WHITE BIRD (In theatres)                                                                  

For decades multitudes of books, documentaries and movies have focused on the ugliness of the undreamed, unmitigated crimes perpetrated by the German architects of horror. “White Bird: A Wonder Story” by R. J. Palacio is a mystifying tale of the ordinary, rising above the monstrous, securing residency in the celestial; a wonderous movie that should be seen by all; especially now, when antisemitism is lambasting its tenacious, poisonous bile throughout the contemporary universe. Director Mike Foster sheds a blazing beacon on those whose spirit, grace and light transcended the iniquitous, malevolent, darkest evil.

Helen Mirren stars as renowned artist, “Sara Blum” a Holocaust survivor arriving from Paris to New York where a retrospective of her work is opening at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Mirren, always the Dame of Perfection tells Sara’s history of survival to her young grandson “Julian” (Bryce Gheisar); her eloquence and elegance breathe with an aura of the Lamed Vavnik (one of the 36 righteous ones in Jewish mysticism, not necessarily of the Jewish faith); more than a survival story it revolves around a classmate and his family who closet her from a Nazi roundup; Ariella Glaser is the teenage Sara and Orlando Schwerdt is her physically challenged mate “Julian”; aided by his parents “Vivienne Beaumier” (impeccably, Gillian Anderson) and “Jean Paul Beaumier” (Jo Stone Fewings) they change the saddest, dirtiest, bat-infested barn into a cocoon of education, care and hope.

Devoid of sentimentality, riveting with human temperance, the “white bird” hovers above “man’s inhumanity” a symbol of eradicating profound depravity; blossoming of a world echoing kindness, understanding, tolerance.

FOUR STARS!!!!

Peneflix