A superbly crafted low-boil drama about an East German doctor who must balance dedication to her patients with a potential escape to the West, Barbara represents the latest entry in a continuingly successful working relationship between actress Nina Hoss and director Christian Petzold. A smart, engaging story built on telling details, the film gets its hooks into you the old-fashioned way — through character — and highlights the difficulties and cost of living by principles.



Winner of the Berlin Film Festival’s Silver Bear Prize for Petzold, Barbara unfolds in 1980, in a small rural town in East Germany. Idealistic Barbara Wolff (Hoss) used to be a top doctor at a respected Berlin medical facility, but has been banished to a provincial pediatric hospital after applying for an exit visa out of the communist country. Tracking her movements is Klaus Schutz (Rainer Bock), a representative of the Stasi secret police who views Barbara with a personal contempt (“If she were six you’d say she’s sulky”) that seems to extend beyond his tasked surveillance of her.

Even though she ranges from cool to outright standoffish, Barbara’s supervising doctor, Andre (Ronald Zehrfeld), keeps making attempts to get to know and help her. A delicate dance ensues. Barbara is touched by Andre’s altruism, but suspects, not without good reason, that he’s also an informant charged with reporting on her movements and activities. As she dodges Klaus’ observation and puts up with unannounced, intrusive and humiliating searches, Barbara continues to plot an escape to West Germany with her lover, Jörg (Mark Waschke). Burgeoning, complicated feelings for Andre, however, throw into relief a looming, difficult decision about what sort of future she truly wants.

The performances here are precise and modulated, like a Swiss watch; small glances and moments of silence are pregnant with quiet meaning. Hoss, whose previous four collaborations with Petzold include the striking Yella and Jerichow, is an actress of uncommon intelligence as well as chameleonic beauty; when she puts up a stern front her inner light can seem utterly impenetrable, and when she drops it the vulnerability can be shattering.

The commingling of the personal and political (also a big part of Yella) on the part of Petzold is impressive. He doesn’t cram in a lot of chronological markers to continually reinforce and remind viewers that he’s telling a period piece story. Instead, he gives his movie a thin sheen of formality that both obscures and heightens a plot which could otherwise be construed as melodramatic, and lets an audience consider and arrive at the allegorical weight on their own terms. But Barbara is never hammy or overwrought. It plays out on an altogether human terrain, marked with recognizable uncertainty, heartbreak and other turmoil. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Adopt Films, PG-13, 105 minutes)

A nonfiction film about hydraulic fracturing aimed largely at debunking Josh Fox’s Oscar-nominated Gasland, FrackNation is a slice of agitated environmental pushback, an impassioned but slapdash cinematic rebuttal masquerading as a legitimate investigative documentary.

Directed by right-leaning filmmaker Phelim McAleer, who’s previously taken antagonistic runs at Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth and environmentalism more generally, FrackNation bills itself as an exploration for the truth about the petroleum and natural gas extraction method known widely by its shorthand nickname of fracking. In much the same fashion as Michael Moore in his earlier works, McAleer casts himself as a crusading journalist wading into the fray for answers, speaking truth to power and demanding accountability from bureaucracy.

Certainly FrackNation is interesting and valuable for the voice it lends to residents of Dimock, Pennsylvania (one of the chief settings of Gasland), who don’t feel any threat to their drinking water or health from mining. It shows, quite capably, the difference of opinion in this town. The problem is that McAleer fancies those espousing environmental concerns as “green extremists,” and by and large treats the fact that both local and national opinions of support for fracking exist as disproving evidence that anyone could have any issues with water potability or other health problems caused by fracking.

The movie makes the spurious leap of logic that the fact that there are some examples of methane present in drinking water dating back many decades as proof that no drinking water is so contaminated by fracking, and takes as gospel the word of mining companies in regard to the inviolability of their methods. FrackNation addresses the proprietary (read: secret) chemical additives pumped into the ground in massive amounts during fracking only by having a scientist say that the same thing could be true about coffee (!), and it does not address at all the crucially important issue of the storage and disposal of waste water run-off.

FrackNation is emblematic of some of the worst aspects of lazy social-activist filmmaking, both right and left (see also: Top Priority: The Terror Within, a documentary about Department of Homeland Security whistleblower Julia Davis), in that it throws out a bunch of tidbits of information and theories about adversaries’ motivations without much regard to a cogent macro argument. In McAleer’s case, this includes everything from a sourcing allegation about a specific insert shot in Gasland and a weak character assassination on a public official with adjudicating authority on a fracking bill to the assertion that American environmentalists are perhaps somehow in league with a Russian energy mafia determined to monopolize the future of natural gas shale drilling.

Most problematically, however, FrackNation peddles a false narrative. In striking minor nativist chords about how the generations-old livelihoods of rural Americans are at risk by environmental activists, McAleer completely ignores the many other difficult external economic realities facing small, family-owned farms being swallowed up by conglomerates. If a farmer absolutely requires the additional income of leasing his land for natural gas drilling in order to sustain his business, is the primary threat to that way of life those who seek transparency, tighter regulation and/or, yes, even a ban of hydraulic fracturing?

FrackNation is not a totally hackish work, but it does start from a bogus and willfully cordoned off point-of-view, and exhibits a desire to grind axes more than uncover truth. Promulgating the rather ludicrous claim that Big Media — that familiar right-wing boogeyman — has peddled fear-mongering about fracking, the movie wraps itself in a cloak of besieged indignity, content to scream “Fair and Balanced!” rather than engage in a more honest exchange of ideas. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. For more information on the movie, which opens in Los Angeles at the Laemmle Pasadena Playhouse 7, click here to visit its website. (Hard Boiled Films, unrated, 77 minutes)