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 ...
Toba Singer
Raoul Peck takes a unique approach to documenting the meditations of the late Harlem-born author James Baldwin, who lived as an expatriate in Paris for most of his adult life. Peck gives thirty pages of the writer’s observations over to ...
Toba Singer
Using the device of a play within a movie, Asghar Farhadi (“A Separation”) this time brings us a whodunit set in Tehran. A young couple, Emad Etesami (Shahab Hosseini), and his wife Rana (Taraneh Alidoosti), are actors who play Willy ...
Toba Singer
“I always thought of the joke as a superior way of telling the truth.”—Emily Nussbaum, “New Yorker,” January 23, 2017
Robert DeNiro plays Jackie Burke, the title role comedian who is the embodiment of all frustrations associated with his ...
Paula Farmer
2016 was an exceptional year for movies, as well as refreshingly diverse. The upcoming Oscar Awards show will thankfully be showcasing an array of stories and the talents of more than just whites- behind and in front of ...
Andrew Osborne
Many films are well-made, but the ones that land on my own personal Top 10 each year have something more: some memorable element, some unique quality or emotional connection that reverberates down deep -- a special something that ...
