Noticias

I caught a screening of the doc, a couple of years back at the Toronto Film Festival, and if I remember correctly, this became a Weinstein co. title that never got released - it's finally receiving a release on VOD via Sundance Selects on March 10th. A must see for WWII history buffs and Macdonald fans. - When Patty Jenkins' Monster came out, I'll admit to having been one of the least judgmental folks towards the course that Aileen Wuornos took. When discussing the bad apples in society, I've always tried to be cautious about calling out people for what they are: folks that make bad judgement calls and those who are pure evil. And then you have Kevin Macdonald's My Enemy's Enemy which showcases one very rotten apple at the core. I caught a screening of the doc, a couple of years back at the Toronto Film Festival,...

More Spring Preview: [Theatrical Calendar]

[Repertory Calendar]

[Jason Reitman's Favorites]

Over 85 films will be filing through arthouses and multiplexes between now and the end of April, but nearly triple that number will be accessible from the comfort of home, whether it's on demand, online or on DVD. Here's what will be hitting televisions, computer screens, Netflix queues and store shelves this spring.

On Demand

Once you get through the masterful six-hour "Red Riding Trilogy" currently available on demand through May, IFC Films and their Sundance Selects label have quite the collection of festival favorites available to beam directly onto your TV in the next few months. It starts on February 17th with the Festival Direct release of the acclaimed John Bryant comedy "The Overbrook Brothers," about two siblings who find out they're adopted, as well as the Sundance Selects release of "Flannel Pajamas" director Jeff Lipsky's multi-generational comedy "Once More With Feeling," starring Chazz Palminteri as...

• #88.My Enemy's EnemyDirector/Writer: Kevin Macdonald Producer/Production Company: Rita Dagher , Kevin Macdonald Distributor: The Weinstein Company The Gist: This is about Klaus Barbie, the Nazi war criminal known as "the Butcher Of Lyon." Barbie was also the subject of Marcel Ophuls' Oscar winning 1988 documentary Hotel Terminus, but Macdonald's film will have a very different focus. The film will chronicle how Barbie worked with the CIA after the war and how the Nazi felon was protected by the Us.Fact: Equally agile in documentary and narrative storytelling forms, MacDonald has gone back and forth between docu and fiction: Touching the Void (2004), The Last King of Scotland (2006) and is helming studio pic State of Play. See It: This is a perfect companion piece for another doc film Terror's Advocate, and acts as another mind-boggling example of how American foreign policy is cause for many blunders. Release Date/Status?: Presently in the Tba status,

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Telluride Fim Festival

TELLURIDE -- The Last King of Scotland director Kevin Macdonald returns to his documentary roots with My Enemy's Enemy, a sobering history lesson detailing the disturbing record of complicity between notorious war criminals, specifically Klaus Barbie, and the West in the aftermath of WWII.

A pet project of Macdonald's, the France/U.K. co-production, which also screens at Toronto, makes a compelling case out of its resourcefully assembled if somewhat dryly presented archival footage and more recent interviews.

The end result could nevertheless ignite some considerable debate given The Weinstein Co. release's highly relevant perspective, and is a strong contender for the Best Documentary Oscar shortlist.

Macdonald, whose riveting 1991 film, One Day in September, dealing with the 1972 Munich Olympics tragedy, took home a Best Documentary Oscar, finds no shortage of glaring hypocrisies when it comes to the troubling postwar relationship between the Barber of Lyon and American counterintelligence.

Although he was held accountable for the murder of celebrated French Resistance leader Jean Moulin, as well as for the deaths of 44 Jewish children in Izieu, France, the U.S. nevertheless found his Communist-hunting tactics to be quite useful during the Cold War.

They'd eventually part company and Barbie and his family would "disappear" to Bolivia (with the assistance of the Catholic Church), where he'd lay low for a while, eventually becoming a powerful businessman and enlisting the help of some of his old Nazi brethren in a bid to build a Fourth Reich in the Andes.

With its French-language narration and confluence of German, Spanish and English, the extensively subtitled film requires a little effort on the part of the viewer, but it's a potent payoff.

Among the many informed talking heads, both freshly interviewed and in news footage, are famed French Nazi-hunters Serge and Beate Klarsfeld, and Jacques Verges, the lawyer representing Barbie after his eventual extradition to France, who compared some of Barbie's sanctioned activities to others later taking place in Vietnam and Afghanistan.

While there's much to digest here, Macdonald serves up some undeniably potent food for thought.

• Today’s slate of four films included a pair that will be (mark my words) in the year-end contention for the Academy Award’s Best foreign picture category – and while they will both likely attract the same audiences they couldn’t be more different in terms of how viewers will come away from the separate film experiences. Tomorrow, I’ll be missing in action with 5 films on the slate. I had a Nazi war criminal documentary film from Kevin MacDonald for breakfast. My Enemy's Enemy is a mind boggling doc that looks at how a person (famously nicked named the Butcher Of Lyons) who tortured hundreds (if not thousands) of people and was somehow portected by the U.S for several decades. Though it doesn’t have the emotional or cinematic value as Touching the Void, but it follows in the list of madmen projects that commenced with The Last King of Scotland.

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