Polish minister vows ‘swift action’ against far-right MEP over antisemitic rant outside Auschwitz: TVP World

 

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Nuremberg movie review

 

Nuremberg 2025

A good movie for grownups about important historical events

Nuremberg is a 2025 historical drama written, directed, and co-produced by James Vanderbilt. Nuremberg is a misnomer; the film is not an exhaustive treatment of the thirteen trials of Nazi war criminals that took place in Nuremberg, Germany, between 1945 and 1949. A more accurate title for the film would be Five Men at Nuremberg, those five men being SCOTUS Justice Robert H. Jackson (Michael Shannon), psychiatrist Dr. Douglas Kelley (Rami Malek), Hermann Goering (Russell Crowe), Sergeant Howard Triest (Leo Woodall), and Colonel Burton C. Andrus (John Slattery). Jackson played a key role in initiating the Nuremberg trials. Goering was a top Nazi defendant. Kelley was a thirty-two-year-old Army psychiatrist and lieutenant colonel tasked with assessing the Nazi defendants' mental fitness to stand trial. Triest was a US Army interpreter, and Andrus was the commandant of the Nuremberg prison. Richard E. Grant stars as British prosecutor Sir David Maxwell-Fyfe, and Colin Hanks plays a US Army psychologist, Dr. Gustave Gilbert. Nuremberg is roughly two and a half hours long. Nuremberg opened in the US on November 7, 2025.

Please go see this movie. Buy a ticket; see it in a theater. It's a good movie, and it's for grown-ups. If we want movies like this, we have to support them with our ticket purchases.

"After the Hunt" "Blue Moon" and "Good Boy" movie reviews

 

After the Hunt, Good Boy, and Blue Moon

And filmmaking so inept that it transcends sexual politics

After the Hunt is a 2025 psychological thriller. Luca Guadagnino directs. His previous films include Call Me By Your Name and Queer. The title After the Hunt is an allusion to a quote attributed to Otto von Bismarck. "People never lie so much as before an election, during a war, or after the hunt." Nora Garrett, a first-time screenwriter, wrote the screenplay in a workshop. Garrett was intrigued by the disconnect between a person's interior life and the persona that one must present in order to be successful. The main character, Alma, a Yale professor pursuing tenure, has "has spent her whole life cordoning off pieces of herself in order to reach this apex … as soon as she's there … circumstances … occur that would make it so that she could no longer successfully keep those other parts of her away from the identity that she projects out into the world."

World Enemy No. 1 by Jochen Hellbeck Book Review

 

World Enemy No. 1: Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, and the Fate of the Jews

 

A new book moves the center of World War II history eastward

 

World Enemy No. 1: Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, and the Fate of the Jews is a new book that offers a daring interpretation of World War II. Author Jochen Hellbeck is Distinguished Professor of History at Rutgers University. German-born Hellbeck's previous works include Stalingrad: The City that Defeated the Third Reich, and Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary Under Stalin. Hellbeck's father, a 17-year-old draftee, fought briefly for Nazi Germany, before being injured on the Eastern Front. His maternal grandfather ran a factory that used Russian forced laborers. Penguin Press will release World Enemy No. 1 in the US on October 21, 2025. It is 560 pages, inclusive of black-and-white illustrations, maps, a bibliography, and an index.

One Battle after Another Movie Review

 

Is it just me? Is everyone else in on the joke? Am I the only one who has no idea what the punch line is and when it's our cue to laugh? Has everyone but me been issued the secret decoder ring that makes sense of all this? Am I too sensitive? Too Catholic? Too old? Too grounded in objective reality? Or is it drugs? Some audience members, in a movie theater, receive 3-D glasses. Do some viewers receive a magic mushroom concoction that renders schlock beatific?

That's what I was thinking as I sat in my local multiplex showing the new film One Battle after Another. Critics tout it as a "masterpiece." Rotten Tomatoes reports that One Battle after Another has a 96% positive score. The National Public Radio program, Pop Culture Happy Hour, called One Battle after Another "awe-inspiring," "eye-poppingly beautiful," "really, really fun," "a masterclass," "firing on all cylinders," full of "painterly compositions." The crew at the Next Best Picture podcast devoted four hours – four hours! – to slathering praise on the film. To these young guys, One Battle after Another is one of the greatest films ever made. In the New York Times, Michelle Goldberg crowns One Battle after Another an "anti-fascist film."

Is it just me?

NPR and Teen Pregnancy; Important Truths Left Unsaid

 

National Public Radio, Christianity, and Teen Pregnancy
Important truths left unsaid

 

I used to be a leftist. Back then, I was immersed in a worldview. I believed that we were right and they were wrong. Every now and then, though, I would experience cognitive dissonance. I might be reading an article in the New York Times, listening to a story on National Public Radio, or conversing with a fellow leftist. I would enter these exchanges feeling that we – I and the media source or my interlocutor and I – were on the correct side of things, and that we stood against all that was unholy and we would correct error with our righteousness.

 

But then I would hear something that would get me thinking. These thoughts would always be blurry; I unconsciously pressured myself not to pursue these thoughts to their logical conclusion, so they remained inchoate. I pressured myself because I did not want to contradict people who were smarter than I was. I had facts at hand to support a left-wing point of view. I did not have facts at hand to support a conservative point of view. And, I knew, even if unconsciously, that if I went too far in my transgressive thought patterns, I would be thinking and eventually saying things that I would be punished for. My interlocuter might mock my stupidity, and my missing the obvious flaw in my thoughts. Or I might upset someone. Or I might lose a friend.

What about the Bodies by Ken Jaworowski. Book Review

 

Atlantic Crime publishers released What about the Bodies by Ken Jaworowski on September 2, 2025. The author is an ex-boxer and New York Times editor. Jaworowski has been nominated for an Edgar Award for mystery fiction. Bodies is a 288-page, noirish thriller set in contemporary rust-belt Pennsylvania. What about the Bodies has been rapturously reviewed by bestselling thriller authors Dean Koontz, Alex Finlay, and Lisa Scottoline, among others.

What about the Bodies is one of the best-written books I've ever read. As I was reading, I kept waiting for Jaworowski to misstep. He never did. Jaworowski knows how to craft a sentence, what punctuation is and how to use it, and how to choose the right words and put them in the right order. He knows how to juggle the big picture so that each sentence works towards the larger structure and the final payoff. Characters are vivid; you know them. You'd recognize them on the street. Multiple chapter-end cliffhangers work like the dips and rises on a roller coaster ride. I had no idea how this book would end until the last page. As befits a noir thriller, there is brutality here, and sadism, and a touch of gore. But there is also real heart. Hearts that break, hearts that promise to heal, hearts that silently and invisibly endure. There is heroic self-sacrifice. There is also, to my great surprise, humor, and boy-oh-boy are those laughs earned. Jaworowski has said, "I hope I wrote a fast-paced thriller. I hope I wrote something entertaining and exciting." Mission accomplished. "But," he added, "I hope you can also do that and throw in a couple of questions about life and about what we think and about who we are." Mission accomplished twice over.