Category Archives: Recommendations

New to DVD this week: WHAT OUR FATHERS DID: A NAZI LEGACY

David Evans’ profile of the sons of high-ranking Nazis made its debut at Tribeca last year. It also screened at the Jerusalem, Vancouver, Hamburg, London, Stockholm, and San Francisco Jewish film fests.

Evans’ film focuses on three men: Niklas Frank and Horst von Wachter, both sons of lawyers turned governors of Nazi-occupied territories during WWII, and Philippe Sands, a renowned international human rights attorney whose Ukrainian Jewish grandfather lost his entire family due to atrocities overseen by Frank and von Wachter’s fathers. While Frank has unreservedly condemned the actions of his father, a man who never showed him any affection before he was convicted at Nuremberg and sentenced to death, von Wachter clings to the increasingly untenable belief that his beloved father was a good man, not responsible for any war crimes. In settings both private and public, Sands and Frank challenge von Wachter to face facts, but continue to face disturbing resistance, facile excuses, and impossible demands for corroboration, making for a troubling and compelling consideration of the limits of denial.

Coming to VOD today, Tuesday, March 15: BOOM BUST BOOM

Terry Jones, Bill Jones, and Ben Timlett’s creative look at economic crashes has largely bypassed festivals to instead screen at universities, conferences, and other professional events since its debut last March. It opened theatrically last week and now comes to VOD platforms including iTunes.

I previously wrote about the doc here.

Coming to DVD today, Tuesday, March 15: STEVE JOBS: THE MAN IN THE MACHINE

Alex Gibney’s look at the life and legacy of the computer pioneer debuted at SXSW last year. Other fest berths included Nantucket, New Orleans, San Francisco, Seattle, AFI Docs, Melbourne, Woodstock, Napa Valley, DocPoint, Big Sky, and IDFA.

I previously wrote about the film here.

Coming to theatres today, Friday, March 11: BOOM BUST BOOM

Terry Jones, Bill Jones, and Ben Timlett’s crash course in world economics has been screening extensively in university and professional settings since last March.

MONTY PYTHON alumnus Terry Jones serves not only as one of this entertaining project’s directors, but also its cheeky host, a guide through economic history and human behavior that seeks to explain why we seem destined to repeat cycles of booms and busts when we really should know better. A surfeit of talking heads is invigorated through an expansive – or, perhaps for some viewers, excessive – use of animation, puppetry, graphics, and even a song or two. Rather than stick to the most recent financial crisis exclusively, the film demonstrates the importance of looking back in time to the various other instances where greed and arrogance led to devastating crashes, from Dutch tulip mania in 1627 to the stock market crash of 1929. The lessons learned from these historical episodes underscore a primary thesis – that economists, and the institutions that train them, have willfully turned a blind eye to history and to humanity’s tendency to irrational economic behavior, embracing a neoclassical model that has left them ill-prepared to recognize the impending dangers of the next bust until it happens once again.