Welcome to Rosie the Reviewer, a Dutch-Canadian female-led WW2 media podcast. A new episode airs every Friday!
Everything about Rosie and our WW2 adventures.
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.
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 a meeting.
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. Also, some kick-ass Kay Summersby stuff.
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, Samuel’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 it’s not all depressing, as you will find out if you read his book.
Buy it wherever you get your books.
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.
Description Transcript 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
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.
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 talk about the standoff between three British and 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 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 ended up producing propaganda in India.
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.
In this episode of Rosie the Reviewer, we discuss The Longest Day (1962), the docudrama based on Cornelius Ryan’s nonfiction book about the Allied landings at Normandy on 6 June 1944. We go through the mega ensemble cast, stuff we liked and can’t get over how good Cornelius Ryan is at character driven narratives.
We also get into: the star-studded cast, the lack of blood, some movie trivia and the Plus: Canadia mention.
In this episode of Rosie the Reviewer, we discuss The King’s Speech (2010), the biopic about King George VI and his unlikely friendship with Australian speech therapist Lionel Logue. We get into what the film gets right and where it takes some liberties… look, Edward VIII was a lot more pro-Nazi than the movie suggests. Also: how the Second World War ended up being the best thing that could have happened for the British monarchy’s reputation.
In this episode of Rosie the Reviewer, we discuss Der Tiger (2025), a German film about a Tiger I tank crew on a special mission behind Soviet lines in 1943. What starts as a tense war film quietly becomes something else entirely. We talk about the Eastern Front after Stalingrad, give you much-needed tank facts (are we a tank podcast now?), and generally enjoy this one a lot.
In this episode of Rosie the Reviewer, we discuss Days of Glory (2006), the Rachid Bouchareb film that follows a fictional group of North African soldiers fighting with the Free French forces to liberate Europe. We talk about the film’s honest depiction of colonial racism, the ensemble cast, what the film gets right and where it falls flat, and the real history of the hundreds of thousands of African soldiers whose story went largely untold for decades.