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 […]
There’s a strong possibility that Iran and the world’s major powers may fail to convert an interim accord, signed last November, into a permanent agreement on drastically curbing Iran’s covert, militarized nuclear program. On Nov. 24, the two sides acknowledged that they had failed to bridge the gaps in their respective positions and announced a […]
In accordance with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s recent promise that security in Jerusalem will be restored, following an upsurge of violence in Israel’s capital in the past month or so, the Israeli government has resurrected its policy of demolishing the homes of terrorists. On Nov. 19, only a day after two Palestinian cousins from East […]
The American entertainer Bing Crosby was a ball of fire. He was a singer of style and distinction who’s still the most recorded performer in history. He was also a Hollywood film actor, ranking behind only Clark Gable and John Wayne as the most popular male actor of all time. Crosby, who died 37 years […]
What’s your favorite city? New York? San Francisco? Montreal? Vancouver? London? Paris? Hong Kong? Tokyo? Rio de Janeiro? Buenos Aires? Shanghai? Jerusalem? Istanbul? Cape Town? It’s a tossup, of course. I’ve visited all these cities and each one offers something special and different. So, no, I can’t rate them like cars or cafes. But if […]
Who is a Russian? In everyday conversation, people speak of “Russia,” but the country is actually the “Russian Federation.” Even today, following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, only 81 percent of its almost 144 million people are ethnic Russians. So who is a “Russian?” And who is not? In English, we sometimes differentiate between people’s […]