The Zookeeper's Wife (2017)
Directed by Niki Caro
The account of keepers of the Warsaw Zoo, Jan and Antonina Zabinski, who helped save hundreds of people and animals during the Nazi invasion.
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What critics compared The Zookeeper's Wife to
Plenty of movies have dealt with the Holocaust in ways that created powerful emotions in the viewer without resorting to the shock value we’ve almost become inured to—Roberto Benigni’s Life is Beautiful, for instance.
The new live-action Mulan , directed by Niki Caro ( Whale Rider , The Zookeeper’s Wife ), is reminiscent of two things.
Director Niki Caro ( North Country , The Zookeeper's Wife ) delivers a Chinese war drama in the vein of Hero and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon .
Disney oddly offered no production notes for this one…) and the costuming (Bina Daigeler, “The Zookeeper’s Wife”) impressive, it is once again no match for the original animation.
It’s quite the epic canvas for New Zealand filmmaker Niki Caro, whose short films “Sure to Rise” (1994) and “Memory & Desire” (1998) shined at the Cannes Film Festival before features like “Whale Rider” (2002), “North Country” (2005), “A Heavenly Vintage” (2009), “McFarland, USA” (2015) and “The Zookeeper’s Wife” (2017).
Intriguingly, the film’s directed by Niki Caro, who’s made a series of impressively intimate and internal feminist-themed films including “Whale Rider” (2002), “North Country” (2005) and “The Zookeeper’s Wife” (2017) but gets a bigger palette here – and likely more studio supervision.
Niki Caro proved her ability to respectfully capture young women’s stories with her confident New Zealand-set debut Whale Rider in 2002 — though her biggest film to date is Jessica Chastain-fronted period drama The Zookeeper’s Wife .
The Zookeeper’s Wife, though it has the usual WWII hallmarks of pathological Nazi cruelty—sudden shootings, a gang rape—differs from the likes of recent violence-drunk entries like Hacksaw Ridge and Fury by focusing on the human elements rather than the awfulness (by now, nearly 80 years on, we surely know).