Imagine, for a moment, that after the Holocaust the official German position was one of denial. That the German heads of state have, since 1945, consistently asserted that the events of the Holocaust were nasty, yes, but both the Jews and the Germans bear some responsibility, and in the end, well, such things happen in…
Charles Hirsch Barris, who died on March 21 at age 87, proved that one Jewish man’s inner conflicts could entertain America in a series of game shows. Creator of TV’s “The Dating Game” and “The Newlywed Game,” in the ‘60s, Barris also launched and hosted “The Gong Show” in the 1970s, tapping into such matters…
For a complete history of broadcasting, you do not need to go through archives or visit a museum. Just have a chat with Larry King. The iconic broadcaster, now 83, is coming up on 60 years in the business, having first started on radio on May 1, 1957. Along the way he has interviewed everyone…
Midway through Asghar Farhadi’s “The Salesman,” Emad, the actor and schoolteacher who serves as the Oscar-nominated film’s protagonist, seizes one of his student’s phones, hoping to delete photos the student has taken of him sleeping. He castigates the boy for the risqué images he finds, telling him his father needs to look at them. A…
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…
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