Toba Singer
“Moka” is a revenge thriller tendering a compact story that traverses Lac Leman (Lake Geneva). Some of its action plays out on the lake’s French bank in the city of Évian-les-Bains, and the rest in the Swiss city of Lausanne. ...
A documentary about the extraordinary Gertrude Bell.
Renata Polt
Everybody has heard of T. E. Lawrence--"Lawrence of Arabia"--adventurer, explorer, expert on what's now called the Middle East. Certainly every movie-goer has seen Peter O'Toole in flowing white robes, riding through the wide-angle desert with his coterie of Arab ...
Films from Poland, the UK, Italy, the USSR, Japan, Sweden, and the USA.
Renata PoltSan Francisco,
Father's Day, wedding day, graduation--all important June occasions. And, of course, the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, June 1st to 4th. This year, as in the 21 preceding years, the festival will feature a ...
Andrew OsborneAustin,
Previously on Culture Vulture, I shared the Top Five Films I saw at Austin's 2017South-by-Southwest Festival.
And now, my picks for additional SXSW hits and misses, coming soon to a theater, festival, streaming service, ...
Toba Singer
You know you’re in for a treat when among the opening scenes of a film is one where two mature men face each other across a threshold, say nothing, but with an exchange of facial expressions and body language, tell ...
Andrew OsborneTX,
Does moviegoing matter? And with so many options for consuming entertainment, is there still a distinction between small and big screens?
In the mainstream blockbuster world, theaters have become theme park attractions with vibrating D-BOX ...
Janos GerebenSan Francisco,
Sixty years doesn't seem a great length of time, but as the San Francisco International Film Festival is turning 60, it's holding a unique distinction of being the oldest such event in the Americas. (The world record ...
A bar mitzvah mishap causes a major rift in a devout Orthodox community in Jerusalem.
Toba Singer
My father broke with the religion of his birth, Judaism, when he was 14. Three factors drove his apostasy, two practical, one philosophical. During my grandfather’s Austrian childhood, a rabbi boxed his ear for an infraction of one of a ...
George Wu
Hirokazu Kore-eda has seemingly inherited the role of chronicling Japanese middle class domestic life from Yasujiro Ozu. That isn't to say their sensibilities are similar. Kore-eda is less formalist and more conventional than Ozu, but both have a keen eye ...
Renata Polt
Big cities in the warmer latitudes--Rome and Athens come to mind--all seem to have their cadres of "street cats": not-quite-feral felines who get by with occasional help from their human friends.
But no city I'm aware of has the kind ...