Peneflix MOVIE REVIEWS BY PENEFLIX
These were not the films that I had originally planned to review but with universal, raging antisemitism, viciously mushrooming, proliferating since October 7, 2023, where Israel was held accountable for the slaying of innocents by Hamas and other Palestinian militant groups and license was granted, afforded to those whose hidden hatred of Jews was now stripped bare, celebrated, applauded, exploding, exponentially gaining toxic tread throughout the world and so minimally addressed by leaders capable of changing the poisonous, malignant, destructive wounds to the “body politics that have been allowed to fester.”
Hundreds of films have been made about the Holocaust; of the 77 American co-produced 21 have been nominated and/or won Oscars; “Schindler’s List” (1993) winner of 7 Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director bellows with its legitimacy and heroism of a non-Jew who saved thousands. In recent years “Son of Saul”, and “Zone of Interest” focus on the systematic extinction of a people simply because of their faith. A faith that has been impossible to erase; millenniums, civilizations have tried, and they are no longer in existence; Israel and a people who have gifted the world: Old Testament, cures for diseases, technology, humanitarian assistance to developing countries; Jews have won 22% of all Nobel Prizes, first cell phone (Martin Cooper); in the artistic sphere Stephan Zweig’s “The World of Yesterday” is testament to the glory of Jewish genius in Austria/Vienna before the ruination of WWII. Multitudes more in their resume of accomplishments.
“Truth & Treason” based on the monumentally relevant of life of Mormon, Helmuth Hubener (Ewan Horrocks); a blazing brain, wordsmith, scholar at sixteen; recognizing the sickness of Nazism and Hitler’s maniacal, megalomaniac thirst for absolute devotion and elimination of the “other”; on his own initiative, eventually conscripting two friends, he writes and distributes anti-Hitler pamphlets throughout Hamburg, Germany in 1942; he resonates truth, because he is astutely aware that “a harmful truth is better than a useful lie”. Fearlessly this teenager knows “sometimes the greatest act of rebellion is simply speak the truth”. Director Matt Whitaker illuminates an unusual soul worthy of lyonization.
5 STARS!!!!!
“PERSIAN LESSONS” reigns as a star of imaginative inventiveness; artistry throbs with every quirky turn, focusing on a survival story, true, because no one could conjure a man (Gilles) a Jew who literally invents a language to survive in a concentration camp. Hilarity stuns in many, at times gruesome scenes. Directed by Vadim Perelman with luminously, presciently perfect actors “Gilles”, Nahuel Perez Biscayart, “Klaus Koch” Lars Eidinger, victim and perpetrator. A film, me-thinks, once seen will hibernate perpetually in the realm of miraculous movies.
FIVE STARS!!!!
Peneflix
