Sobibor (Собибор) (2018)

When James Cameron injects high spectacle, grand romance, and completely made-up characters like Billy Zane's suave, tuxedoed, gun-toting villain Caledon Hockley into a painstakingly recreated Titanic, viewers can shrug off expectations of historical accuracy and give themselves up to blockbuster spectacle - never mind the roughly 1500 real people who died in 1912 - but the same can't be said of Sobibor, Russia's odd entry for Best Foreign Language film at the 2019 Academy Awards, a high-gloss but button-pushing movie in which writer, director, and star Konstantin Khabensky presents the lead up to the uprising of the prisoners in the Jewish extermination camp, Sobibor - with a similar appetite for spectacle over accuracy, so atrocities play out in unflinching full where restraint might be more respectful, and Christopher Lambert's Karl Frenzel tips over into caricature - a mumbling, starey Dirk Dastardly whose abhorrent acts are here tied to a camp love triangle.

★★☆☆☆

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Foreign Correspondent (1940)

Joel McCrea is no Cary Grant, lacking charisma as the lead of this Hitchcock thriller, but then I suppose he is supposed to - an American crime reporter in London seconded as a foreign correspondent in Amsterdam, he is both a man out of his league and a fish out of water tasked with investigating the potential for war in Europe  - but the other problem is the plot is rambly and loose and barely holds Hitchcock's setpieces together, so thank goodness those setpieces - an assassination, thrills inside a windmill, dizzying scenes atop a hotel and a chapel, and a spectacular plane crash - are so, so memorable! 

★★★★☆

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Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (2022)

Wakanda Forever, this 2022 sequel to Black Panther, certainly goes forever, told with the sweep of a grand war saga after Homer, which is a feat given almost the whole of its nearly three-hour runtime revolves around a single battle, and even though this conflict — between a deep-sea kingdom and Wakanda — seems easily-avoidable and founded on a misunderstanding, and even though two-and-a-half hours of not terribly interesting political exposition is spent trying to explain how and why it is avoidable to a Homeric catalogue of overwrought characters, the epic CGI fight goes ahead in the end.

★★☆☆☆

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The Wall (2017)

A small crumbling wall is the only thing protecting an American soldier from an Iraqi super sniper in this thriller with a unique premise, but the psychological tension is lessened by two things: the not very likely nor insightful exchanges that take place via earpiece between the two adversaries, and the litany of rookie mistakes made by the American soldier which by movie's end proves such a comprehensive list it can not simply be dismissed as the result of the soldier's youth, his being wounded, his fear, nor his dehydration from being stuck in the searing desert heat.

★★☆☆☆

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The Omega Man (1971)

Germ warfare in a Sino-Russian war turns everyone into Paul Bettany's character in The Da Vinci Code and it is up to an often shirtless Charlton Heston, the only person in the world not yet an eloquent albino with problematic life philosophies, to find a cure before this unrewarding scifi thriller, in which nothing much actually happens, ends up even longer than it already is.

★★☆☆☆

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Far From Men (Loin des Hommes) (2014)

So that he can be tried in a French court, Daru, a schoolteacher, reluctantly transports Mohamed, a confessed murderer, across Algeria's Atlas mountains and along the way the two men become embroiled in the beginnings of Algeria's War of Independence, in this visually arresting, philosophically interesting, and broadly politically relevant neo-Western drama based on a 1957 Albert Camus short story, The Guest.

★★★★☆

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The Counterfeiters (Die Fälscher) (2007)

This film adaptation of Adolf Burger's memoirs, historically fascinating, gut-wrenching, and haunting, details his time in a concentration camp, a part of a team of prisoners forced to work towards the Nazi's goal of flooding the British economy with counterfeit money.

★★★★☆

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Darkest Hour (2017)

The first days of Winston Churchill's Prime Ministership are brought to the big screen in such a grand and rousing way that history teachers around the world must be starting to feel redundant, or just relieved that that  bit of the curriculum is covered for evermore.

★★★★☆

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Zero Dark Thirty (2012)

This is an undeniably rivetting account of the hunt and execution of Osama Bin Laden, but it is also chilling in its depiction of war games in which the cost of a life is rationalised.

★★★★☆

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The Railway Man (2013)

An Australian movie, The Railway Man tells the true story of a traumatised train-obsessed former British soldier's modern-day encounter with a Japanese Kempeitai interpreter who formed part of the team that tortured him after his capture in Japan-occupied Singapore during World War II, and while the realtime story minus flashbacks is temporally slight, the build up to it is gruelling and engrossing and when redemption of a sort comes, is very emotional.

★★★☆☆

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