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 […]
Jefferson, a town in Yoknapatawpha county, looms large in the novels of William Faulkner, a great Southern writer and a Mississippian. Jefferson, in fact, is modelled after the real town of Oxford, the home of the University of Mississippi, or Ole Miss, while fictional Yoknapatawpha county stands in for Lafayette county. Faulkner, a Nobel Prize […]
Andrea Dorfman’s Heartbeat, a low-key, occasionally moving Canadian film due to open in Toronto on Nov. 28 at the TIFF Bell Lightbox, is about thwarted ambition, self-discovery, unrequited love and the pain of loneliness. Tanya Davis, the former poet laureate of Halifax, stars as an aspiring musician who’s upended by stage fright in her first […]
There’s a strong possibility that Iran and the world’s major powers may fail to convert an interim accord, signed last November, into a permanent agreement on drastically curbing Iran’s covert, militarized nuclear program. On Nov. 24, the two sides acknowledged that they had failed to bridge the gaps in their respective positions and announced a […]
In accordance with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s recent promise that security in Jerusalem will be restored, following an upsurge of violence in Israel’s capital in the past month or so, the Israeli government has resurrected its policy of demolishing the homes of terrorists. On Nov. 19, only a day after two Palestinian cousins from East […]
The American entertainer Bing Crosby was a ball of fire. He was a singer of style and distinction who’s still the most recorded performer in history. He was also a Hollywood film actor, ranking behind only Clark Gable and John Wayne as the most popular male actor of all time. Crosby, who died 37 years […]
What’s your favorite city? New York? San Francisco? Montreal? Vancouver? London? Paris? Hong Kong? Tokyo? Rio de Janeiro? Buenos Aires? Shanghai? Jerusalem? Istanbul? Cape Town? It’s a tossup, of course. I’ve visited all these cities and each one offers something special and different. So, no, I can’t rate them like cars or cafes. But if […]
Bennett Miller’s Foxcatcher, which opens in Toronto and Vancouver on Nov. 28, leaves you perplexed, stunned and horrified. It’s a film that snares and entraps you in its iron grip. An American billionaire summons a 27-year-old wrestling champion to his mansion in the Pennsylvania woods, and life is never the same again for either of them. […]
The Israeli government recently decided it would not cooperate with a United Nations commission charged with investigating allegations that war crimes were committed by Israel and Hamas during their 50-day war in the Gaza Strip last summer. This comes as no surprise. Last August, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as well as Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman, […]