Entertainment

Survivors’ summers

LIVING well may be the best revenge, but for the Holocaust survivors of the life-affirming and touching documentary “Four Seasons Lodge,” living well and long is superb revenge against Adolf Hitler.

Every year for more than a quarter of a century, these well-to-do survivors of the concentration camps have spent their summers partying and remembering among themselves at a meticulously maintained bungalow colony in the lush Catskills.

This may be the last summer for the aging lodgers, who are in their 80s and 90s and are debating whether to try to reverse a deal to sell their retreat on the advice of their weary president, who is struggling with a very ill wife.

“Four Seasons Lodge” grew out of a six-part series that director Andrew Jacobs reported for the New York Times. His pitch-perfect film provides an affectionate look at a brave, disappearing subculture.

Running time: 97 minutes. Not rated (nothing offensive). At the IFC Center, Sixth Avenue and Third Street.
— Lou Lumenick



THE GOOD SOLDIER 2 STARS

THE documentary “The Good Soldier” has important things to say. Sadly, it does so in an unexciting manner.

Directed by Lexy Lovell and Michael Uys, the film allows soldiers from four wars (WWII, Vietnam, the Gulf first conflict and Iraq) to tell their stories.

They say they were turned into killers, who often gunned down unarmed civilians. (The Pentagon euphemistically calls this “collateral damage.”)

“When you turn somebody into a killer, how do you turn it off?” one young man asks. “It’s not a mechanism that can just be turned off. Combat doesn’t work that way.”

The vets have vital things to say — things that could change the public’s perception of war. But the presentation is mostly a collection of ineffective talking heads.

Running time: 79 minutes. Not rated (profanity, graphic war footage). At the Village East, Second Avenue and 12th Street.
— V.A. Musetto