Yuval Adler’s first feature film, Bethlehem, should catapult him into the upper rungs of Israel’s movie industry. Screened at the Toronto International Film Festival and set to open in Canada on April 4, Bethlehem is strong and explosive. Normally, a visceral thriller of this calibre would have been made by a seasoned director. But in this case, […]
Films infused with the joys of gastronomy have, alas, come in dribs and drabs. Think of Babette’s Feast (1987), Like Water for Chocolate (1992), Eat Drink Man Woman (1994) and Big Night (1996). Tapping into our fascination with food, much less haute cuisine, the Toronto International Film Festival launched the subscription series, Food on Film, three years […]
Later this year, Europe will mark the centenary of the outbreak of World War I, a cataclysmic conflict that shattered a century of near peace, claimed the lives of 8.5 million soldiers, altered national borders, broke up several empires, spurred the rise of the Bolsheviks in Russia and the Nazis in Germany and sped up the […]
Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Like Father, Like Son, poses an excruciatingly difficult question, one that would surely crush any doting mother or father: How do you react to the news that your adorable six-year-old son was switched at birth and that he has to be returned to his biological parents? That’s the appalling predicament a young, upwardly […]
Pardon the expression, but filmmaker Greg Whiteley is like a fly on the wall. He`s been given full and unfettered access to Mitt Romney, the Republican party presidential hopeful, and he makes the best of the opportunity. Over a six-year period, Whiteley follows Romney virtually everywhere and shares private moments with him. He’s the consummate […]
On June 14, 1940, on the very day German troops marched triumphantly into Paris, a freelance journalist named Rosie Goldschmidt Waldeck checked into the swankiest hotel in Bucharest, the Athene Palace. She remained there for the next six months, watching events unfold in Rumania, a neutral and deeply divided Balkan country whose natural resources were […]
Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi were not destined to meet, bond, cook together and create a budding restaurant empire. Ottolenghi and Tamimi, both born in Jerusalem in 1968, a few kilometres from each other, were raised in separate societies that could accurately be described as two solitudes. An Israeli Jew, Ottolenghi was from western […]
I admit it: I’m addicted to House of Cards, Netflix’s polished political drama. Now in its second season, this is American television as it should be rather than the dismal wasteland it so often tends to be. I came late to House of Cards, which is smart, literate and brimming with surprising and even shocking […]
The Human Rights Watch Film Festival, an annual fixture of the Toronto International Film Festival, opens at the TIFF Lightbox on Feb. 27 with The Square and closes on March 6 with Highway of Tears. In all, eight movies will be screened. Jehane Noujaim’s The Square, which is available on Netflix, charts the zig-zag course of […]
Hany Abu-Assad’s taut thriller, Omar, gives a viewer a bird’s eye view of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, now in its 47th year, and the Palestinians’ resistance to it. An Academy Award nominee for best foreign picture, Omar unfolds in a Palestinian village that has been divided by a high, ugly concrete wall. Part […]