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When his cider distillery is destroyed, a pioneer must learn to trap beaver to stay alive through the winter and win the love of the fur trader's daughter. This live action cartoon is the Looney Tunes love child of Jeremiah Johnson and Chaplin's The Gold Rush. It's ridiculously clever and inventive and the hilarious gags never stop flowing from beginning to end. Filmed in the snowy forests but heavily edited in After Effects, it has the rough-hewn quality of silent films that complements its setting and adds to its charm. Lead actor and co-writer Ryland Brickson Cole Tews is terrific in a heavily physical role that's broadly comic without overplaying it. I laughed a lot and will be recommending this film to everyone.

From the director of the terrific "Japan's Longest Day", this is an ambitious documentary-styled recreation of the battle for Okinawa, where hundreds of thousands of soldiers and civilians were abandoned by the Japanese military in order to better protect the mainland. The soldiers fortified themselves in caves and fended of an overwhelming American attack over a period of several months. Unfortunately, the filmmaker's talents don't match their ambitions. "Japan's Longest Day" was a fascinating film written by Shinobu Hashimoto about a little known military revolt at the end of the war. Okinawa is dramatically inept with misplaced bits of humor, and the crowd scenes never number more than 50, making it seem far less epic than it purports to be. The photography is bland and the blood very fake. The desperation never seeps in like it should, but the film does a good job of showing what they went through. It also shows that when the going gets tough, the Japanese commit suicide - according to this film it must have been the leading cause of death. The events depicted are similar to "Sands of Iwo Jima" - so if you like that you might like this. Okinawa is still occupied by American forces. Script by Kaneto Shindo ("Onibaba").

Using the Nuremberg trials as source material, this film looks at how German businesses colluded with the Nazis and centers on the crisis of conscious from the scientist that developed of the poison gas used in the concentration camps. Great idea but it's propagandistic and tries very hard to atone for the sins of the Nazis. Lots of weak drama mixed in with real war and atrocity footage. Perhaps it played better in 1950? It makes no bones about the international industrial machine that fed Germany during the war, explaining how goods traveled from country to country to make their way into German hands, with Standard Oil being singled out as a major accomplice. It's just like buying American products in Iran today. War is good for business.