Yet another Tolkien production’s opening this summer. But this one takes place in our world, not Middle Earth. And its creator isn’t Lord of the Rings wizard JRR Tolkien, but his 27-year-old great-grandson Nicholas. “Terezin,” Nicholas Tolkien’s first play, debuted June 20 in New York; it’s a harrowing descent into the hell of Terezin, which…
At the very end of “Dalya’s Other Country,” a young woman named Dalya — the documentary’s namesake — attends the January protests at Los Angeles International Airport against the president’s first travel ban. Accompanied by her two brothers and wearing a hijab, she carries a piece of poster board on which she has written in…
If you’ve ever watched “Jerry Springer” and thought the talk show, infamous for presenting familial confrontations over lurid secrets, expressed some ineffable (if grim) truths about humanity, you’re in luck: “Jerry Springer — The Opera” will arrive in New York in the 2017-2018 season. The stage production, which premiered in London over a decade ago,…
With the release of the fifth installment of the “Transformers” franchise upon us, it seems like an appropriate time to reveal that they are Jewish. The Transformers are giant robots who can change themselves into everyday objects, including cars, airplanes, trucks and tanks. They excel at mimicry, morphing between machine and robot with chameleon-like ease,…
Nobody is saying that “Rough Night” is a great film, but what charm it has comes from Scarlett Johansson playing against type. Johansson’s roles tend to cast her as the perfect woman — her last appearance earlier this year as an icy superhuman cyborg in “Ghost in the Shell” was typical. In “Rough Night,” she…
‘All in the Family,” which ran from 1971 to 1979, may soon be rebooted. The show’s creator, 94-year-old Norman Lear, is in talks with Sony Pictures Television to bring back not only this show, but also a few other popular Lear sitcoms. The plan is to take actual scripts from the shows and remake them…
When I wrote a piece at the Forward pointing out that Gal Gadot is white, I did not expect there to be a backlash. Gadot is, after all, playing a white character; she was clearly cast because people see her as white. The argument that she was a person of color was transparently made in…
“Wonder Woman” is the biggest hit of the year, the savior of Warner Brothers and the greatest boon to the chattering classes since Trump’s election. Only four days into its release, it’s brought in 200 million dollars and almost as many reaction pieces. Is it too feminist? Is it not feminist enough? Gal Gadot is…
Wonder Woman is, shockingly, the first film in our current decade-plus superhero moment to feature a female lead. But while the film is pioneering in terms of gender representation, in other respects it is not especially innovative. The film does include some black Amazons, and a couple of people of color, but the headline characters…
LOS ANGELES (JTA) — When movie star Kirk Douglas married Anne Buydens in Las Vegas, the justice of the peace asked Anne to raise her hand and repeat after him, “I take thee, Kirk, for my lawful husband.” Anne, who had recently arrived in the United States from Europe, raised her hand and proudly proclaimed,…
Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels became a literary phenomenon. Will a televised adaptation of the books meet similar success? The author, who write under a pseudonym and has kept her identity studiously under wraps even after a reporter, last fall, claimed to have “unmasked her,” told The New York Times she thinks expectations should be kept…
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