Russian President Vladimir Putin is trying to balance Russia’s conflicting interests in war-ravaged Syria. It’s a devilishly difficult exercise that requires nerves of steel and formidable diplomatic skills. Putin’s competency was put to the test on February 10, following a series of deadly clashes during which Israel downed an Iranian drone in its territory, attacked an […]
One of the most memorable images in Loveless, an evocative Russian film by Andrey Zvyagintsev opening in Canada on February 23, summarizes its relentlessly bleak mood. In the opening frame, the camera lingers pensively on a big tree whose branches have been shorn of their leaves by lashing autumn winds and rain. It’s a stark […]
Iran and Saudi Arabia, carrying the banners of the Shi’a and Sunni strains of Islam, are engaged in an intense struggle for primacy in the Middle East. Their bruising competition for dominance, playing out mainly in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen, has already affected Israel and Arab countries. Martin Smith, a seasoned Middle East correspondent, […]
Sad to say, Poland has been deluged by an outpouring of nasty rhetoric with antisemitic overtones. It has surfaced since the passage this month of controversial legislation which criminalizes the accusation that the “Polish nation” was complicit in the Holocaust and which outlaws the erroneous phrase “Polish death camp.” These malicious expressions were swiftly and […]
Stacey Tenenbaum’s unusual documentary, Shiners, examines an archaic trade that seems destined for oblivion. Her subjects are shoe shiners who polish and buff shoes and boots for a living. As she suggests, they’re a dwindling breed. Her film, a paean to working-class men and women, will be screened at the Royal Cinema in Toronto on February […]
Friedrich Kellner, a German civil servant, kept a secret diary from 1939 to 1945 in which he charted Germany’s inexorable descent into war, totalitarianism and genocide. A committed Social Democrat and a steadfast opponent of Nazism, he was born in Mainz and lived in the small Upper Hesse town of Laubach, 73 kilometres northeast of […]
Military tensions on Israel’s northern front reached a boiling point yesterday, prompting speculation whether a new Middle East war is inevitable. In the early hours of February 10, an Israeli Apache helicopter shot down the first Iranian drone to penetrate Israeli airspace. It was downed in the Jordan Valley, near the Jordanian border. By way […]
One of the world’s least progressive countries may at last be on the cusp of meaningful change. Saudi Arabia, the seat of Islam, was until very recently a major exporter of Wahhabism, an austere and intolerant strain of Islam which Al Qaeda adopted for its own malicious ends. Lest we forget, 15 of the 19 […]
Interracial dating, an increasingly common phenomenon in Western societies, is the subject of Michael Showalter’s romantic comedy, The Big Sick. It’s about the on-again, off-again relationship between a Pakistani American standup comedian and an Anglo postgraduate student. Kumail Nanjiani, playing himself, meets Emily Gardner (Zoe Kazan) in a comedy nightclub one night. In a clever […]
There are only a handful of movies I would bother watching again, and Das Boot (The Boat), a German-language war film released in 1981, qualifies as one. I caught it on the Netflix streaming network the other night, and it was as thrilling, gripping and spine-tingling as I remembered it 37 years ago. Wolfgang Petersen’s […]