Alice Rohrwacher’s The Wonders — which opens at the TIFF Bell Lightbox in Toronto on March 27 — is as naturalistic as the sweet, liquidity product its main characters harvest daily. This film, set in rural Italy, is broadly about an eccentric Italian-German family of beekeepers. Beyond this, it’s a coming-of-age movie about a young woman from […]
The Toronto International Film Festival, in conjunction with Human Rights Watch, is presenting the Human Rights Watch Film Festival from March 24 to April 2 at the TIFF Bell Lightbox. There are eight films on the program, three of which I preview here. Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians is broadly the theme of The Wanted […]
Lacey Schwartz comes from a long line of New York Jews whose ancestors immigrated to the United States from Eastern Europe. Raised in a white milieu, she had no reason to think she was anything but a caucasian. But with the disclosure that her biological father was an African American, she was thrown into an […]
Say hello to Seymour Bernstein, a man of many parts. A former concert pianist whose recitals garnered rave reviews in The New York Times, he gave up celebrity at the age of 50 to dedicate himself exclusively to teaching. Now, at 87, he continues to give private and master classes. Yet Bernstein is more than […]
The communist approach to the Holocaust was, in a word, bloodless. While the Soviet Union and the mostly compliant satellite states in Eastern Europe never entirely banned discussion and memorialization of the Holocaust, they often muffled the full story of the extermination of six million Jews and dissolved it into the general narrative of the […]
The third season of House of Cards, now available on Netflix, is almost as sizzling and compelling as the first two seasons. Francis Underwood (Kevin Spacey) and his wife, Claire (Robin Wright), are the ultimate power couple. He’s the president of the United States and she’s the first lady. Spacey and Wright, as usual, deliver […]
Global warming is a hoax. Cigarettes have no impact on your health. The Arctic icecaps are not melting. Arrant nonsense such as this is disseminated by an army of paid lobbyists whose aim is to befuddle the public and protect their clients’ financial interests. For some 50 years, these glib publicists worked hand-in-glove with the […]
Persecuted Jews have found a safe haven in the Ottoman Empire and its successor state, Turkey, for centuries now. This is easily overlooked, or even forgotten, as political tensions continue to flare between Turkey and Israel. Victoria Barrett’s documentary, Desperate Hours, makes this point crystal clear. Although it was made more than a decade ago, […]
About a month after the Arab Spring rebellions washed up on the shores of Tunisia and Egypt, Syria’s cocky president, Bashar al-Assad, bragged that a popular uprising would never break out in Syria, a police state where dissent is strictly forbidden. Four years on, Assad’s arrogant boast rings hollow. What began in March 2011 as […]
Damian Szifron’s Spanish-language film from Argentina, Wild Tales, is dark and uproarious. An Academy Awards finalist for best foreign movie, it’s composed of six stand-alone vignettes turning on the dark side of human nature. The unifying theme is vengeance, but sub-themes revolve around rage, greed, despair, corruption, passion and infidelity. Quite a combustible mix. Scheduled […]