Marcel Ophuls's career is littered with detours and potholes, sort of like the FDR Drive, but unlike that usually homely stretch of highway (it does look great at dawn, when the East River and Queens are gilded by the rising sun), he has several masterpieces to show for all the travails. Regrettably, he hasn't made a new film since 1994's The Troubles We've Seen, and that one was unshown here in the US for over a decade, except for a couple of one-time-only screenings.
Now Milestone Films has Troubles and will, I assume, be releasing it on DVD sometime soon. However, the film will have a truncated theatrical run at Anthology Film Archives over the weekend of November 17-19. I have already reviewed it for Jewish Week (here), and have nothing to add to that piece, other than to say that, while I think the second half of the film is something of a mess, it is well worth seeing for all the virtues that Ophuls brings to his documentaries, a cunning and sarcastic humor, profound sense of moral outrage, and a sense of decency.
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