“Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.” J Robert Oppenheimer’s quotation from Hindu scripture is often used to signify the scientist’s rueful realisation, when it was too late, of what he had created in delivering an atomic bomb to the US military.
Saul Dibb dispenses with the first half of Irene Nemirovsky’s great novel Suite Française in about a minute. Grainy newsreel footage disposes of the Fall of France in 1940, then it’s on to the occupation of Bussy, the country town where Lucille (Michelle Williams) falls for gentlemanly German officer Bruno (Matthias Schoenaerts, pictured below with Williams).
"Blood Brothers" is the title of the featurette included with this DVD. It tells how Brad Pitt and his fellow cast-members learned what it felt like to be the crew of a World War Two tank – Fury is the name painted on the gun of their battle-scarred Sherman – thanks to some hard-slog dawn-to-dusk training and conversations with 90-year-old veterans of the US 2nd Armored Division.
The quotation from which this film’s title is taken runs thus: “Unless the world learns the lessons these pictures teach, night will fall.” It’s drawn from the voiceover of a documentary called German Concentration Camps: Factual Survey that was made by Sidney Bernstein as World War II drew to a close. It was a gathering of massed concentration camp footage and detailed explanations that he hoped would be shown worldwide but, especially, to the German people, so that they might consider their complicity.
There’s been a pronounced sense of finality at this year’s 70th anniversary commemoration of the 1945 liberation of Auschwitz. No closure, of course, but an awareness that the ranks of survivors are diminishing, and that soon their first-person testimonials will disappear into a past.
More than once in André Singer’s documentary Holocaust: Night Will Fall – marking in advance the 70th anniversary, on 27th January, of the liberation of Auschwitz, having added that explanatory first word to the title with which the film was released in cinemas last year – his interviewees describe their experience as like “looking into hell”. We hear phrases like “world of nightmare”, “utter shock”, “beyond describing” repeatedly, uttered by the first Allied soldiers to enter the German concentration camps at the end of World War Two.
That the truth will always be so much bigger than we can comprehend is something I had to accept as I started to write Oppenheimer. There are so many sources, so much information, so many hundreds of books, declassified files, interviews and history. One biography of the man took its authors 25 years to write. And there are still the hidden thoughts that were never written down, conversations long forgotten by people now long dead. There have to be so many omissions that it is an impossible task to tell this "truth" over the course of one evening’s entertainment.
Writer Anthony Horowitz has imbued Foyle's War with longevity by anchoring it among some lesser-known and frequently shameful occurrences in the margins of World War Two, and this ninth series opener duly embroiled us in murky shenanigans involving unscrupulous oil barons and cynical German industrialists. The former DCS Foyle is continuing in his post-war role with MI5, as the Russians continue to infiltrate remorselessly from the east while the West is still struggling to pick itself up off the cratered and rubble-strewn floor.
This year's award-courting survival picture (after 2013's All Is Lost, and 2012's Life of Pi) is based on the genuinely remarkable story of Olympian Louis Zamperini. It's a tale of heroic resilience in the face of an onslaught of adversity, helmed by someone who, in a very different way, is pretty unstoppable herself – Dame Angelina Jolie.
Hong Kong master Wong Kar Wai has ventured into new territory with The Grandmaster. Many years in the making, his new film is a remarkable portrayal of martial-arts traditions, specifically the story of kung fu master Ip Man from his early life in mainland China on the eve of World War II, through to post-war exile in Hong Kong. It was there that he set up his own Wing Chun school, which would with time achieve huge international popularity; Ip went on to train future kung fu stars, most notably Bruce Lee.