Can the nearly four-decade-long enmity between the United States and Iran be eased? That’s the big question following U.S. President Donald Trump’s recent announcement of his willingness to confer with Iran’s leaders. “I would certainly meet with Iran if they’re ready to meet,” he said during a White House press conference at the end of […]
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). […]
Iran is constantly in the news, yet it remains opaque and enigmatic. Thomas Erdbrink, one of the last foreign journalists reporting from Iran, rips off the veil, to some extent at least, and explores it in Our Man in Tehran, a two-part, four-hour documentary to be broadcast by the PBS network on August 13 and […]
Iran’s brash and threatening attempt to establish a military foothold in Syria, its most important Arab ally, has concentrated minds in world capitals. In recent weeks, this topic has topped the agenda in high-level talks between Israel and Russia, Iran and Russia and the United States and Russia. It’s clearly one of the most important unresolved […]
Britain’s embattled and divided Labor Party, led by Jeremy Corbyn since 2015, is heading for an acrimonious showdown whose outcome could well affect its electoral prospects. Early in September, the party will decide whether to fully adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism, which has been accepted by scores of countries, including Britain, […]
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 […]
It was, as Steven J. Zipperstein writes in his cinematically vivid book, Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History (Liveright Publishing), “a dreadful moment” burned into the souls of Jews. He is referring to the unbridled anti-Jewish violence that broke out in Kishinev — a provincial Bessarabian city on the edge of the Russian empire — […]
On July 24, just days after the Knesset passed legislation officially defining “the land of Israel” as “the historical homeland of the Jewish people” and “the State of Israel as the national home of the Jewish people,” Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan went ballistic. Responding to the nation-state bill,” Erdogan warned it would cause “blood, […]
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 […]