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Agniezska Holland knows a thing or two about the Oscar appeal of a dark historical drama.

The Polish filmmaker has made three Academy Award-nominated period dramas: Best international film nominee Angry Harvest (1985), about a Jewish woman on the run during World War II; best screenplay nominee Europa, Europa (1990), which tells the true story of Solomon Perel, a Jewish German who enrolled in the Hitler Youth to save himself; and best international feature nominee In Darkness (2011), the story a Polish sewage worker gave shelter to Jewish refugees hiding from the Nazis.

For the 97th Academy Awards, Holland is throwing her weight behind The Girl With the Needle, Denmark’s best international feature contender, and the third film from Swedish director Magnus von Horn’ (Sweat, The Hear After).

The 1920s-set drama, loosely based on a true story, follows a poor but resilient seamstress, played by Danish actress Vic Carmen Sonne, who finds herself unemployed,...

Green BorderImage: Kino Lorber

Green Border, the latest from master Polish filmmaker Agnieszka Holland, is nothing short of a call to direct action. The film provides a nuanced, if at times frankly brutal, account of the treacherous conditions migrants face on the Polish-Belarusian border, which are either exacerbated or assuaged...

Director Agnieszka Holland pulls off a difficult task — her true-life Holocaust tale neither trivializes the horror nor glamorizes individualized victims at the expense of the big picture. Marco Hofschneider is the inexperienced German teenager who by strange quirks of fate becomes a staunch Stalinist in a Communist school, then a Nazi war hero and candidate for Hitler Youth honors and adoption by a Nazi officer… if he can avoid being uncovered as a Jew in hiding. It sounds tasteless but it’s not — the true story of Solomon Perel reveals the ‘fluidity’ of ideology when survival is on the line. Our young hero must keep ‘becoming’ what he pretends to be. With André Wilms, René Hofschneider and Julie Delpy as a rabid Hitlerite.

Europa Europa

Blu-ray

The Criterion Collection 985

1990 / Color / 1:66 widescreen / 112 min. / available through The Criterion Collection / Street Date July 9, 2019 / 39.95

Starring: Marco Hofschneider, André Wilms, René Hofschneider, Julie Delpy,...

Now that the 2010 line-up for the Criterion Collection has finally been announced with last week’s December titles, we can begin speculating on what we’ll get in 2011. With over 50 spine numbers in 2010, will we see # 600 in 2011? At the rate that Criterion is churning out these discs, we have to assume so. Where will they get all of these upcoming titles from?

Well, over the past few months we’ve seen several titles from MGM’s catalog announced, and hinted at in their monthly newsletter. Most likely due to MGM’s current financial problems, it’s nice to see Criterion stepping up to rescue these films from the abyss of “out of print”. If you head over to the various forums (CriterionForum.org, Mubi, etc.) you’ll find many people speculating on the MGM titles that Criterion has acquired the rights to. While some are mostly speculation, I have had...