Albert Speer: Last News

Andrew Birkin If one daydreams about what film, music, Hollywood, London and all ports in between felt like in the ’60s and ’70s, writer-director Andrew Birkin’s new memoir, “POV: A Life in Pictures,” is a dreamscape of glorious days and nights and legendary personalities. Starring Birkin’s famous model-actress-singer sister, Jane Birkin, along with her famous husbands, plus filmmakers from Walt Disney to Stanley Kubrick (for whom he worked for two years) and festooned with pop stars such as the Beatles and Slade as well as Hitler’s architect Albert Speer thrown in for good measure, the tome is a swirling kaleidoscope that Birkin paints with vivid colors.

A rather pedestrian presentation of a potentially fascinating story, Vanessa Lapa’s “Speer Goes to Hollywood” expands on a little-known footnote to the Hydra-headed history of the post-war fates of top Nazi lieutenants. It is based on the 1972 recordings of conversations between Albert Speer, Hitler’s architect, friend and wartime munitions minister, and screenwriter Andrew Birkin (the Kubrick protegé who co-wrote “The Name of the Rose” and directed “The Cement Garden”) as they collaborate on a screenplay based on Speer’s memoir “Inside the Third Reich.” But Lapa’s embellished archival doc falls some way short of the cinephile/history lover’s catnip that tantalizing summation promises.

A rather pedestrian presentation of a potentially fascinating story, Vanessa Lapa’s “Speer Goes to Hollywood” expands on a little-known footnote to the Hydra-headed history of the post-war fates of top Nazi lieutenants. It is based on the 1972 recordings of conversations between Albert Speer, Hitler’s architect, friend and wartime munitions minister, and screenwriter Andrew Birkin (the Kubrick protegé who co-wrote “The Name of the Rose” and directed “The Cement Garden”) as they collaborate on a screenplay based on Speer’s memoir “Inside the Third Reich.” But Lapa’s embellished archival doc falls some way short of the cinephile/history lover’s catnip that tantalizing summation promises.