Most families have their share of rage, but the Westons in “August: Osage County,” opening December 25, make other dysfunctional families seem normal. The film, adapted by Tracy Letts from his Pulitzer Prize-winning play of the same name, offers a close look at sibling relationships, and Meryl Streep, who plays the cruel matriarch Violet Weston,…
Set in one of northwest London’s tight-knit Jewish communities, Francesca Segal’s debut novel “The Innocents” tells a tale of family and love that includes all the ingredients of a widely read story: lust, betrayal, doubt and commitment. Adam and Rachel are in their late 20s and engaged to be married. Then Rachel’s free-spirited and vulnerable…
Actor Eric Roberts is pretty busy but he likes it that way. Roberts just wrapped “Escaping the Holocaust,” Josh A. Weber’s film about his own family. Weber’s grandfather, Max Fronenberg, spent a year digging a tunnel to escape a prison camp and saved 15 people but couldn’t convince the woman he loved to come with…
During a phone conversation from his home in Paris, David Serero admits that his “is kind of a Cinderella story.” That’s an understatement. Frankly, Cinderella wouldn’t believe his story. Cinderella would call it a fairy tale. Deaf almost since birth, Serero began to regain his hearing after a three-year series of surgeries starting at the…
Once upon a time, Americans grew up humming show tunes. They dominated radio airwaves, so, even if you hadn’t seen the musicals (or the films made from them), you knew the melodies and words to the songs of “Oklahoma,” “Carousel” and “My Fair Lady.” But that changed as pop, rock and rap started to control…
Israeli-born director Jonathan Gurfinkel’s first film is officially called “S#x Acts.” You can substitute an “I” for the asterisk, because the movie has six acts. Or you can put in an “E,” because there are numerous erotic scenes. But mostly it is an emotionally charged film about bullying that is both fascinating and depressing. In…
Glen Berger wasn’t surprised when the announcement came. He’d had an inkling that “Spiderman: Turn off the Dark” was on the last of its eight legs well before producers made it official. “I was speaking to some of the actors back in August, and the general feeling was that unless a miracle happens we were…
Five years after Daniel Menaker started working at The New Yorker in 1968 — first as a fact checker, then as a copy editor — he was told by the executive editor to look for another job. A lack of diligence, and because Menaker had criticized the content of a piece, something that was considered…
צוליב דעם וואָס ס׳רובֿ פּאַריזער אַשכּנזים שטאַמען פֿון פּוילן, קומט די ליטוויש־ייִדישע קולטור נישט אָפֿט צו רייד
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