Last spring when Michael Levine, the filmmaker of “Streit’s: Matzo and the American Dream” was in the final days of editing and had already shipped a copy off to film festivals, he received word from the Streit family that the factory he had been documenting over the past two years was closing and moving to…
When a group of young Jewish men and women stockpiled arms and rose up against their Nazi oppressors in the Warsaw Ghetto, 73 years ago today, they surely weren’t motivated by the idea that what they were doing would make for good TV. But in the decades since that Passover eve, countless novels, plays, poems,…
In the 1993 movie “Benny and Joon,” Sam (Johnny Depp), a strange and illiterate young man, falls in love with Joon (Mary Stuart Masterson), an artistic young woman who suffers from occasional psychotic episodes. Aside from the odd breakdown, though, you wouldn’t know there was anything wrong with her. As Sam says to Joon’s brother…
The first time I remember being overwhelmed with laughter in a movie theater was when Peter Sellers, as Inspector Jacques Clouseau in “The Return of the Pink Panther,” went airborne with a slow-motion karate kick that sailed over the head of sidekick Cato (Burt Kwouk), through a door and into the mayhem of crashing shelves…
There is no curtain when you enter the theater for Danai Gurira’s “Familiar” at Playwrights Horizons. And so you get a good look, as you wait for the play to start, at its fully illuminated set, an idealized, cathedral-ceilinged suburban living space with smooth cream walls, dark-wood detailing and a towering bookcase. You know the…
There’s a lesson in Kenneth Lonergan’s new play “Hold On To Me Darling,” which opened on Monday, March 14 at the Atlantic Theater Company. But I kind of doubt it’s the lesson the author intended. Lonergan is one of my favorite playwrights, which isn’t to say that he’s the author of my favorite plays. Like…
For the loudest person in the room, Sacha Baron Cohen took a while to find his public voice. Or voices. From the time we met as 16-year-olds, through our college years and while we lived together, Sacha was always the center of attention and always the funniest person around. But people underestimate his commitment to…
It’s been nearly half a century since George Stevens’s multiple-Oscar-winning 1959 film “The Diary of Anne Frank,” the first and best known of the many film adaptations of “The Diary of a Young Girl,” was released. For many it remains the ultimate cinematic treatment of this classic of Holocaust literature. But that perception might be…
In his 2002 autobiographical novel, “A Tale of Love and Darkness,” the Israeli writer Amos Oz compares the process of remembering his childhood to the task of “trying to restore an ancient ruined building on the basis of seven or eight stones that are still left standing.” More than that: In his attempt to describe…
Despite the record-breaking admissions (over 330,000 tickets sold) for nearly 400 films from 76 different countries, the Berlin Film Festival, which ended Sunday, celebrated its dullest year in a decade. As expected, the Golden Bear went to the timely documentary “Fuocoammare” (“Fire at Sea”) by Gianfranco Rosi. Italy’s second win in four years, “Fuocoammare” would…
In nearly a decade of covering Europe’s largest and busiest film fest, one of the aspects I have come to prize most about the Berlinale is the pride of place it bestows to documentaries. Even with this year’s lukewarm line-up, non-fiction films have made the biggest impact, notably the Italian competition entry “Fuocoammare” (“Fire at…
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