Charlie Bertsch / 02 Mar 2023
We Are All Donkeys
Jerzy Skolimowski’s EO
The donkey is lying on the ground, like a corpse. We see a close-up of the blood-spattered hairs on its nose. But then it takes a breath, then another.(...)
France
John Foster / 24 Feb 2023
The Biggest Failure Ever
R. T. Howard’s Spying on the Reich
From the vantage point of the early 21st century, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the interwar period was a preamble to catastrophe.(...)
Charlie Bertsch / 16 Feb 2023
Ukraine in Hindsight
Edward Berger’s All Quiet on the Western Front
All Quiet on the Western Front, Edward Berger’s astoundingly brutal adaptation of Eric Maria Remarque’s 1929 novel about World War I – the favourite to win this year’s Best International Film Oscar – is timely to a degree that would have been hard to imagine when the project began.(...)
Natalie Sarkic-Todd / 06 Sep 2022
Life Under Gorbachev
The End of the USSR
When Mikhail Gorbachev was appointed General Secretary of the Communist Party of the USSR in 1985, I was studying Russian at university.(...)
Charlie Bertsch / 10 Aug 2022
Post-War Youth
400 Blows After Netflix
François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows is one of cinema’s all-time classics, the 1959 film that demonstrated how deftly a new generation of French critics could transform themselves into the filmmakers of la nouvelle vague.(...)
Natalie Sarkic-Todd / 20 Apr 2022
First Impressions Last Forever
Dining With Marine Le Pen
Emmanuel Macron’s stump speech in Strasbourg last week was a blast from the past.(...)
Maxime Sattonnay / 30 Mar 2022
Putting Refugees First
French Aid Workers in Poland
Everyone’s going to Poland. Not just from Ukraine, but Western Europe.(...)
The Battleground / 21 Mar 2022
Never Mind the News
The Battleground’s Spring Books List
It's easier than ever to lose sight of books. With global crises overtaking our lives every couple of years now, to read anything other than news gets harder by the day.(...)