Welcome to Rosie the Reviewer, a Dutch-Canadian female-led WW2 media podcast. A new episode airs every Friday!
Rosie the Reviewer is a passion project, built episode by episode. If you’d like to support what we do, you can help keep us on the air or pick up some Rosie merch. We’re working on more ways for you to get involved in the future.
This week, we discuss the movie Memphis Belle, a fictionalised tale about the B-17’s final mission. Sam also watched the documentary of the same name. Maartje has only been to RAF Bassingbourn once but pretends she knows stuff now.
The Memphis Belle documentary by William Wyler is awesome. Watch it below.
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In this episode of Rosie the Reviewer, we dive into Black Book, Paul Verhoeven’s 2006 thriller about a Jewish woman who goes undercover in the Dutch resistance. Nearly twenty years later, its themes of complicity, moral ambiguity, and survival feel sharper—and perhaps even more relevant—against the backdrop of today’s conflicts.
We unpack the film’s chaotic plot, infamous pube-bleaching scene, and the real-life resistance fighter who inspired the story. And we discuss the uncomfortable: how Verhoeven uses a WWII setting not just to thrill, but to ask unsettling questions about the blurred lines between victim and aggressor—and how quickly one can become the other.
A war movie that’s sexy, violent, politically loaded, and painfully relevant.
We dive into 1963´s The Great Escape, a movie so long that Maartje had to watch the last 30 minutes at three times the speed. Sam did a lot of research for this and now knows a lot about escaping, so if you´re ever in jail…
In this episode of Rosie the Reviewer, we cover the first three episodes of Masters of the Air, the latest Spielberg-Hanks WWII series following the Bloody Hundredth Bomb Group. Joined by our resident SAS Rogue Heroes correspondent George to talk about not the SAS, we unpack what works and what doesn’t. From Buck and Bucky banter to B-17 flight scenes you come to a WWII show for. We talk ball turrets, bike races, bomber boys, what we think is a missed opportunity to cast a critical look at the morality of bombing strategies.
Plus: why Harry Crosby’s memoir is a must-read, how the ground crew kept the B-17s flying, and straight-out-of-Blackadder Brits.
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.
Discover the true stories of Virginia Hall, Noor Inayat Khan, and Vera Atkins — the real women behind A Call to Spy. Learn how these courageous women shaped the SOE.
Rosie the Reviewer is a passion project, built episode by episode. If you’d like to support what we do, you can help keep us on the air or pick up some Rosie merch. We’re working on more ways for you to get involved in the future.