Review of Woman in Gold (2015) by Jeanrenoir13 — 16 Apr 2015

MIrren's excellent as always, and the whole cast is good enough (wasting the great Danny Bruhl, but whatever). The production values are great, in the "quality picture" tradition. And it's hard not to be moved at times.

But the whole movie is ultimately an incredibly shameless machine for emotional manipulation and beating the dead horse of Nazi evil for the easiest effects imaginable. In fact, the hard truth is that the movie's this year's annual Holocaust movie clearly made by the Israel Lobby neocon wing of Hollywood to keep the American masses Pavlovian suckers for "Never again!" so that when the neocons roll it out again to con the American masses into supporting Tom Cotton's proxy war for Israel for "regime change" in Iran, the suckers will bite yet again, in an uncontrollable reflex that has been brilliantly drilled into them by Israel Lobby Hollywood for so many years now for just such an occasion.

The attention to Pavlovian detail is such that they've made the heroine father look just like Stefan Zweig! How's that for tugging at the heartstrings of the literate, the ones most in danger of dismissing the movie for its shameless manipulations.

Nothing is harder to make a good film about than the Holocaust, because any work of art has to avoid cliches and stock responses like the plague. Manipulative schlock like Woman in Gold does NOTHING but trade in both.

It looks so good, and Mirren's such a good actress that the film might strike the unwary as better than it is. But Stephen Holden's 30 ranking for the Times nails it for what it is: crowd-pleasing junk.