Michael Moore, the rambunctious American filmmaker, brings to his craft a skeptical mind, a jaundiced eye and a goofy sense of humour, the very qualities that have informed his documentaries on current affairs since 1989, when Roger & Me was released to a wave of adulation. In his latest documentary, the provocatively-titled Where To Invade […]
It should come as no surprise that food has a central place in the annals of Zionism. Israel, after all, has been referred to as the Land of Milk and Honey. As Yael Raviv writes in Falafel Nation: Cuisine and the Making of National Identity in Israel (University of Nebraska Press), “Food has been used as a […]
John Birch, an American missionary and U.S. army intelligence officer killed in China by communist troops in August 1945, earned acclaim and adulation only after his untimely death at the age of 27. Hailed by his rabidly anti-communist admirers as the first casualty of the Cold War, Birch would become associated with right-wing extremism in […]
If you’re a Baby Boomer, like me, you may have been hooked by the mesmerizing rhythms of Carole King’s iconic pop songs. King’s songs, at once exuberant and plaintive, were appealing due to their simplicity, honesty, empathy and compassion. They struck a chord with an entire generation, of which I was part. A living legend, […]
Grimur Hakonarson’s austere film, Rams, which opens in Canada on February 12, unfolds under a leaden sky in a treeless valley. The bleak Icelandic landscape lends itself to the theme: the discord that keeps two feuding brothers, Gummi (Sigurdur Sigurjonsson) and Kiddi (Theodor Julisson), at loggerheads. Although they live in close proximity to each other, they have […]
Jewish writers like Irwin Shaw and Norman Mailer created the template of an enormously important and popular literary genre — the American war novel. From Shaw’s The Young Lions to Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead, these best-sellers, published between 1948 to 1961, shaped the American public’s perception of World War II, the Holocaust and […]
Maggie Smith, the British actress who portrays a prim and proper aristocrat in the popular series, Downton Abbey, transforms herself into a homeless person in The Lady in the Van, which opens in Canada on February 5. It’s quite an astonishing makeover. As Margaret Shepherd, a woman whose current circumstance are jarringly at odds with […]
The fifth anniversary of the seminal uprising in Egypt is upon us. On January 25, 2011, thousands of Egyptians from all walks of life converged on Cairo’s Tahrir Square to demand an end to autocracy, a staple in Egypt’s governance. “They weren’t merely trying to overthrow a despicable regime,” writes the American journalist Thanassis Cambanis […]
The late Mike Nichols was a man for all seasons. In an illustrious 50-year career, which ended with his death in 2014, he was an actor, comedian and movie director. Nichols, who was equally at home in theatre as in film, is the subject of a documentary scheduled to be broadcast by the PBS network […]
In the spring of 2001, George W. Bush, the then president of the United States, asked his friend, Robert W. Jordan, a Dallas lawyer, to be America’s 25th ambassador to Saudi Arabia, a major U.S. ally in the Middle East and an active participant in regional developments, its autocratic system of government and its intolerance of […]