Anyone who’s been around for any length of time knows that the past is never dead and buried and that it can haunt you until the end of days. Asghar Farhadi’s new film, The Past, now playing in Toronto and Montreal, explores this perennial theme with subtlety and sensitivity. Marie-Anne (Berenice Bejo), an attractive French […]
I think it would be fair to say that Big Bad Wolves is a radical departure in Israeli cinema. It doesn’t deal with the convoluted political and emotional intricacies of the Arab-Israeli conflict, or the pain and trauma of the Holocaust, two of the most enduring themes in Israeli film. Nor does it touch on […]
I normally don’t watch a movie, however good, more than once. But when I read that Peter O’Toole had died, I decided to revisit Lawrence of Arabia, David Lean’s three-hour epic in which O’Toole played the lead role. The recipient of seven Academy Awards, including best picture, Lawrence of Arabia is one of those rare […]
Charles Dickens, the great Victorian novelist, was admired and adored by the British public. Through his cast of vivid and eccentric characters, Dickens’ readers were pretty much familiar with his ideas, values and ideals. But Dickens had a secret, and her name was Ellen (Nelly) Ternan. An actress, Ternan was 18 when she met Dickens, […]
Journalism is based on trust. Without it, journalists lose their credibility, if not their readers. Jayson Blair, a talented and driven reporter on the staff of The New York Times, betrayed that trust repeatedly, disgracing himself and besmirching the renowned daily newspaper that published his fabricated and plagiarized stories. The Blair scandal, the biggest to […]
Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street is a romp into a Roman circus of excess. The three-hour film, a biting and hugely entertaining satire on the perils of unregulated capitalism and the pitfalls of greedy materialism, is rife with sex, drugs, immorality, conspicuous consumption and profane language. Is it a trenchant commentary on the […]
The myth persists that Jews do not excel in sports. Why this myth lingers on is beyond understanding. It’s true that Jewish mothers cajole their children to become doctors, lawyers, dentists and accountants rather than baseball or hockey players. But it’s patently untrue that young Jewish men and women are averse to excelling in sports. […]
Greenland, the world’s largest island, is an ice-bound, treeless expanse of raw grandeur and timeless beauty. Although it has been inhabited for about 1,000 years, it’s still sparsely populated, and much of its vast, forbidding terrain remains unexplored. In Expedition to the End of the World, a Danish documentary now playing at the Bloor Hot […]
A bare microphone in a dimly-lit nightclub gives way to a young, curly-haired folk singer named Llewyn Davis sitting mournfully on a stool. Strumming his guitar, and looking quite rumpled, he belts out a soulful song, the first plaintive line of which is, “Hang me, oh hang me, I’ll be dead and gone.” It’s 1961 and […]
Nicholas Winton, 104 today, is a hero in the deepest sense of the word. On the eve of World War II, he saved 669 Czech and Slovak Jewish children, who would have been murdered had they remained behind in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia. Winton, a British stockbroker, facilitated their escape to Britain within the framework of the […]