The Girl in the Cafe is one of those wonderful, little-heard of films that you nearly click away from, the start is so slow, with such eye-averting awkwardness. Then it … [Keep reading >>]

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Ingrid Bergman looks her fabled, youthful best and Charles Boyer dark and dashing as her handsome, older lover in The Arch of Triumph a forgotten minor gem of WW II … [Keep reading >>]

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Around our house there are two streams of movie selections: dark, meaningful films, preferably by “auteurs,” about people overcoming terrible odds immersed in worldly cruelty, or those that are light … [Keep reading >>]

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Alhaam, a movie shot in Iraq in 2004 — during the full catastrophe of the US invasion and related Iraqi insurgencies– is the rawest, hardest to watch movie of war … [Keep reading >>]

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Immigration is big in the news these days – mostly the opposition to it– around the world. It is absolutely the case that most people welcome immigrants when … [Keep reading >>]

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For a wonderful excursion away from the shattering sights and sounds of the here-and-now take a friend and an understanding of how long ago 35,000 years was to see Werner … [Keep reading >>]

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The incredible, beautiful green of trees, grasses and rice against the blue rivers, blue skies and white clouds at the beginning of Buffalo Boy, seem like postcards of paradise. Bucolic … [Keep reading >>]

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Many years ago I translated The Manuscript of a Crow, a short story by Spanish author Max Aub, the protagonist of which was a crow relating its observations of human … [Keep reading >>]

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We took a flyer last night on Potiche – Trophy Wife, based on Catherine Deneuve and Gerard Depardieu being the leads. Neither are in their glorious prime but … [Keep reading >>]

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Yep. Omar Sharif in a 1961 Egyptian movie was cast as having helped ignite the Second Egyptian Revolution, as it is sometimes called, in 1952.  We’ve been witnessing the Third … [Keep reading >>]

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I rushed home last night to watch the Egyptian movie “The Yacoubian Building,” just arrived from Netflix.  It was released in 2006, based on Alaa Al Aswany’s  2002 novel of … [Keep reading >>]

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The King’s Speech, Hollywood’s moving story of how King George VI of England was helped to overcome a debilitating stutter by an unorthodox Australian, ascended the throne when his older … [Keep reading >>]

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