Welcome to Rosie the Reviewer, a Dutch-Canadian female-led WW2 media podcast. A new episode airs every Friday!
Find all Rosie the Reviewer episodes here.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
