When Nicolas Rapold, editor of Film Comment, sits down on Monday February 20 for a Q & A with the director-acting teacher Jack Garfein and the composer David Amram during a program of films called “Newman Directs,” he will be speaking with two 86-year-old men with unusually interesting things to say about the evening’s subject…
Donald Trump’s elevation to the White House has inspired two apparently contradictory sentiments among liberals. The first is a skittishness about the future of democratic institutions and constitutional rights. The second is a desire to escape, in both a literal and figurative sense — hightail it to Canada or avoid the homepage of The New…
“There’s no way to tear open the secret heart of another human being,” Phillip Green (Gregory Peck) laments in the 1947 movie “Gentleman’s Agreement.” Phil can’t figure out how to do a story on anti-Semitism absent “the drool of statistics and protest.” But he finds a fresh angle on an old issue by living as…
One might assume that a web series about internet hookups in Tel Aviv — the Middle East’s party capital — would be gratuitously sexual. But “Confess TLV” is more equivocal than erotic. Based on true stories of people who met online for sex, the eight-part series focuses on the emotional aspect of encounters that are…
If there’s one moment that bugs Philip Roth more than any in “American Pastoral,” the new film adaptation of his explosive Pulitzer Prize-winning 1997 novel, I’m guessing it’s this one: During an overwrought scene of domestic conflict between Newark’s one-time golden boy Swede Levov and his bilious, radical teenage daughter Merry, the camera lingers on…
In the spring of 1998, it seemed as if the meandering, directionless years of my life were over, and I was about to arrive in the promised land. I had been accepted to film school. USC sent me a list of films that I was to watch before classes started in the fall. Many were…
It’s ironic that “High Maintenance,” a new HBO series about a New York City pot dealer, appears just as its subject is about to become a thing of the past. As marijuana legalization spreads across the country, buying weed will soon be no sketchier than getting frozen yogurt. But even if “High Maintenance” is a…
September 8th, 2016 is Star Trek’s 50th Anniversary. Read Adam Nimoy’s ode to his father, Leonard Nimoy — the original Spock — originally published in the Forward in June, 2015. Leonard Nimoy passed away on February 27th, 2015. Last year, I approached my father, Leonard Nimoy, about collaborating on a documentary about Mr. Spock, his…
“Ben-Hur: A Tale Of The Christ” was the best-selling American novel of the nineteenth century, beating out “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” There were a million copies printed of the 1913 edition, an American record at the time. It would stay on the top of the charts (just under the Christian bible) until “Gone With The Wind”…
“Germans and Jews,” an engaging, thoughtful documentary about the current relationship between Germany and its Jewish population, begins with a lively dinner party. In the middle of the meal, a German woman suddenly confesses that she always feels self-conscious uttering the words Juden and Deutschland and only dares to say them in English. It is…
‘It almost reads like a gag,” Sam Blair said. “Have you heard about the fascist politician who found out he was a Jew?” Blair was talking about Csanád Szegedi, a former leader of Hungary’s extremist right-wing Jobbik party. Jobbik is widely, but not officially, associated with anti-Semitism; as an example, in the run-up to the…
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