Talya Lavie spent two years in the Israeli army, like many Israeli women subject to conscription, and Zero Motivation distills her experiences there as a soldier. Judging by this movie, which she wrote and directed, she was not a happy camper in uniform. Not by a longshot. Zero Motivation, which opens in Toronto on Friday, Dec. 12 […]
In May 1945, at the the end of World War II, American soldiers rummaging through Heinrich Himmler’s home in Gmund, Germany, found stacks of his photographs, documents, journals and personal letters. Vanessa Lapa’s chilling biopic of this mass murderer, The Decent One — which opens at the Bloor Hot Docs Cinema in Toronto on Friday, Dec. […]
Call it Germany’s last gasp. On Dec. 16, 1944, about five months before the war in Europe finally ended, Germany launched a surprise offensive in the heavily forested Ardennes region of Belgium, France and Luxembourg. Facing the Germans was a U.S. force supported by French and British troops. When the guns fell silent about a […]
It’s a nasty world out there. Even peaceniks who believe that Israel can resolve its differences with the Arabs realize, sadly enough, that their pleas for peace and amity may well fall on deaf ears in the Arab world and that Arab governments aside from Egypt and Jordan, which already have peace treaties with Israel, […]
The Kunstmuseum Bern in Switzerland should be congratulated for having established a set of commendable guidelines to deal with the issue of Nazi looted art. Several days ago, the museum announced that experts had been hired to ascertain whether a fabulous collection of paintings, drawings and lithographs inherited from the son of a German art […]
Among the many ethnic groups that inhabit the Caucasus are the Azeris, a Turkic people who speak a language related to Turkish, but who are culturally closer to the Persians. The Republic of Azerbaijan’s 9.4 million people inhabit a land 86,600 square kilometers in size. The country borders the Russian Federation’s republic of Dagestan to […]
Anne Fontaine’s French-language film, inspired by Gustave Flaubert’s 1856 masterpiece, Madame Bovary, and based on Posy Simmonds’ 1999 graphic novel, Gemma Bovery, sizzles with sexual longing and passion. Set in a village in contemporary Normandy, like Madame Bovary, Gemma Bovery unfolds through the recollections of a local baker, Martin Joubert (Fabrice Luchini), who was infatuated with Gemma Bovery […]
Terrance Odette’s Fall, scheduled to open in Toronto on Dec. 5, taps into the still simmering pedophilia scandal that has rocked the Roman Catholic church for the past decade. Father Sam Ryan (Michael Murphy) is a fine parish priest in Niagara Falls, Canada. He tends to congregants in a retirement home, dispenses advice to a […]
Jefferson, a town in Yoknapatawpha county, looms large in the novels of William Faulkner, a great Southern writer and a Mississippian. Jefferson, in fact, is modelled after the real town of Oxford, the home of the University of Mississippi, or Ole Miss, while fictional Yoknapatawpha county stands in for Lafayette county. Faulkner, a Nobel Prize […]
Andrea Dorfman’s Heartbeat, a low-key, occasionally moving Canadian film due to open in Toronto on Nov. 28 at the TIFF Bell Lightbox, is about thwarted ambition, self-discovery, unrequited love and the pain of loneliness. Tanya Davis, the former poet laureate of Halifax, stars as an aspiring musician who’s upended by stage fright in her first […]