REVIEW: A Hidden Life [2019]

We lived above the clouds. With notoriously long post-production periods due to his uniquely poetic editing style, Terrence Malick‘s three-hour WWII romance A Hidden Life may have actually benefited from its three-year delay as far as thematic relevance to current events is concerned. As a rising tide of fascistic totalitarianism takes hold of world governments (including partisan blindness in the United States), a rarely told story like that of conscientious objector Franz Jägerstätter becomes more important than ever. While it might have been lost in 2016’s shuffle, seeing it now…

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REVIEW: Good Bye Lenin! [2003]

“It was a really hot October” It is quite interesting that I have been privy to three movies dealing with amateur filmmaking within a very short span this year. While Be Kind Rewind and Son of Rambow utilized the form for comedic purposes, the German film from 2003, Good Bye Lenin! differs slightly, even though humor is the main result. With a pretty creative premise, a pro-East German woman falls into a coma during the eight months of the fall of the Berlin Wall and her son and daughter must…

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