Lea Tsemel, an Israeli criminal lawyer, is a polarizing figure in Israel. Critics vilify her as a devil’s advocate. Admirers describe her as a champion of human rights. Rachel Leah Jones, the director of Advocate, a documentary scheduled to be screened at the Canadian International Documentary Festival (Hot Docs) in Toronto on April 28, April […]
Hungarian filmmaker Laszlo Nemes brought the unimaginable horrors of the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp uncomfortably close up in Son of Saul, which won the Academy Award for best foreign picture in 2016. Now, three years later in Sunset, which opens in Canada on April 5, Nemes transports us to fin-de-siecle Budapest on the eve of World […]
Steve Bannon, the fire-breathing American conservative ideologue, is bent on creating a global right-wing populist movement. In Alison Klayman’s absorbing documentary, The Brink, which opens in Canada on April 12, she accompanies Donald Trump’s former chief strategist on trips across the United States and Europe to lay the groundwork for this ambitious objective. A fierce […]
The passing of Joseph Stalin in Moscow in 1953 precipitated a power struggle among his grasping associates and potential successors. Armando Iannucci imagines what transpired in his satirical film, The Death of Stalin, which is now available on the Netflix streaming service. Iannucci approaches the topic with an irreverent sense of humor. Nothing is sacred […]
Sobibor was a cog in a chain of Nazi extermination camps in German-occupied Poland built to eradicate the Jews of Europe. Upwards of 225,000 men women and children were murdered there in just over a year. In the autumn of 1943, a group of Red Army prisoners of war who had been sent to Sobibor […]
Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s latest movie, Never Look Away, which opens in Canada on February 22, is a sweeping personal and historic drama about the artistic development of the renowned German painter Gerhard Richter and the turbulence that engulfed Germany during the Nazi era and the division of the country into two politically irreconcilable republics, East Germany and West […]
By any yardstick, Emanuel Ringelblum was a heroic figure. As the Nazi occupation of Poland deepened, he began keeping a diary of daily events in the Warsaw ghetto, where he lived. As the oppression intensified and he came to the realization that the Germans were intent on exterminating Polish Jews, he brought together fellow Jews […]
Bryan Singer’s Bohemian Rhapsody immortalizes the late, lamented pop singer Freddie Mercury. This exuberant biopic rises to sublime heights at times thanks to Rami Malek’s star turn as Mercury. Malek portrays the iconic British musician as self-confident yet vulnerable, flamboyant yet lonely, heterosexual yet gay, secular yet attached to his Zoroastrian faith. It is apparent […]
Dick Cheney, George W. Bush’s two-term vice-president, emerges as the power behind the throne in Adam McKay’s sardonic film, Vice, which takes a dim view not only of Cheney but of Bush and many of the major figures in his administration. Superbly portrayed by Christian Bale, a British actor who imitates his monotone mid-western accent with […]
Pawel Pawilkowski’s stark black-and-white Polish film, Cold War, charts the course of a tempestuous romance between two people temperamentally at odds — Wiktor (Tomasz Kot), a serious-minded musician who strives for artistic freedom, and Zula (Joanna Kulig), a flighty dancer and singer who’s content with the status quo. The lovers are loosely modelled after Pawilkowski’s late […]