Reviews

Panic Attacks is a very effective argument against someone thinking they want to move to a small industrial city in Russia's far north. IMDB's "Storyline" description is misleading, but it would be giving away important points to explain why it's misleading, and the film does a fine job of revealing at its own pace, so just be prepared for at least one surprise.

I watched the movie with several dozen Russian speakers and afterwards as we walked towards the theater doors with I think something of a shared sense of relief a number of people commented to each other in that sort of comradely "whew! That was heavy!" tone that tells you people might find it difficult to say they "liked" the film exactly, but you certainly aren't going to say you were bored.

There was gratuitous minor female nudity in a couple places where it just felt formulaic to me, like the director was checking a box, and no equivalent male nudity which would have actually contributed to our understanding of Vika, the female protagonist's experience, but this is not unusual - it just stood out to me as really predictable in a movie that otherwise was often surprising.

I thought the cinematography, lighting, plot, pacing were all excellent. Most of the film would play very well on a small screen, but several vistas really did benefit from theater viewing.

I enjoyed watching "The Boys Who Said NO!". It has the feel of a sort of home movie made by a particular segment of Vietnam draft resisters. While at the beginning of the film the point is made that resisters are focused on stopping the war, and a strong segment around racism follows, halfway through the theme becomes the experience of the young American men portrayed. David Harris speaks to his motivation being solidarity with those other young Americans he'd been counseling to resist.

The title of the film is continually a puzzle. At one point we are shown the "Girls say yes to boys who say no" poster, but there is very little coverage of the experience of couples around the draft other than the prominence of Joan Baez and David Harris. There are no parents and no siblings at all. Several draft resisters make the point that they came from families with no history of left or anti-war activity. One young man is influenced by his father pointing out kamikaze pilots were burned alive. There were other young men who were disowned by their fathers for resisting the draft. I clearly remember strife within my family around the war, arguments with church members, friends, neighbors. Draft resistance had a huge impact on families. Why is there no mention of this?

There is a strong depiction of anti-draft resistance coming out of the civil rights movement, but no mention at all of the New Left or SDS, no mention of SANE, CND and the anti-nuclear movement. When I volunteered mailing out anti-war literature anti-war organizations like WILPF and Women Strike for Peace were sharing the SANE office in Philadelphia, and there was a similar relationship in the Bay Area.

The case for nonviolence around :50 became pretty tedious. There were young men saying "No!" who were not following a tradition of Gandhian nonviolence and who were also not Mark Rudd. I found the Rudd-Harris exchange embarrassing.

No mention of GI strikes, the Presidio mutiny? Late in the film we are told "the Woodstock generation in Vietnam" is refusing to fire their weapons, and that Daniel Ellsberg was inspired by Randy Kehler, but see no mention of draft resisters inspired by GIs.

No mention of Chicago 68? The Chicago 8/7? We see King's assassination but not RFK's? No inner-city riots? We see marchers mourning MLK, however the idea that anti-draft activity was affected by the assassinations is absent.

There was no mention in this film of the young American men who went underground, to Canada, to Sweden, in order to resist the draft and the war. How can this be? How could you produce a film about Vietnam era anti-draft activities without mentioning men going to Canada? Jesse Winchester? I clearly remember conversations with my parents about what course of action my older brother and I might take if the war was still going on when we became draft age, and neither military induction nor recognition of the legitimacy of US courts was something I considered here.

1:07 The Gandhian "the longer you suffer the more pure it is in a way" around Bob Eaton captures the tone of the movie. Boys who said "No!" who saw themselves as resisting an illegal war and followed paths other than non-violent passive resistance or personal sacrifice are absent from this film.

We are shown Catonsville, and an LA draft board raid, but they are as one-offs. There is no mention of the waves of draft board actions. Where is Camden? Rochester?

We are shown a Spock interview, but no mention of the Spock conspiracy trial? The Media FBI office break-in? Of Harrisburg? The massive instances of sabotage within the military and military supply chain? There were young men whose draft positions were influenced partly by nocturnal damage of fuse fittings on bombs en route to Vietnam.

"I only got one year and I think it's because we got through to the judge's heart" suggests, as several of the speakers seem to, that some length of jail time was some sort of win. The legitimacy of American courts trying anti-war resisters at all is not questioned here.

1:09 We are told of a "radical different situation" when a barefoot homemade pants-wearing resister has his charges dismissed, and young Americans who seem to follow an Indian guru smile and cheer. There is no mention here of what was happening in Southeast Asia while these smiling young people were wearing colorful slacks.

1:25 is a brief VVAW demonstration with no explanation of what the viewer is seeing. There were veterans everywhere in anti-war demonstrations. You saw green flak jackets with various patches, guys wearing combat boots. The anti-draft movement seems from this film to have operated in a world without Vietnam veterans.

1:26 There is a very brief clip of canoes blocking a munition shipment - again, no explanation. If the viewer blinked they missed this. The viewer would already need to know what was going on to have any idea whatsoever why they were being shown canoes.

The closing minutes are a hip "resist, resist, resist", "make a difference, stand out. There are times when you have to fight" with "fight" here being a Gandhian sacrifice, a Buddhist self-immolation, after a film which has made clear what forms of resistance are permitted. There were those of us young men who were strongly affected by the Vietnam anti-war movement, by Vietnam draft resisters, and in 1980 refused to register for a military draft when the Carter Administration renewed draft registration partly as a result of the example of Vietnam draft resisters. Many of us were inspired by young American men a few years older than us who resisted the Vietnam draft, and my memory is clearly of the course shown in this film being only one of many threads which were then contemporary.

Hit and Stay surveys the Vietnam-era movement to raid draft boards and damage or destroy Selective Service records. The movie focuses on the best known of these raids, Catonsville, while successfully tracing the movement from the first raid, by the Baltimore 4, through Catonsville, Camden, the Media FBI break-in, to the Harrisburg trial. The film makers make use of contemporary interviews with raid participants along with archival footage to tell the story of how the movement progressed from the unique actions of a handful of Catholic clergy and laity, who committed civil disobedience in the mode of Gandhi or the civil rights movement, symbolically breaking a law in order to draw attention to the greater crimes being committed by the state and then remaining at the scene, to become a much more widespread movement of citizens who effected very real damage to the ability of the United States government to draft young Americans to fight an illegal, unjust war. The tactic of Hit and Stay became over the experience of Johnson's 1967 Vietnam war morphing into Nixon's 1970-71 invasions of Cambodia and Laos and Ramsey Clark's yielding the Justice Department to John Mitchell the tactic of hitting and getting out, as the anti-war movement came to terms with the bankruptcy of the American political and justice system.

In cataloging the various raids Hit and Stay touches on Camden, documented in the excellent Camden 28, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0808190/. The film's interviews show how for years many contemporaries were convinced John Grady orchestrated the Media break-in, when in fact that action was planned and carried out by Philadelphia-area activists, as 1971 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3478510/ expertly shows.

Hit and Stay very effectively communicates the breadth of involvement in draft board raids, showing the variety of individuals involved as well as the variety of actions undertaken, gives visibility to the New York women's draft board raids and the Dow Chemical actions, and gives attention to how the Harrisburg trial contributed to a schism in the movement. It shows how the Catholic Left's experience with US support for dictators in Central America underpinned Catonsville participants' resistance to the war in Vietnam, and illustrates continuity with present day resistance to militarism by showing draft board raiders' work against the war in Iraq. The film is an important contribution to the canon documenting resistance to US empire.

National Bird profiles three young Americans who have spoken out publicly about the US use of drones to conduct reconnaissance and assassinations in Afghanistan, and follows one woman to Afghanistan to meet with the survivors of drone attacks. The film details the PTSD suffered by the three subjects, the fear of indictment for espionage as a result of speaking out, and the disconnect between the reality of the drone program and the video game face put on it by US Air Force recruitment material.

I saw the movie in San Francisco on the second night of its national opening. There were perhaps twenty people in a small theater, and I think most of us were old enough to be parents of two of the three drone program participants in the film as well as of its two producers. I'd gone to see the film thinking its subject was the program by which the US assassinates Iraqi, Afghani, Pakistani and US citizens abroad, using missiles launched from aircraft piloted by youthful operators in the Nevada desert. National Bird instead seems largely about the young US personnel who are rightfully traumatized by the murder of people based on often faulty intelligence as well as the murder of those who happen to be near the target of US assassinations. I thought the trauma suffered by the two young women came across very effectively. The young man, Daniel, seemed pretty matter of fact about his involvement and was being interviewed while he continued to work in an intelligence role for a US military contractor. While Heather and Lisa spoke at length about the emotional toll their actions took on them, Daniel seemed to speak largely to the fear of prosecution for speaking about the drone assassination program and the experience of some thirty men raiding his home with guns drawn. Those of us who are saddened and angered by the killings done in our name or who have had agents of the US state point guns at us will be moved by the PTSD and fear suffered by those who might be our children. Interviews with Heather's mother and grandfather competently support this.

There is a curious parity in National Bird between Heather and Lisa's psychological trauma and the trauma of Afghani drone attack survivors. A woman sits in a family group and tells how her husband was killed trying to save their children, two of whom were killed. Her son, not yet a teenager, sits next to her. He is missing a leg. An Afghani man who had hoped to study medicine tells of being in a drone attack and it is only towards the end of his testimony that we realize he too has had a leg blasted off. It was unclear to me, however, who had been more victimized. There was such a focus on Heather, Lisa, and Daniel's situations that the Afghani portion of the film seemed almost to be saying the Afghanis had suffered as well. Heather and her family speak movingly about her suffering from guilt. Afghani families speak of, and the viewer is shown, the burnt blasted corpses of women and children.

National Bird's protagonists are shown repeatedly speaking of their being described as similar to Edward Snowden in revealing truths about the US intelligence apparatus, yet there is nothing mentioned in the film which has not been copiously documented elsewhere, if one is interested in looking for it. This flirting with danger about revealing secrets, and the fear of being indicted for espionage, was curious. Daniel's eyes light when he mentions some aspect of the drone operation which he says is quite obvious and mundane yet kept top secret and I found myself wondering why the viewer should care. We are being shown a film documenting how the US kills people around the globe who are merely suspected of sympathizing with groups the US declares political enemies, with no semblance of legality, no rules of war, no courts or tribunals, just the hunches of some bureaucrats in the White House based on intelligence vetted at one level by twenty-somethings who seem they would be as at home in the local mall as in a command and control bunker. Is this not enough? Why the inclusion of the frisson around classified material?

National Bird is certainly worth seeing for its depiction of the effects of drone killing involvement on young military personnel. For the drone war viewers will likely be more interested in Jeremy Scahill's The Assassination Complex.

1971 is a little uneven as a documentary, but well worth watching for its telling of the Media story as well as for its exploration of the world of white middle-class professionals active against the Vietnam war. The film blends archival footage with reenactment seamlessly, and delivers the blow-by-blow story of the break-in very well, although as an IMDb goof notes the dramatic device of the apartment manager watching television is anachronistic. While film goers will already be aware of the raid's success, 1971 successfully delivers tension around its explanation of the planning, execution, and aftermath, with the audience made to feel participants' concern about discovery, especially via the actions of the ninth member of the group.

I was especially taken with the movie's examination of John and Bonnie's concern for their children, and Bonnie's statement that the couple refused to use their status as parents to absolve themselves of responsibility for crimes being conducted in their name. The post-Reagan era popular culture narrative of Vietnam resistance tends towards depiction of the anti-war movement as comprised of tie-dye wearers listening to The Doors, but a generation now in our 50s remembers our parents hiring dependable babysitters and then heading off down the Schuylkill to I-95 and a demonstration at the Pentagon. Philly had SANE, Women Strike for Peace, WILPF, AFSC, the Unitarian Peace Fellowship, and other organizations filled with responsible middle-class Americans sickened by the war.

The War. We talk today about Iraq, or Afghanistan, or Syria, as CGI backgrounds for drone video games fought by air-conditioned kids in Nevada trailers. Whether the 1991 or 2003 invasion Iraq was never The War. In 1971 when you said The War everyone knew what you were talking about - the coffee table had Life Magazine's spread on My Lai ditches filled with women and children's corpses as a year later it would have Nick Ut's photo of nine-year-old screaming Kim Phúc. If you were an educated responsible parent in 1971 you knelt down and looked your ten-year-old son in the eyes and told him you would do what you could to keep him, and Vietnamese children his age, from being butchered for your government's lies, Dow's profits.

Vietnam is a character largely missing from 1971. We hear Bob and Keith talk about the necessity for action, see footage of Jackson State bullet holes and Mary Ann Vecchio, but the film fails to evoke that feeling of the war having ground on for so long now despite all one's actions to stop it. By 1971 Tonkin had been six years past, we'd lived through years of Johnson's and now Nixon's lies, nightly body-counts of dead Vietnamese, uncertainty whether the neighbor's boy was going to be drafted. While 1971 delivers the story of how Media, I think it fails to fully communicate why.

1971 is a bit choppy in the aftermath of the break-in. McGovern's rejection of and then capitalization on the Media documents was nicely referenced, reminding us of his and other liberal politicians' actions that year in connection with Ellsberg and Russo's cache. Camden seems kind of tacked on and without context. There was no mention of Harrisburg that I recall. In explaining Bob, Keith, and the Raines' sense of exhaustion it might have been useful to communicate something of the burden of the various conspiracy trials and the work that went into their defense. I liked the explanation of Carl Stern's exposure of Cointelpro. Reminiscences by the Raines' kids and Bob's musing on unintended consequences were interesting, but also telegraphed to me that at this point the film had lost focus. The Church Committee treatment seemed to me very incomplete. We were told of Media participants acting in the wake of MLK and RFK's assassinations, but there was no mention of Fred Hampton, Mark Clark, other Panthers, Allende and other CIA targets. It's true the viewer could easily become lost in a sea of references, but Media's impact and legacy is intertwined with other revelations which were on the minds of contemporary political actors, and the film might have spent a few more minutes fleshing this out.

This film was not worth an hour and a half of my time. There's about 20 minutes of material stretched with endless repetition and reenactments so it'll be suitable for broadcast with commercial interruptions every ten minutes. The constant recitation of what was just said a few minutes before gave me vertigo. If you *must* watch this movie you may want to do so in five or ten minute stretches.

Howard Donahue's thesis is an interesting one, I think Donahue did solid work in researching it and Menninger lays it out well in Mortal Error. The Smoking Gun, however, fails to adequately explain Colin McLaren's presence, and what if anything he added to Donahue and Menninger's work.

I thought Citizenfour was quite powerful as a humanizing portrayal of Snowden. I didn't learn anything new particularly about NSA programs, since I've been reading each story I come across, but the film quite effectively transported me into Snowden's hotel room in Hong Kong and into conversations with Snowden, Greenwald, Poitras and MacAskill. Snowden comes off as a completely responsible, quite sincere, thoughtful young man. He very clearly and explicitly says that he does not want to be the story, and one believes him. Whereas Assange can impress people as narcissistic and Bradley/Chelsea Manning's sexual confusion was only one of a number of facets which distracted from Cablegate, Snowden sounds like a young Ellsberg – very intelligent and well-spoken.

Poitras's style was interesting, I thought. The camera a number of times holds for lengthy periods on fairly static shots of architecture, which served to impress the viewer with the monolithic, pervasive nature of the NSA's networks. There's a long disorienting shot out the window of a train at night or going through a tunnel, which draws you into the dark network Snowden's revealing.

The film successfully touches on a number of different aspects of the surveillance state, bringing in the idea that when we talk about "privacy" we're talking about security, about our constitutional right to freedom from unlawful search and seizure. I think this is a hard sell for too many viewers. I don't fault the film here. I saw it with a friend who was a few minutes late because she was watching the Giants' game. In discussing the movie afterward she questioned just how important some of the issues raised were. Greenwald and others speak passionately about the dangers of the surveillance state, but my date pointed out that she can't feel much fear that the NSA is going to be breaking down her door because of anything she's said on the phone or in e-mail. My own experience is that friends and colleagues on the one hand self-censor and don't mention politics, drugs, Bittorrent use, etc. in e-mail or social media for fear of the all-knowing eye, or on the other hand seem oblivious to any danger – why worry about Google programmatically reading every single e-mail sent or received, if it means free e-mail and potentially more accurate search results when shopping? Snowden at one point convincingly says he doesn't think it is possible for anyone no matter how brilliant and educated to individually fight all the electronic surveillance systems in existence. We're told of the multitude of methods of surveillance and repeatedly shown NSA officials blatantly lying to Congress about their existence. The lack of accountability for this last has been personally troubling to me – I remember Watergate and Iran-Contra – how is it that the heads of the NSA can with impunity flat out lie to Congress about spying on American citizens? What will viewers come away with when walking out of the theater after Citizenfour? I'm wondering how many will see it as a call to action, and how many as a well-executed depiction of Edward Snowden's experience, which may not be seen as intersecting our own.

Very solid work by Petra Volpe reminded me of Ulrich Seidl and Barbara Albert's reflections on anomie in Austria. After the showing which I attended Q & A with Volpe and Judith Kaufmann focused on Swiss prostitution and the plight of women, but I saw Traumland as much more about alienation, as is borne out by the lack of functional intimate relationships between anyone at all within the film.

A strong piece, which while frequently gritty and unsettling also contains a pleasant range of emotions, including frequent humor. The closing scene was perhaps a bit lazy to my mind. I look forward to more films from Volpe.

What is most interesting about The Tillman Story is what it leaves unsaid about Pat Tillman, his death, and the cover-up afterwards. The film doesn't communicate anything about the man a viewer wouldn't know from watching a few news clips after Tillman's 2004 killing – he was a jock "who read Emerson and Chomsky" as well as the Book of Mormon. The Story is thoroughly hagiographic in its treatment of Tillman's character, and assures us the man was sexually faithful to his childhood sweetheart as well as true in his commitment to a military which would in life and death betray him. From the film Tillman is shown to be without foible except that he and his brothers say "f*cking" a lot. Family, friends, fellow soldiers have ought but good to say of the man. Uninterviewed are the Rangers who shot him, or any soldiers who might have held Tillman in anything less than awestruck admiration – was there no one he offended, no one in his platoon who held a grudge? As his buddies gunned him down he's reported to have repeatedly protested "I'm Pat f*cking Tillman" presumedly not as an anonymous Joe Dokes' dying assertion of identity, but rather claiming the shelter of an star. The effect of this on his teammates is unexplored by the film.

What the movie very successfully shows are family and colleagues who are without language to investigate or express their attachment to icons. We are repeatedly shown images of fallen Tillman's red football jersey, a relic displayed in various sizes to reverential audiences. Here the film touches on the sports warrior metaphor but chooses to leave it unexamined. Before going into the military Tillman is said to have spent several hours exploring his decision with his football coach, who huskily asserts that to Pat words like honor, respect, and commitment were "not just adjectives." The intent here is apparently to impart depth of import, to leave the viewer with some enhanced appreciation of Tillman's character, but instead of nodding in reverence to a dead hero this viewer found himself exclaiming reflexively that the words are in fact not adjectives, they are nouns. Tillman Sr., an attorney, closes a brief contesting the government's verdict on his son's death with this summation: "F*ck you, and yours." Richard Tillman's funerary oration is comprised of telling an audience his beloved brother Pat is "f*cking dead."

The Tillman Story shows Pat Tillman as a hero for a people without words, who worshipped Pat because besides being able to run down a field and knock a man over he also "read Chomsky." What Chomsky might have to say about language, or Afghanistan, or Iraq, or Pat Tillman, is unfortunately unexplored by the film.

In publicity for this movie much is made of a truth to be revealed by footage in a newly discovered spool of film, however revelations to be had from the find seem profoundly limited to a single point: in a Nazi film of life in the Warsaw ghetto the scenes are staged.

Footage of walking cadavers is certainly powerful, and emotional recollections of survivors is moving, but, heartless though it may sound, there is nothing new presented here. The only thesis articulated is really pretty uninteresting, and possible ancillary themes are never developed: Rüdiger Vogler reads the testimony of cameraman Willy Wist, who says what he witnessed in the ghetto haunted him long afterward, even despite some of the things he saw later. The narrators might have asked what Wist was referring to. What is the context into which Wist fits his memories of the ghetto? We're shown the Nazis repeatedly staged shots to stress contrasts between wealthy, well-fed Jews in the ghetto and the majority who were starving, but there is no exploration of the reality – a narrator simply recollects that a few dozen people were able to remain well fed.

Rather than a coherent whole this is an hour and a half of staged footage of the May 1942 Warsaw ghetto interspersed with survivor commentary. The holocaust canon has more rewarding works.

An excellent superficial translation of Stefan Aust's book to the screen, Uli Edel's film will be most accessible to audiences already familiar with the RAF. Martina Gedeck as Meinhof and Johanna Wokalek as Ensslin are superb, and Moritz Bleibtreu is well cast as Baader. While the film is most successful as an illustration of Aust, it very much focuses on Meinhof, Baader, and Ensslin, yet uses well known actors like Stipe Erceg and Tom Schilling for the roles of people like Holger Meins, or Rudi Dutschke's would-be assassin, which makes for some confusion – if you are not already familiar with who's who you may see a familiar face and be signaled the character is important, but his or her significance is never clarified. The film is quite weak when it comes to any sort of explication of the intersection between the personal and the political in the lives of Meinhof, Ensslin, or others – the relationship between Ensslin and Baader, actually everything about Baader's character, is somehow just a given, which unfortunately leaves the film as documentary with some glaring lacunae. A number of characters and events seem to have been treated as checkboxes – Ponto's killing especially stood out to me as detached from the film's overall arc.

But these are criticisms of what I think is in a number of ways a fine effort. Acting, cinematography, and direction all work well to transport the viewer to the 1960s and 70s. Edel deftly uses period television footage to make clear the role the BRD's support of America's war against Vietnam played in the formation of the RAF, and Vietnam is effectively shown as the urgent backdrop it was for many of the lives of those the film portrays. The film opens with a well-executed depiction of the demonstration at which Ohnesorg was shot; this, and the state's response, lend effective credence to Meinhof and Ensslin's reactions. A scene where Meinhof overhears Ensslin's parents speaking to Aust about their feelings of guilt for the Nazi era is effective, though there is no mention of the number of ex-Nazis in positions of power in the criminal and judicial systems – instead Bruno Ganz, as Horst Herold, head of the West German police, speaks throughout as a voice of democratic reason, which the filmmakers juxtapose with scenes of Meins' police beating and the conditions of sensory deprivation in which Meinhof and the others were held. The film transitions well from showing the movement's genesis through major events to Stammheim without losing energy – while there's no real climax there's also no loss of narrative focus either, right up to the denouement, which is here much less nuanced than in Aust's work. I thought this was a powerful film, and it made me want to see Deutschland im Herbst again.

Short Cut to Hollywood's very unusual premise is that a middle-aged German man with no particular talents can fly to the U.S. and become international celebrity "John F Salinger" on the basis of his willingness to have his limbs amputated and eventually commit suicide on-camera. This is nonsense, of course, but the clichéd assumptions about American media spectacles which inform the concept are what drive the film.

Short Cut critiques the American television dream machine by making thinly veiled references to American Idol – the John F Salinger Show's host is a Ryan Seacrest look-a-like, and the Salinger team negotiates with television producer "Paula Martini," who in one scene sits next to an executive wearing a kippah, providing both a reference to the Jewish-control-of-Hollywood myth and a curious opportunity for Salinger to offend – do directors Stahlberg and Mittermeier perhaps see themselves as exorcising German ghosts by having Salinger invoke Hitler?

Short Cut doesn't comfortably commit to a genre – at times it seems a buddy picture, depicting the relationship of three failed middle-aged men, but there is very little focus on Salinger's friends; it comments on the German fascination with the vapid wasteland of American television, but there's no real depth to the critique; it wants to be a road picture, but repetitive scenes of a camper tooling down the highway and shots of frenetic hotel room sex don't really suffice for this. Brief shots of gore may be intended to lend gravity to the piece, but for me only served to increase the queasiness of a viewer already uncomfortable with the film's weaknesses.

What's surprising is not that "Das Kaninchen bin ich"'s viewing was banned in East Germany, but that its production was ever permitted in the first place. The film's plot is simple: their parents dead, apolitical nineteen-year-old Maria Morzeck and her brother Dieter live with their aunt. Maria works as a waitress, hoping to go to university to become a translator or travel agent, when Dieter is accused of unspecified acts against the state and jailed for three years. By chance Maria meets Paul Deister, the married judge who sentenced Dieter; judge and Maria proceed to fall in love and carry on a happy affair. What attracts Deister and Maria is never made apparent. The characters are under-developed, but Das Kaninchen's criticism of the DDR's legal system is multi-faceted and striking. At Dieter's trial the prosecutor clears the courtroom of all unauthorized spectators, supposedly in order to serve state security. When Maria asks why only she and her aunt are expelled while the other 20 members of the public remain, she's told the others were invited, leaving the viewer to wonder how many presumed common citizens are working for the Stasi. Such chilling questions regarding machinations of the state are raised with a wry humor which lends this film a delightful charm. Paul's character throughout remains a mystery to both the viewer and Maria. He seems to be a nice enough person, but then so does his wife – why is he cheating on her? Can Maria influence Paul to reduce Dieter's sentence? Paul was apparently harsh with Dieter out of genuine faith in the state apparatus, but how sincere are Paul's beliefs, how ideologically-driven are his actions really? Maria and Paul's actions and their motivations have personal and political aspects which only become clear with the film's dramatic conclusion.

The English title of Die Berührte is taken from graffiti on an abandoned building next to the Berlin Wall, and the Wall as concrete and metaphorical divide appears repeatedly throughout the film. Berlin appears cold, gray. Schizophrenic Veronika walks the city streets alone, looking for Christ, looking for human contact, for connection.

In their aseptic home her wealthy parents listen to a radio which endlessly drones stock prices, while on the street, the S-Bahn, in cafés Veronika experiences a sensual world freighted with hidden meanings. Home is a prison from which she seeks release through suicide. She is hospitalized, drugged, and released. In coitus she finds brief connection but neither the union she seeks with the infinite nor more than a temporary respite from loneliness.

Veronika attempts marriage with penniless Ghanaian Demba, an exotic symbol of the libertine south who she brings home to her parents' disgust, but Demba shows her no commitment, no loyalty, and in fact provides the basis for her forcible rehospitalization.

Here, as in several previous films, Helma Sanders-Brahms' protagonist is a strong woman suffering, nearly crushed, by the patriarchal forces of western industrial society. While at the film's open the viewer is told Veronika's real-life counterpart was almost cured, (at least, the film says, according to the doctors), there is no such cure shown within the movie. In the film's abrupt end rather, we see Veronika's search for Christ in a dramatic new light.

Berlin - Ecke Schönhauser depicts the youth of 1950s East Berlin as an aimless bunch, lacking goals, with no motivation to better themselves or to look beyond the thrill of the next dance or meaningless act of delinquency. Here the youth of the DDR have much in common with their American counterparts in films like Rebel Without a Cause. Unlike the spoiled LA kids choking on Eisenhower-era consumption, however, Berlin teenagers Dieter, Kohle, Karl-Heinz, Angelika and their friends live in poverty amid the ruins of WW II. Parents are missing, killed in the war. As the city rebuilds, piles of rubble disgorge live bombs. While the East struggles to repair the damage of the last war West Germany rearms, this time with nuclear weapons. The kids are all right, but they survive in a pretty grim environment. To the youths, adults belong to an alien race who cling to hypocritical bourgeois values. There are exceptions – a sympathetic police officer takes an interest in the plight of the young people, promising apprenticeships to the out-of-work kids.

But Karl-Heinz has other plans: pre-Berlin Wall travel between the city's Capitalist and Communist zones is easy, and Karl-Heinz exchanges East Marks for West and sells stolen IDs, eager to make enough money to enable flight to the West. One of his crimes goes suddenly wrong, and Karl-Heinz is on the run. Kohle and Dieter try to call in a debt, tragedy ensues, and the two flee West, leaving behind Angelika, pregnant with Dieter's child.

Kohle and Dieter find West Germans suspicious, interested in espionage and not exactly welcoming. To gain asylum the young men must claim they suffered political persecution, a charge the film shows is patently false. The two friends decide to part ways, Kohle excited about heading to a new life farther west while Dieter is drawn back to the DDR life he knows.

As the film closes some important lessons have been learned: The BRD is a locus for crime of all sorts, and it draws criminals out of the East, a statement made explicit in the film's closing lines. Socialism faces challenges; it is not perfect, but it wears the human face of loving well-intentioned men and women.

Friends Heinrich and Grischa find fulfillment acting in political theater, their current production a Greek tragedy that examines the roots of patriarchy, modern gender relations, and women's loss of agency. The two are drawn together in part by their shared desire to live lives rich with the meaning they find in theater. Heinrich projects his need for a Große Liebe onto Grischa. Grischa is leaving her current relationship and is embarked on a journey of personal discovery interviewing West German working women about their attitudes towards work, family, men, abortion. She sees Heinrich as a comrade-in-arms who will support her exploration of women's lives. Grischa sets up a household with warm, loving Heinrich. The two share strong chemistry, politics and playfulness. Soon, however, Heinrich's idealized, self-involved image of love comes into conflict with the realities which 1970s West Germany defines for Grischa and the women she interviews. While Heinrich has the privilege of remaining in his head and wholly male, intellectual political theater, Grischa suddenly finds her choices are dramatically constrained by her woman's body. As the film closes Grischa and Heinrich embody archetypal roles, in a modern tragedy no longer on the stage.

Six 45-minute episodes are arranged chronologically, from the NSDAP rise in the context of the social and political turmoil which followed the first world war to Hitler's suicide in April 1945, and arranged thematically, dealing with the origins of the party, the road to the Chancellery, Anschluss, resettlement in the East, the death camps, and finally the Reich's collapse.

The first episode mentions the workers revolution that briefly took control of München, and shows how the number of Jews among the Communist leadership supported widespread theories of a Jewish-Communist alliance. Street-fighting between Communists and reactionaries is chronicled, explicating the German populace's understandable desire for law and order.

Local operation of the Gestapo, the surprisingly low count of actual employees and the extent to which surveillance by neighbors led to non-conformant citizens' denunciation and imprisonment is illustrated through a brief look at a case in Nürnberg. The informant who sent her innocent neighbor to die in a camp is interviewed.

The Wild East chapter illustrates the great variance in regional Nazi commanders' approach to Germanization of Poland and how Hitler's management style facilitated bureaucratic fiefdoms.

Too often documentaries demonize the Nazis and assume individuals somehow sprang fully formed from the gates of hell. In contrast, each of the well-crafted installments of The Nazis: A Warning from History offers new insight into the development and functioning of the Nazi state and enables us to intelligently consider the lives of its supporters. In calling for a more sophisticated understanding of totalitarianism the warning is very much that of Resnais' Night and Fog.

Resnais intersperses then-current-day (1955) color footage of Auschwitz with archival B&W to demystify and provide context for the Holocaust in modern western society rather than in anything unique to the German experience of totalitarianism. Photos of concentration camp personnel at home with their families invite the viewer to reflect on the banality of evil. Construction of the camps is described as like that of any large project, requiring bids, architects, contracts. Heart-wrenching scenes document a prisoner's view, from the transports being loaded through selections, showers/gas chambers, existence in the barracks, and in the end, mass death.

Included on the DVD is an excerpt from a 1994 radio interview with Resnais, wherein he mentions French censors required the film makers to obscure the hat of a policeman guarding prisoners being deported - the French government refused to permit this recognition of French complicity and assistance with the deportations.