Jon Chu’s romantic comedy/satire, Crazy Rich Asians, opens up new cultural horizons for moviegoers. It’s the first mainstream Hollywood film since The Joy Luck Club 25 years ago to feature an all-Asian cast, and that’s definitely something of a breakthrough. White British actors appear in the first scene, a set piece in racism and revenge, but […]
Pablo Solarz’s absorbing multilingual feature film, The Last Suit, is coming to Toronto’s Cineplex Empress Walk Cinemas on August 17 for a one-week engagement and to Quebec on August 24. Unfolding in Spanish, German, Polish and Yiddish, this feel-good movie is set in five countries — Argentina, Spain, France, Germany and Poland. Abraham Burszstein (Miguel Angel Sola), […]
The Israeli movie director Nadav Lapid will be in the spotlight when the Toronto International Film Festival’s Cinematheque presents two of his feature films, Policeman and The Kindergarten Teacher, and a selection of his short films, on August 16, 17 and 18 respectively at the TIFF Bell Lightbox. I sampled his work by watching Policeman (2011). […]
Marc Turtletaub’s highly appealing debut film, Puzzle, which opens in Canada on August 10, bores into the personality of a devoted wife and empathetic mother who feels repressed and longs for self-fulfillment. Agnes (the Scottish actress Kelly Macdonald) shares a house in Bridgeport, Connecticut, with her husband, Louie (David Denman), the owner of an auto […]
The third movie directed by Orson Welles, The Stranger, is a melodrama about a Nazi who masquerades as a college professor in small-town America. Filmed in the autumn of 1945 and released in the summer of 1946, only a few years after the release of two of his finest films, Citizen Kane and The Magnificent […]
Scotty Bowers provided a service in high demand. From 1946 until the mid-1980s, he procured sexual partners for gays and lesbians in the Hollywood film industry and practised the world’s oldest profession. Six years ago, he wrote a tell-all memoir, Full Service: My Adventures in Hollywood and the Secret Sex Lives of the Stars. Matt […]
When Bobby Shafran began his first semester at an upstate New York community college nearly 40 years ago, he was greeted effusively by some students. The warm reception puzzled him, since he had never set foot on the campus. He soon learned he had been mistaken for another student, Edward (Eddy) Galland, who looked almost […]
As the acclaimed author of Frankenstein, Mary Shelley (1797-1851) was the first science fiction novelist. Her transition from cloistered young woman to acclaimed writer is the subject of Haifaa Al Mansour’s appealing feature film, Mary Shelley, which opens in Canada on July 13. A period piece in terms of atmosphere and language, this evocative movie […]
Shana Feste’s Boundaries, which opens in Canada on July 6, falls back on an old Hollywood cliche to fairly good effect. She places three people in a car and sends them off on a road trip from Seattle to Los Angeles. The travellers are Laura (Vera Farmiga), a single mother struggling with financial problems; Henry […]
Maria Altmann, a Viennese Jew hounded out of Austria following its annexation by Germany in 1938, was a fighter. Determined to settle an historic injustice, she sued the Austrian government to regain five invaluable paintings by Gustav Klimt that had been commissioned by her late uncle, a wealthy art connoisseur and collector. Simon Curtis’ solid […]