No Place on Earth (opens in Cleveland on May 3rd exclusively at the Cedar Lee Theatre)

[NO PLACE ON EARTH opens in Cleveland on Friday May 3rd exclusively at the Cedar Lee Theatre.]

Review by Pamela Zoslov

“I forgot that there was a sun” are the poignant words of a woman recalling the day in her childhood when she emerged from a Ukrainian cave, where she and her family hid from the Nazis for a year and a half. She recounts her experience in the extraordinary documentary NO PLACE ON EARTH.

Janet Tobias' film tells the remarkable true story of five Jewish families who took shelter in the dark caves of the Ukraine to elude certain death during World War II. Thirty-eight men, women and children improvised an underground life between 1942 and 1944, scarcely seeing the light of day except when the men ventured outside, at great peril, to gather food. Theirs was the longest uninterrupted underground survival in recorded history.

The Tin Drum (November 13th at the Capitol Theatre)

[THE TIN DRUM screens Tuesday November 13th at 7 pm at the Capitol Theatre in association with The Cleveland Cinematheque.)

Review by Charles Cassady, Jr.

Maybe if I had studied German instead of French in high school or something, then my life would have taken a very different turn, and right now my lovely bride Heidi Klum and myself would be toasting long left-behind Cleveland, with our neighbor Lebron James at the Victoria's Secret After-Party in Miami. It's a nice thought. But no, I went with French. At least I finally read The Three Musketeers in the original (took a number of years), which got me insider moxie on any one of the numerous movie adaptations. But, probably because I did not take German, I also lost out, most likely, on reading the Gunter Grass novel The Tin Drum, which I am given to understand is Most Important. Okay, whatever. I finally got through the Twilight trilogy and so the literary part of the brain is still a bit numb.

What I am getting at here, in circumbendibus fashion, is that with my general avoidance of Teutonic culture I also put off seeing world-cinema classic THE TIN DRUM until just now, with a Director's Cut re-release of Volker Schlondorf's 1979 multiple award-winner (Best Foreign-Language Feature Oscar, among others). Whether it does justice to the Grass novel I cannot fully say, but as sheer cinema it is an incredible achievement, a Goya-esque pageant of the horrors and absurdities of 20th-century German culture, especially the little thing called Nazism.