Movie Background Daily

“There are three conflicts and you side with both sides,” critic Kenneth Turan says, explaining the heart of “Fiddler on the Roof,” and why it became one of the most beloved musicals of all time. There has already been one documentary about the improbable story of the Broadway musical based on the stories of a poor dairyman in a Russian Jewish shtetel, the 2019 film “Fiddler: A Miracle of Miracles.” The stories written by Yiddish author Sholem Aleichem had universal themes of parents, children, money, prejudice and the endless struggle between tradition and the need to adapt to changing times. And the music by Jerry Bock, lyrics by Sheldon Harnick, book by Joseph Stein, and dances by Jerome Robbins brought those stories, well, “To Life.”  The specific details in the story may not be universal, but it is the specifics that illuminate the universal details. Everyone in every culture knows what it is to leave home, to become your own person, to separate from your parents’ ways of doin...

An anti-war movie like Lewis Milestone’s “All Quiet On The Western Front” or Terrence Malick’s “The Thin Red Line” is made great by the humanism at the center. These films put the soldiers, their lives and their souls, above the battle sequences or patriotic sentiment. “Foxhole,” written and directed by Jack Fessenden, aims for such heights. Working with a small cast playing characters of the same name in three wars spread over three different centuries—the American Civil War, World War I, and the Iraq War—Fessenden wrestles with themes of duty, honor, and most importantly empathy.  Bookending his film with shots of a field filled with bloodied, dead soldiers, Fessenden immediately instills a sense of the futility of war. “The privilege of service seems to wither as each battle passes and what remains in the soul is not the glory of combat, but the horror of its aftermath,” a voiceover echoes in the fog. It’s through this poetic Malick-esque dialogue that his characters show how in...