Rosie the Reviewer Podcast

Each week, we'll post a link to our latest episode - along with plenty of content about WWII and the movies, TV shows, and books we love.

If you post about WWII media or women in WWII, let us know so we can follow you!

Franz Jägerstätter was an Austrian farmer from a tiny mountain village who, when conscripted into the German army, refused to swear loyalty to Hitler and was executed for it on 9 August 1943.

A Hidden Life (2019) tells his story with very little dialogue, barely any camera movement, and the kind of patience that will test yours. The film is three hours long, and you just have to surrender to it to enjoy it.

We talk about the film's stunning imagery, the marriage between Franz and his wife Fanny that the film depicts so warmly you almost forget where it is going, and silence as a theme.

We also got into Austrian resistance more broadly, including Maria Stromberger, the nurse who smuggled weapons and information out of Auschwitz and later said that what she had done was only a drop in the ocean.

In a world full of resentful bishops and nihilistic Nazis, be a Franz Jägerstätter. Ep 119 is out now.

We discussed The Land Girls this week and, well, we feel sorta meh about it. It's a very 90s film about three women who join the Women's Land Army and end up on a Dorset farm during WWII, and there is a LOT of romantic entanglement happening around one farmer's son.

We spent a good chunk of the episode just saying "girl, what are you doing?", which, if you know us, you know is our highest form of critical engagement.

But we also get into the real history here: the Women's Land Army and the Spitfire Funds that let entire towns "buy" their own fighter planes. Can we get one, please?

So even when the plot lost us a little, the history absolutely delivered.