Park Chan-wook’s The Handmaiden, adapted from Sarah Waters’ bestseller, Fingersmith, is a highly stylized erotic thriller which takes place in Japanese-occupied Korea in the 1930s. Scheduled to open in Canada on October 28, this two-and-a-half hour Korean and Japanese-language film is at once prim and carnal, unfolding in an opulent mansion set deep in a forest. With one striking exception, the […]
On April 20, 1889, at 6:30 p.m., Klara Polzl gave birth to a boy in Braunau am Inn, a town in Austria adjacent to the German border. The boy’s name is inscribed in crabbed letters in a mouldering registry kept behind lock and key in St. Stephen, Braunau’s preeminent Roman Catholic church. A Gothic pile whose spire […]
The face of intermarriage in the United States has changed significantly since the Supreme Court, in the 1967 landmark Loving v. Virginia case, ruled that race-based legal restrictions on marriage are unconstitutional. Since then, mixed marriages between Americans of different racial, ethnic and religious backgrounds have risen dramatically, especially in ten states: California, Texas, New […]
Adolf Hitler and his wife, Eva Braun, committed suicide in their Berlin bunker on April 30, 1945 as the Red Army advanced into the German capital. Hitler’s ignominious death was confirmed by German radio and by Marshall Georgy Zhukov, the commander of Soviet forces in Germany. Since then, the circumstances surrounding Hitler’s demise have […]
The small, remote Italian island of Lampedusa, 70 kilometers off the coast of Africa, has borne the brunt of the migrant crisis afflicting Europe. In the past 20 years, 400,000 migrants have landed there on their way to the European mainland, while 15,000 have drowned en route. Gianfranco Rosi’s spare but affecting documentary, Fire at […]
The draft resolution adopted by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) on October 14 is so ahistorical and unjust that its director-general, Irina Bokova, was compelled to disavow it. By a 24-6 margin, with 26 abstentions, the UN agency passed a motion that essentially tries to sever the historical link between Judaism […]
I have fond memories of the Yarkon River. On one of my first dates with the Israeli woman who would become my wife, we sat under a grove of fragrant eucalyptus trees on the bank of the Yarkon in Tel Aviv, talked and admired the lush scenery. It was early April and the weather was […]
I read Gerald Durrell’s autobiographical novel, My Family and Other Animals, long ago, but its masterful portrayal of a British family on the Greek island of Corfu in the second half of the 1930s remained vividly fixed in a corner of my mind. So I was glad to learn that The Durrells in Corfu, a […]
It’s one of the most secretive and repressive societies on the face of the earth. Welcome to Saudi Arabia. The totalitarian nature of the Saudi regime is graphically exposed in Saudi Arabia Uncovered, a British documentary now available on the Netflix streaming network. The footage was shot by Saudi dissidents and British photographers with hidden […]
Since the collapse of the short-lived ceasefire in Syria two weeks ago, Syria and its ally, Russia, have been mercilessly and indiscriminately pounding the besieged eastern sector of Aleppo, the last major Syrian city still under the partial control of anti-government rebels. The defenceless 275,000 civilians living there have been subjected to constant aerial attacks, with […]