Tag: prior films
Ken Burns’s ‘The U.S. and the Holocaust’ Reveals the Limits of Democracy
Many works of history are much less about the past than they are about the present. People contemplate past events to understand current problems, and in today’s fractured America, the Civil War would surely be a resonant topic for an eminent documentarian to explore. But Ken Burns has been there and done that. Instead, in our bifurcated country, where the past is relitigated daily in state legislatures and school-board meetings, Burns and his longtime co-producers, Lynn Novick and Sarah Botstein,
‘The Northman’ Brings a Surprising Twist on Male Heroism
In the director Robert Eggers’s brutal $90 million Viking epic, a prince seeks revenge on the uncle who killed his father and married his mother. If the plot sounds familiar, it’s because the Scandinavian source material of the legend of Prince Amleth was also the inspiration for Hamlet. And like so much of Shakespeare’s work, the story has been told and retold across centuries. The iteration in The Northman achieves a kind of feral animal violence exceeding even the