Special report by PEOPLE’S WORLD
A PRETTY good, sometimes gripping, political thriller, the new movie Munich — The Edge Of War, based on Robert Harris’s 2017 novel, includes a couple of obvious howlers.
First, the film’s Adolf Hitler is so bad it becomes comical. Surely, film-makers understand Bruno Ganz as the Fuhrer in the 2004 German film Downfall irrevocably raised the bar when it comes to onscreen portrayals of the Nazi leader?
Second, amazingly, the film-makers chose August Diehl to play a slightly manic, slightly comic SS officer, after he had played a slightly manic, slightly comic SS officer in Quentin Tarantino’s 2009 movie Inglourious Basterds. Is the pool of decent German actors really so small?
GORDON PARSONS salutes the apt return of Brecht’s vaudevillian cartoon drama that retains the vitality of the boxing or the circus ring
SETH SANDRONSKY recommends a production that looks back at the political Tinseltown in the mid-1970s when US cinema ‘didn’t pander to trends’
ROGER McKENZIE argues that Western powers can see the beginning of the end in the rise of the global South — and racist reactions are kicking in
In a speech to the 12th Xiangshan Forum in Beijing, SEVIM DAGDELEN warns of a growing historical revisionism to whitewash Germany and Japan’s role in WWII as part of a return to a cold war strategy from the West — but multipolarity will win out


