About a month after the Arab Spring rebellions washed up on the shores of Tunisia and Egypt, Syria’s cocky president, Bashar al-Assad, bragged that a popular uprising would never break out in Syria, a police state where dissent is strictly forbidden. Four years on, Assad’s arrogant boast rings hollow. What began in March 2011 as […]
Damian Szifron’s Spanish-language film from Argentina, Wild Tales, is dark and uproarious. An Academy Awards finalist for best foreign movie, it’s composed of six stand-alone vignettes turning on the dark side of human nature. The unifying theme is vengeance, but sub-themes revolve around rage, greed, despair, corruption, passion and infidelity. Quite a combustible mix. Scheduled […]
France’s encounter with multiculturalism has not been a roaring success of late, judging by the Charlie Hebdo incident, the radicalization of some French Muslim youth and the spate of antisemitism that has prompted thousands of Jews to emigrate. It’s evident that the forces of xenophobia and racism are corroding French society, and that the spirit of […]
You don’t have to be Irish to like Irish films, so enjoy the forthcoming Irish Film Festival, which runs from Friday, March 6 to Sunday, March 8 at the Toronto International Film Festival’s Bell Lightbox. The festival gets under way with the Toronto premiere of Standby, directed by the brothers Rob and Ronan Burke. A romantic […]
Izmir, in Turkey, is the only city in the world in which an unusual cluster of synagogues, bearing a typical 16th architectural style, are preserved. Some of these synagogues are adjacent to each other, creating an historical architectural complex unique in the world, and unknown even to world Jewry. There is a real danger that some of […]
Iran’s film industry is subjected to censorship and hobbled by a poor global distribution system, but it has chalked up stellar achievements nonetheless. It has produced internationally-recognized directors like Abbas Kiarostami and Mohsen Makhmalbaf and films like A Separation (the first Iranian movie to win the best foreign language film award at the Academy Awards) and […]
On Aug. 25, 1938, Der Angriff — a Nazi newspaper published in Berlin under the auspices of Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels — described Henry Morgenthau Jr., the U.S. secretary of the treasury, as “the real chief of a wide Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracy” against Germany. The antipathy was mutual. Morgenthau, the sole Jew in President Franklin Roosevelt’s cabinet, hated […]
Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott has unveiled a new counter-terrorism strategy that other Western countries should emulate. It seems like an effective method of curtailing the spread of radical Islam. Under his proposals, announced on February 23, a senior government official will oversee counter-terrorism measures and be placed in charge of efforts to achieve better […]
Israel and its closest ally, the United States, are embroiled in an acrimonious dispute over a looming agreement to constrain Iran’s contentious nuclear program. The broad objective of the latest round of talks, which have been going on for one and a half years, is to ensure that Iran cannot build a full-fledged nuclear arsenal. […]
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s call for mass Jewish emigration from Europe is well-intentioned, but ultimately unhelpful and maybe even counter-productive. Netanyahu issued his appeal earlier this month, shortly after a 37-year-old Jewish Danish citizen named Dan Uzan was fatally shot in front of a synagogue in Copenhagen, Denmark, by a Dane of Palestinian origin, […]