Some Bay Area movie-goers have called the annual Jewish Film Festival their favorite Jewish holiday, and you’d have to witness…
Renata Polt
Renata Polt, a freelance writer and critic, is the translator and editor of A Thousand Kisses: A Grandmother's Holocaust Letters.
Starting with the plain white opening titles against a black background, Woody Allen’s latest romantic comedy, “Café Society,” has all…
Louise Brooks. Pola Negri. Douglas Fairbanks. Fritz Lang. René Clair. Ernst Lubitsch. Victor Fleming. Buster Keaton. If any of these…
New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art–“the Met”–is open every day of the year except Thanksgiving Day, Christmas Day, New Year’s…
It turns out that murdering six million Jews takes a lot of work. Herding them off the trains; persuading them…
San Francisco Bay Area silent film fans won’t have to wait until summer to get their fix:…
“Maybe it’s never too late to start living the life you really want,” says Winston (Bob Odenkirk), the best…
Less is more, Mies van der Rohe’s memorable dictum, must be anathema to Iris Apfel, the subject of documentarian…
“Viva la Libertà” has little to do with libertà but everything to do with politics, personality, and fooling all the…
It’s Fashion Week in New York–when isn’t it?–and the pages of the New York Times feature the…
Who hasn’t done time in the ER: with a sliced lip, chest pain, a child with a broken bone or…
It’s disorienting: San Francisco’s Silent Film Festival has moved from its iconic mid-July position to the last weekend…
Would you pay a thousand dollars to have sex with John Turturro? Okay. That’s what I expected….
In May of 1962, the first spring after France’s debilitating war with Algeria, documentarian Chris Marker, together with his cinematographer…