Russia has taken hypocrisy to new cynical heights by having lodged a letter of complaint with United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon over Israel’s “aggressive actions” in Syria. On Dec. 7, Israeli aircraft reportedly struck Syrian military facilities near the international airport just outside Damascus and a site close to the Lebanese border. According to […]
France has taken another step forward in acknowledging its role in the Holocaust. On Dec. 5, it announced it had established a fund to compensate Jews who had been deported to German concentration camps on French trains belonging to the state railway company, SNCF. By all estimates, SNCF, under pressure from Germany, sent some 76,000 […]
Can two strangers from diametrically opposing and irreconcilable backgrounds meet on common ground? Not likely. But in Maxime Giroux’s Felix and Meira — which will be screened by the Toronto Jewish Film Festival’s Chai Tea & A Movie series on Sunday, Dec. 14 at 1 p.m. and 4 p.m. — all things are possible. The strangers […]
Talya Lavie spent two years in the Israeli army, like many Israeli women subject to conscription, and Zero Motivation distills her experiences there as a soldier. Judging by this movie, which she wrote and directed, she was not a happy camper in uniform. Not by a longshot. Zero Motivation, which opens in Toronto on Friday, Dec. 12 […]
In May 1945, at the the end of World War II, American soldiers rummaging through Heinrich Himmler’s home in Gmund, Germany, found stacks of his photographs, documents, journals and personal letters. Vanessa Lapa’s chilling biopic of this mass murderer, The Decent One — which opens at the Bloor Hot Docs Cinema in Toronto on Friday, Dec. […]
Call it Germany’s last gasp. On Dec. 16, 1944, about five months before the war in Europe finally ended, Germany launched a surprise offensive in the heavily forested Ardennes region of Belgium, France and Luxembourg. Facing the Germans was a U.S. force supported by French and British troops. When the guns fell silent about a […]
It’s a nasty world out there. Even peaceniks who believe that Israel can resolve its differences with the Arabs realize, sadly enough, that their pleas for peace and amity may well fall on deaf ears in the Arab world and that Arab governments aside from Egypt and Jordan, which already have peace treaties with Israel, […]
The Kunstmuseum Bern in Switzerland should be congratulated for having established a set of commendable guidelines to deal with the issue of Nazi looted art. Several days ago, the museum announced that experts had been hired to ascertain whether a fabulous collection of paintings, drawings and lithographs inherited from the son of a German art […]
Anne Fontaine’s French-language film, inspired by Gustave Flaubert’s 1856 masterpiece, Madame Bovary, and based on Posy Simmonds’ 1999 graphic novel, Gemma Bovery, sizzles with sexual longing and passion. Set in a village in contemporary Normandy, like Madame Bovary, Gemma Bovery unfolds through the recollections of a local baker, Martin Joubert (Fabrice Luchini), who was infatuated with Gemma Bovery […]
Terrance Odette’s Fall, scheduled to open in Toronto on Dec. 5, taps into the still simmering pedophilia scandal that has rocked the Roman Catholic church for the past decade. Father Sam Ryan (Michael Murphy) is a fine parish priest in Niagara Falls, Canada. He tends to congregants in a retirement home, dispenses advice to a […]