Rocky Braat is that rarest of individuals: a selfless person who gives of himself completely, day in and day out. Braat, a young American who works in an Asian orphanage filled with HIV-infected children, is the subject of Steve Hoover’s moving documentary, Blood Brother, now playing in Toronto. The film, plodding at first, builds to an […]
“These mountains are breathtaking — utterly different than anything we have seen. The peaks and forests and “tone” fulfill almost every ideal I have had of what ‘my’ mountains could be. The cold ice crashes down tremendous cliffs to the very edge of deep, somber forests. No dust here — all is snow, ice, clean […]
Tango originated in Buenos Aires in the late 19th century, but klezmer, a Russian Jewish genre, exerted an enormous influence on it. Jewish immigrants from the Russian empire began arriving in Argentina, a land of prosperity, hope and opportunity, toward the end of the 19th century. They brought their musical traditions with them, forever changing tango. […]
Gore Vidal, a son of privilege, left the American ruling class to become a constant thorn in its side. Through his novels, essays, plays and television appearances, he was a sharp critic of U.S. foreign policy and the “decadence” of political life in the United States. Articulate and outspoken, he was a celebrity intellectual, a student […]
Joel and Ethan Coen have made an indelible impression, to say the very least. Since the release of their first feature film, Blood Simple, the Coens have carved out a niche for themselves in American cinema. Their films, from Raising Arizona and Miller’s Crossing to Fargo and The Big Lebowski, are distinguished by memorable characters, laconic […]
Steve McQueen’s 12 Years A Slave takes us into the ferocious maw of slavery in the years leading up to the U.S. Civil War. Based on a true story, it recounts the bitter experiences of Solomon Northup (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a free African American who was drugged, kidnapped and sold into bondage. This unadorned, unaffected and […]
There was no better cyclist than Lance Armstrong during his supremacy of the sport from 1999 to 2005, when he won seven successive Tour de France titles. Detractors claimed he owed his success to performance enhancing drugs, but Armstrong strenuously denied the accusation, reminding critics he had passed a succession of drug tests. In 2013, […]
Challenging conventional dogma in Poland, Wladyslaw Pasikowski’s intense and courageous feature film, Aftermath, boldly asserts that Polish Catholics, far from having been only victims of Nazi oppression, were also perpetrators. Inspired by a notorious incident in 1941 in which as many as 1,600 Jews in the northeastern Polish town of Jedwabne were massacred by their Catholic […]
Adolf Schicklgruber, otherwise known as Adolf Hitler, was a dispatch runner in the German army on the Western front during World War I. A private in the 16th Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment, or the List Regiment, he later claimed the war radicalized him and constituted the most formative years of his life in terms of […]
David Cronenberg, the Toronto-born movie director, is the subject of a retrospective mounted by the Toronto International Film Festival. From Within: The Films of David Cronenberg runs until Jan. 19, 2014 at the TIFF Bell Lightbox (350 King Street West). Cronenberg launched his career with Stereo in 1969, and has made such films as Shivers, Dead Ringers, Naked Lunch, The Fly, M. Butterfly and Eastern […]