Ira Sachs’ drama, Frankie, which opens in Canada on November 8, stars Isabelle Huppert as a famous French actress who invites her family, an ex-husband and a friend to Portugal for what may be a final summer vacation. This appealing film, set in the wooded mountains and sandy beaches of the rustic resort of Sintra, […]
Canadian poet, novelist and essayist Margaret Atwood once said, “I never thought I’d be a popular writer. I only wanted to be a good one.” Several decades on, Atwood has achieved not only popularity but admiration as a stylist. Thanks to her prodigious body of work — 17 books of poetry, 17 novels, 10 works of […]
They’re the last of the Holocaust survivors — the Jewish boys and girls who survived the genocidal Nazi onslaught and are now in the final years of their long lives. Maxwell Smart, Rose Lipszyc and Helen Yermus, all Canadian citizens, witnessed the destruction of their respective Jewish communities in Poland and Lithuania. Seventy four years after […]
It’s 1989 and Ethiopia is being torn apart by a civil war. The country has sunk into the slough of violence and despair and people, particularly Jews, are desperate to leave. Fig Tree, directed by Israeli/Ethiopian filmmaker Aalam-Warqe Davidian, is set during this tumultuous period. Premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival last year, Fig […]
For five years, until 2018, the Syrian government of President Bashar al-Assad besieged Eastern Ghouta, a suburb of Damascus populated in the main by Syrians opposed to his totalitarian regime. Following the outbreak of the civil war in Syria in 2011, Eastern Ghouta was regularly pummelled by forces loyal to Assad. In the summer of […]
In his semi-autobiographical film, Pain and Glory, the 70-year-old Spanish director Pedro Almodovar conducts a critical examination of himself. In this respect, the title of the movie is appropriate. Salvador (Antonio Bandaras), the aging character who portrays him, has amassed acclaim in his industry, but now he suffers from a rash of debilitating ailments and […]
Adam Zucker’s American Muslim leaves a viewer with a nuanced portrait of Muslims in the United States in the age of Donald Trump. It will be screened at New York City’s DOC NYC, the country’s largest documentary film festival, on November 10 and 12. This impassioned and informative movie tells us that Muslims, comprising one percent of […]
Anne Frank, the inspirational Dutch Jewish diarist, would have been 90 this year had she lived through the Holocaust. Anne, of course, was not the only Jewish adolescent whose precious life was snuffed out by the Nazis and their collaborators. Lest we forget, one million Jewish children were murdered during the Shoah, a tragedy that […]
Jacek Borcuch’s drama, Dolce Fine Giornata, which opens in Toronto on October 11, oscillates between the sylvan splendor of Tuscany and the hard world beyond its soft, rolling green hills. Maria Linde (Krystyna Janda), a Nobel Prize laureate of Polish Jewish descent, lives in a rustic farmhouse with her Italian husband (Antonio Catania), her single […]
Nikolaus Leytner’s The Tobacconist, a German-language feature film set in late-193os Vienna, fleshes out an imaginary friendship between a young Austrian man and the celebrated psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud. Unfolding against the Nazi takeover of Austria, it is a jolting reminder of how easily a tolerant society can accommodate itself to totalitarianism and racism. The main character in The […]