Film Reviews

Soldier boy (Cineville)

(First Run Features)

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More About

• Susannah Grant
• Auschwitz-Birkenau
• Ella Taylor
• Movie Stars
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SMOKIN’ ACES Writer-director Joe Carnahan’s third and most elaborate feature presents as its antihero a glitzy stage magician cum mobster mascot turned Mob kingpin then FBI informer. Buddy “Aces” Israel (Jeremy Piven) is, as someone in this overstuffed baloney-and-ketchup sandwich puts it, “the great white whale of snitches.” Everyone wants a piece of this joker’s hide, which, given its rumored million-dollar price tag, makes the Lake Tahoe penthouse where he’s laying low something of a magnet for a gaggle of competing hit squads. To add to the barbarism, the killers have orders to not just ice Israel but — pace Mel Gibson — to cut out his heart. Let the games begin. Smokin’ Aces has no particular narrative: It’s basically a study in convergence as a vast assortment of FBI guys, hotel security men, SWAT teams, and killers of all varieties — including a clan of lunatic chain-saw neo-Nazi mohawk-coiffed punks — fight, claw and swarm their way up to Israel’s suite. Self-important but not untalented, the movie is tonally consistent from beginning to end, and, for all its bloody mayhem, kinetic nihilism and jive minstrelsy, has a surprisingly light touch. What Carnahan’s picture lacks in hilarity, it recuperates with a well-developed, albeit mumbling, sense of the absurd. (Citywide) (J. Hoberman)

PICK VERDICT ON AUSCHWITZ: ?THE FRANKFURT-AUSCHWITZ TRIAL 1963–’65 If you pay any attention at all to Holocaust history, there’ll be few surprises in the actual evidence about the biggest site of Hitler’s Final Solution offered in this three-hour exhumation (shortened from a much longer 1993 version) of the trial of former Nazi apparatchiks at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. Consider the context, though, and this German-made documentary becomes a fascinating record — via a two-year Frankfurt courtroom drama less splashy than either the Nuremberg or Eichmann trials that preceded it — of the country’s awkward baby steps toward confronting its hideous legacy. Culling from 430 hours of audio recordings and limited archive footage from the proceedings, as well as interviews with observers and participants, filmmakers Rolf Bickel and Dietrich Wagner provide a deconstruction of the mechanics of life at Auschwitz so exhaustive, it would make Claude Lanzmann proud. Verdict on Auschwitz dwells properly on the uniform mendacity and lack of remorse among the functionaries who ran the Third Reich’s most efficient charnel house — liars and cowards all, long after the fact. In testimony after testimony, often delivered in chillingly dispassionate tones by former victims about their treatment by sadists who went way beyond their brief, the film handily dispatches the notion that those who ran the camps were just following orders. The big fat elephant in the room is the court’s heavy emphasis on the perpetrators and nervous avoidance of the word “Jew.” Still, this is required viewing for everyone, especially for David Irving, Mel Gibson’s dad and all other profane deniers of a bloody century’s bloodiest genocide. (Grande 4-Plex) (Ella Taylor)