Jody Shapiro’s bracing documentary on Burt Shavitz, the reclusive Jewish hippie who co-founded the Burt’s Bees personal care empire in the backwoods of Maine 30 years ago, paints a vivid portrait of a loner, curmudgeon and reluctant entrepreneur whose rags-to-riches story is a template of the possibilities of American capitalism. Burt’s Buzz, which opens in […]
Nearly six months before the United States declared war on Japan following its attack on Pearl Harbor, the syndicated columnist Stewart Alsop, writing in the Atlantic Monthly, warned, “To fight the war we will be sooner or later called upon to fight we need a crusading faith, the kind that inspired the soldiers of 1917.” […]
Years ago, when I was a postgraduate student in Britain, I saw Andrzej Wajda’s classic movie, Ashes and Diamonds, and was bowled over by it. It left a powerful impression and became one of my all-time favourites films. Last week, I had the pleasure of watching it yet again, and I was just as impressed. Ashes and […]
Man-against-nature films are common-place, but in John Curran’s Tracks, scheduled to open in Canada on June 6, a plucky, courageous young lady takes on the elements in an epic 1,700 mile journey across the untamed, barely inhabited wilderness of western Australia. Tracks, an Australian movie based on a best selling book by Robyn Davidson, demolishes […]
What does aging businessman Murray Schwartz do when his old-school bookshop goes belly up? John Turturro’s comedy, Fading Gigolo, which opens in Toronto on May 23, provides the answer: Schwartz (Woody Allen), in a radical makeover, becomes a pimp. In Fading Gigolo, set in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg district, Schwartz and his long-time employee, Fioravante (Turturro), are […]
Concert pianist and Holocaust survivor Alice Herz-Sommer was 110 when she died in London last February. She passed away only two days before the movie in which she appeared, The Lady in Number 6: Music Saved My Life, won the Academy Award for best documentary in the short subject category. It’s a pity she couldn’t […]
When Germany entered World War I a century ago this summer, millions of Germans saw them off in a burst of patriotism, assuming that a great victory was imminent. Swept up by the nationalist fervour, 100,000 German Jewish men joined the ranks of the armed forces. Of these, 80,000 served on the front lines and almost […]
A rebellious French girl on the cusp of womanhood blatantly defies middle-class norms and conventions in Francois Ozon’s provocative movie, Young & Beautiful, scheduled to open in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver on May 16. This erotically-charged French film unfolds over the four seasons of a year as Isabelle (Marine Vacth), an attractive high school student, […]
The late George Plimpton (1927-2003) was a Renaissance Man — a writer, editor, athlete and actor. One of the founders of The Paris Review, as well as a successful sports writer, he’s the subject of Plimpton, a PBS biopic due to be broadcast on Friday, May 16 at 9 p.m. as part of its acclaimed American […]
Montreal documentarian Abbey Jack Neidik is a secular Jew, but he can see the wisdom of the ages in traditional Judaism. This attitude works itself deeply into his latest documentary, Shekinah: The Intimate Life of Hasidic Women, which is coming to Toronto next week. Neidik’s film — which will be screened at the Carlton Cinema […]