Rosie the Reviewer: a WW2 movies and shows podcast
Two female history buffs review and comment on World War Two media, such as movies, shows, and books, and share related personal experiences.
Episodes
This week, we're back in the annex for part two of A Small Light (2023), episodes four to six. This is where Miep starts to crack: she shouts at two Nazis in the street, points at the ceiling every time someone says the word resistance, and finds out her best friend is nice, but not good.
As always, we compare it to Miep's memoir. Because on occasion, this stuff feels too crazy to be real.
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This week, we're discussing A Small Light (2023). The National Geographic/Disney+ miniseries tells the story of Miep Gies, the woman who helped hide Anne Frank and her family in the Secret Annex in Amsterdam for more than two years during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands.
In this first of three episodes, we cover the first three of the series’ eight episodes. We look at how the series opens, and how it compares with...
This week, we're discussing the classic Filipino film Oro, Plata, Mata (Gold, Silver, Death) (1982). This movie portrays class conflict, with WWII as an interesting backdrop. It's a visually stunning piece, with a perspective we don't often get in Western media, which, almost by default, makes for an interesting conversation in this episode.
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This week on Rosie, we're talking about Trial on the Road, a Soviet movie shot in 1971 but suppressed for 15 years and not released until 1986. It follows Red Army sergeant Lazarev, a former collaborator who tries to redeem himself with a partisan group operating behind German lines.
Any guesses as to why it was banned for so long?
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This week, we're discussing Winter in Wartime (Oorlogswinter, 2008), based on Jan Terlouw's beloved 1972 Dutch youth novel of the same name. The film follows a teenager named Michiel in the freezing winter of 1944-45, as the Netherlands suffers a famine under German occupation. When an RAF pilot falls from the sky into the woods near his village and his initial rescuer is incapacitated, Michiel must help the airman instead.
Great ex...
This week, we're discussing Schindler's List (1993). Bit late, perhaps, but worth the wait? We're both convinced that this is Steven Spielberg's best movie.
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This week on Rosie, we're discussing They Who Dare (1954), directed by Lewis Milestone. Based on the true story of Operation Anglo, it follows a mixed group of British and Greek commandos on a raid to destroy Axis airfields on the island of Rhodes in September 1942. We dig into the real mission and mostly whether the flag-waving is quieter than the American kind or just better at hiding it.
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This week on Rosie, we're discussing the movie 1941 (1979), directed by Steven Spielberg. It's a comedy, believe it or not, about invasion panic in Los Angeles after the attack on Pearl Harbor. With a cast that includes John Belushi, John Candy, Dan Aykroyd, Toshiro Mifune, and Christopher Lee, it should have been a lot funnier than it was.
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This week on Rosie, we discuss Das Boot. One of our new favourites across the board and definitely our favourite Sub movie. We talk about the horrors of being underwater in a tin can for arguably too long, rooting for the enemy, the U-boat hero myth, the Straight of Gibraltar, and Maartje is claustrophobic throughout. Fun times.
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This week on Rosie, we talk about the 1999 German film Aimée & Jaguar, recommended by Samuel Clowes Huneke, and the 1994 book it is based on. It explores the story of Lilly Wust and Felice Schragenheim, two women who fell in love in Nazi-occupied Berlin in 1943. We talk about their story of self-discovery, resistance and queer culture in Berlin.
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This week we’re joined by guest co-host George to discuss Oppenheimer (2023), Christopher Nolan’s three-hour portrait of J. Robert Oppenheimer: theoretical physicist, Manhattan Project director, father of the atomic bomb.
We get into Cillian Murphy’s performance, whether Nolan knows what to do with women, the complicated reasons for dropping the bomb on Japan, and Lewis Strauss’s petty vendetta. Plus: soup in...
This week on Rosie, we get into Pressure (2026), directed by Anthony Maras and written by Maras and David Haig, based on Haig's stage play about the 72 hours leading up to D-Day told through the eyes of meteorologist Group Captain James Stagg.
Learn more about Exercise Tiger, the Anglo-American weather forecasting standoff between Stagg and Colonel Crick, and whether Brendan Fraser and Andrew Scott were given nearly enough to do. Al...
In this episode of Rosie the Reviewer, we are joined by historian Samuel Clowes Huneke, associate professor at George Mason University, to discuss his book I Will Not Abandon You: Queer Women in Nazi Germany (2025). We explore the prosecution of Queer women in Nazi Germany, Sam's research and also...
Weimar Berlin's queer culture and its suppression, the Night of the Long Knives and the weaponisation of Ernst Röhm's sexuality. But i...
In this episode of Rosie the Reviewer, we discuss A Hidden Life (2019), Terrence Malick's film about Franz Jägerstätter, the Austrian farmer and conscientious objector who was executed in 1943 for refusing to swear loyalty to Hitler. It's a long one, but you have to just give in to it.
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This week, we're reviewing The Land Girls (1998), David Leland's adaptation of Angela Huth's novel about three women who join the Women's Land Army and land on a Dorset farm during the Second World War. We go down a genuinely fun historical rabbit hole on Spitfire Funds and the WLA and wonder multiple times: “Girl, what are you doing!?”.
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This week on Rosie the Reviewer, we cover The Book Thief (2013), based on Markus Zusak’s bestselling novel about a girl growing up in Nazi Germany. Her foster family teaches her to read, and hides something far more dangerous beneath the floorboards. We talk about the power of storytelling while books are burning, and about the small, enormous risks this family takes to protect someone.
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In this episode of Rosie the Reviewer, we discuss The Battle of the River Plate (1956), about the first British naval battle of the Second World War. We discuss the standoff between three British/New Zealand cruisers and the German pocket battleship Admiral Graf Spee, the captured merchant captain who came to respect his German captor, and how the fight ultimately ended in a tense diplomatic standoff in neutral Montevideo.
In this episode of Rosie the Reviewer, we discuss Come and See (1985), directed by Elem Klimov and set in German-occupied Belarus. We follow Flyora, a teenage boy who joins a partisan unit and is drawn into the systematic destruction of Belarusian villages by German forces. We talk about the film, the history of what Germany did to Belarus, and the survivor accounts that Adamovich travelled across the country to collect.
In this episode of Rosie the Reviewer, we discuss From Here to Eternity (1953), based on James Jones's novel about the peacetime US Army stationed in Hawaii in the months leading up to Pearl Harbor.
We also dig into the women of wartime Hawaii who were doing a lot more than waiting around, from the Women's Air Raid Defense tracking aircraft around the clock to OSS recruit Elizabeth McIntosh, who taught herself Japanese and end...
In this episode of Rosie the Reviewer, we are joined by guest Tom to discuss The Dirty Dozen (1967), directed by Robert Aldrich.
We talk about Operation Jedburgh, the Filthy 13 from the 101st Airborne, and the German propaganda broadcasts of Lord Haw-Haw. We also get into the film as an anti-war piece made in the shadow of Vietnam.
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