Like the fierce women she committed to the screen, the young Nelly Kaplan was a risk-taker, unafraid to break barriers, or, for that matter, marriages. The Argentinian-born director arrived in France in 1953. She was 22, didn’t speak a word of French and had a meager $50 to her name, but within two years she…
Tim Burton’s remake for Disney of “Dumbo” about an elephant whose oversized ears enable him to fly, has received mixed reviews. Some filmgoers prefer the classic 1941 version, also from Disney. Yet indisputably, the story for both originated in a book published in 1939 by Helen Aberson (1907-1999), a Syracuse-born writer of Ukrainian Jewish origin….
Ben Hecht: Fighting Words, Moving Pictures By Adina Hoffman Yale University Press, 232 pages, $26 In 1947 Mickey Cohen, the Los Angeles crime boss, paid a visit to Ben Hecht, the journalist, screenwriter and propagandist for a Jewish state, to ask how he might best support Jews in Palestine. When the mobster and his henchmen…
The New York Police Department is investigating magician David Blaine after two women accused him of sexual assault. In a news conference April 1, Dermot F. Shea, the department’s chief of detectives confirmed the investigation into the complaints, first reported by The Daily Beast. Shea refused to comment on the details of the allegations or…
Stephen K. Bannon lost his job in the White House more than a year and a half ago, departing in an atmosphere so rancorous that his erstwhile champion, Donald Trump, slurred him on Twitter as “Sloppy Steve Bannon.”) Then Bannon’s full-throated support for Roy Moore’s campaign to represent Alabama in the U.S. Senate ended in…
Jordan Peele’s second film, “Us,” all but demands a second viewing. The box-office-breaking horror flick, while light on its feet, is packed with pop culture signposts, character pay-offs and a script-flipping twist that has audiences lining up for a later showing before the lights come up on the end credits. But one reference that may…
It’s a familiar story that nonetheless demands retelling: A woman, a job and a boss who doesn’t respect boundaries. So runs the plot of Michal Aviad’s “Working Woman,” which premieres in New York March 27. The film arrives in the United States amid a monumental cultural reckoning surrounding the way we behave in the office,…
Bernard-Henri Lévy is a man of ideas. A celebrity philosopher of the kind that has no equivalent this side of the Atlantic, he’s nonetheless picked the United States as the subject of his latest book, “The Empire and the Five Kings: America’s Abdication and the Fate of the World,” in which he lays out how…
This week only fans of “A Star is Born” can see a new, extended cut of the film featuring an additional song: In Yiddish. “Was it a slow song or a fast song?” Tony-winning actor Ron Rifkin, who sings the ditty in the film as Carl, the therapist of drug addicted musician Jackson Maine (Bradley…
For years, I have walked through the heavy doors of the stone building on Columbia University’s campus that houses the Graduate School of Journalism founded by Joseph Pulitzer — as a student, an alumna, an active volunteer. For years, I have secretly wished that I’d be chosen to even be a finalist for one of…
You may have heard that people are upset about “Green Book” winning the 2019 Oscar for Best Movie. Or you may have seen Spike Lee, whose “BlackKklansman” was also up for the award, drain a full glass of champagne rather than respond to a question about what he thought of the film’s victory. The “Green…
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