Reviews

Review: The Karski Report

Elaborations on Claude Lanzmann's Holocaust account

By PETER KEOUGH | March 21, 2012

3.5 Stars

After nine and a half hours of Shoah, what remains to be said? Everything and nothing, but some testimonials in Claude Lanzmann's Holocaust account begged for elaboration, among them a segment in which Polish underground hero Jan Karski described his debriefings in 1943 with President Roosevelt and others. In this extended version of the 1978 interview, Karski, who looks like an older James Woods, recreates his meetings theatrically (in a perhaps unintentionally ironic aside, he recalls how the Polish ambassador suggested he be more "concise"), doing a fair imitation of Roosevelt's pronunciation of the word "war" and relating how, when he brought up the extermination camps, the President discussed instead Polish horses used by the Nazis on the Eastern Front. Perhaps more chilling is Justice Felix Frankfurter's flat-out refusal to believe him, if not Karski's own silence at the end of the movie, when he realizes that maybe his report could have been better. (Claude Lanzmann appears in person at the Friday night Harvard Film Archive screening of The Karski Report.)

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ARTICLES BY PETER KEOUGH

REVIEW: DELICACY | March 20, 2012
For the first 20 minutes of David and Stéphane Foenkinos's screwball comedy, Nathalie (Audrey Tautou) and her beau enjoy a relationship as bland and bubbly as Tautou herself.

REVIEW: THE KARSKI REPORT | March 21, 2012
After nine and a half hours of Shoah , what remains to be said? Everything and nothing, but some testimonials in Claude Lanzmann's Holocaust account begged for elaboration, among them a segment in which Polish underground hero Jan Karski described his debriefings in 1943 with President Roosevelt and others.

REVIEW: FREE MEN | March 22, 2012
In a little known footnote to the Holocaust, the head of the Paris mosque, Si Kaddour Ben Ghabrit, helped many Jews escape the Nazis.

REVIEW: THE HUNGER GAMES | March 22, 2012
More powerful than fear in subduing a society, says President Snow (Donald Sutherland) in this overstuffed adaptation of the first book in Suzanne Collins's trilogy, is hope.

REVIEW: BEING JEWISH IN FRANCE | March 14, 2012
"A love affair gone sour," is how one of the writers quoted in director Yves Jeuland's documentary describes the Vichy collusion with the Nazis, which ended with thousands of French Jews rounded up by Gendarmes and shipped to death camps.

See all articles by: PETER KEOUGH

Reviews

Review: The Karski Report

Review: The Hunger Games

Review: Delicacy

Review: Free Men

Review: The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye

Review: Footnote