International Holocaust Remembrance Day will be commemorated on Tuesday, January 27, the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, and there will be special programming on television to mark the occasion.
Hot 8 is showing What They Found, directed by Sam Mendes (American Beauty, 1917), on January 26 at 9:15 p.m., and it will also be available on Hot VOD and Next TV.
It’s a very interesting and effective documentary that looks at two British soldiers who were sent with the troops to film the liberation of the concentration camp Bergen-Belsen. It was a wise decision on the part of the British military command to document in minute detail the horrific loss of life and abuse of the inmates they discovered there.
Some of this film overlaps with the major documentary, German Concentration Camps Factual Survey, on which Alfred Hitchcock was an adviser, which was based on footage shot by Allied forces in 1945 all over Germany, and which was abandoned and only completed by the Imperial War Museum in 2014. What They Found has a narrower focus and combines the footage filmed by the two soldiers with interviews with them. They are modest and down-to-earth, but it is fascinating to hear their perspectives on what they found.
Hot 8, Hot VOD, and Next TV are also featuring The Stamp Thief, on January 27 at 9:15 p.m. This documentary shows how Seinfeld producer Gary Gilbert sought to recover stamps stolen from victims of the Holocaust by a Nazi officer. In a crazy move that recalls Argo, he stages a fake movie shoot to unravel the mystery of the stolen stamps. The film combines a detective story with a heist film, and it’s an interesting story of the Holocaust that has not been told before.
Neshoma, by Sandra Beerends – a look at Jewish life in Amsterdam from the end of World War I to the beginning of World War II – will be shown on January 26 on YesDocu at 10 p.m. and is available on YesVOD.
Neshoma is the Yiddish pronunciation of a Hebrew word that translates to soul or spirit, and the film portrays the Jewish soul of the Dutch city by combining archival footage from the period with letters from Rusha, read by Daniella Kertesz of Shtisel, to her older brother, Max, who has gone to work in the Dutch East Indies.
The two characters are representative of members of the Dutch Jewish community, and it’s heartbreaking to see how the optimism at the end of the First World War turns into despair over the rise of the Nazis.
Yes is also showing Hannah Arendt: Facing Tyranny, on January 27 at 10 p.m., on YesDocu and YesVOD.
HBO comes to Israel
HBO MAX has just rolled out its content in Israel, which is available on both Yes and Hot, and it’s also possible to subscribe to it separately.
The streamer offers an incredible library of classic content from HBO’s early years, including all the seasons of The Sopranos and The Wire, two shows that have aged incredibly well, and also Sex and the City, which has been imitated so much it seems a little dated, but which is still fun.
There is also a great deal of new programming, and one of the streamer’s biggest recent hits, The Pitt, is available. This is the series that sends Noah Wyle, an actor who starred in the ’90s hit drama ER (alongside George Clooney), back to the emergency room. This time, he’s Dr. Michael “Robby” Robinavitch, a senior doctor at an understaffed ER in Pittsburgh. Wyle is an extremely appealing actor, and while Clooney got the lion’s share of the attention on ER, Wyle was one of the reasons so many tuned in.
But at its most gritty, ER was a tea party compared to The Pitt, which is a much more graphic portrayal of what doctors actually do. The Pitt uses a clever device to tell its story: The entire first season is a single day in the ER, with a full episode devoted to each hour. More than any previous medical drama, The Pitt gives you a glimpse into the mind-numbing number of decisions and tasks the hospital staff must perform throughout a single shift. It does so partly by showing each treatment in vivid detail, which for many will be stomach-churning, although I found that I only closed my eyes about four times per episode.
But The Pitt doesn’t skimp on personal drama, and there’s an underlying story about Robby’s guilt over the death of his mentor during the COVID pandemic, and all the doctors and nurses get a few moments to tell their stories.
The second season, one episode of which is being released each week, is also set during a single shift, about 10 months later, on July 4.
Many will be happy to hear that Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere, the film starring Jeremy Allen White of The Bear as The Boss while he withdrew and recorded Nebraska, starts streaming on Disney+ on January 23.
It’s very enjoyable, especially if you are a big Springsteen fan, and White does a good job of portraying Bruce without mimicking him too closely.
Many more movies to be released throughout the year will stream on Disney+ after they play in theaters for a month or two, including the sequel to The Devil Wears Prada and the fifth Toy Story movie.
Other new shows on Disney+ include The Beauty – a series from Ryan Murphy, who created Glee, American Horror Story, and Nip/Tuck – which just started streaming.
Based on the trailer, it looks a lot like the Demi Moore horror movie The Substance, and tells the story of a corporation run by an executive played by Ashton Kutcher that markets a shot guaranteed to make people look decades younger, but which has devastating, icky side effects. It’s said to be a comment on the “culture” where it can happen that people trade off feeling unwell for easy weight loss.
In the spring, there will also be a sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, set 15 years after the end of that show, and it promises much oppression and gore. It will star Chase Infiniti, who is in One Battle After Another, and some of the original cast, including Ann Dowd.
If you loved The Americans and want to see something similar, you might want to try Ponies, which is available on Hot and Yes, but, sadly, it isn’t nearly as good and may send you running back to rewatch the series that inspired it.
Ponies, which is a sort-of acronym for “Persons of no interest,” tells the story of two widows of CIA agents in Moscow in the 1970s who volunteer to be spies to find out how their husbands died.
It stars Emilia Clarke, who is best known for Game of Thrones, and Haley Lu Richardson, who was in season two of The White Lotus, but even these very talented actresses can’t save the series from a consistently improbable script.
Sure, The Americans often seemed beyond belief when you thought about it, but cocreator Joel Weisberg was a former CIA agent, and there was an internal logic to the situations and the motivations that always made sense and created suspense.
The logic and suspense are missing here, although the soundtrack is fun and features a cover of Neil Young’s “After the Gold Rush” by Dolly Parton, Emmylou Harris, and Linda Ronstadt.