The Big Sit
So I saw five movies the weekend before Christmas, and am happy to say I didn't entirely like any of them. First up was Barbara, a German movie which has been getting excellent reviews. It isn't so excellent. The eponymous lead character is a doctor in East Germany in the early 1980s who has been assigned to work at a new hospital. We see her working at the hospital, getting attached to another doctor in a romantic way, and to a patient or two in an empathic way. The German secret police come by every so often to her apartment and search it up and down, then have a female agent come in to search her up and down. We see her biking all over town, sometimes to have a romantic tryst with a government official. Well made, yes. But sometimes I think critics are hampered in their judgment because they go to a movie with the press kit, or they go to a play and are given a copy of the play. And this is one of those times. Barbara is so suffus...