I am a retired father of two living with my wife in Vancouver, B.C. who has had a lifelong interest in the arts.
“Strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it” — Matthew 7:14 Many reports from the aftermath of World War II describe the indifference and, in some cases, outright hostility that the general population in Europe felt towards the Jews, with even lifelong neighbors…
Philosopher Henri Bergson said that once people begin sensing that something is amiss and start looking for answers, “inner knowledge and anomalous outer experiences show them a side of reality others are oblivious to […]” In Personal Shopper, French director Olivier Assayas (“Clouds of Sils Maria”) succeeds in reminding us, as Shakespeare suggested, that there…
In his powerful and beautifully realized documentary, Tower, Keith Maitland (“A Song For You: The Austin City Limits Story”) movingly recreates the shock and heartbreak of the random shooting of 49 people at the University of Texas in the summer of 1966. The attack was the first mass shooting at any school in the U.S.,…
Emad Etesami (Shahab Hosseini, “About Elly”) and his wife Rana (Taraneh Alidoosti, “The Wedlock”), a childless married couple in their early thirties, are amateur actors playing the lead roles in a local production of Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman,” a play in which a good man’s virtue turns to hypocrisy and his marriage crumbles….
“I am convinced there will be mutual understanding among human beings . . . in spite of all the suffering, the blood, the broken glass” — Pablo Neruda, Memoirs If the genre known as bio-pic has evolved into a predictable linear account of a well-known person’s life, Chilean director Pablo Larraín (“Jackie”) has turned the…
Christianity came to Western Japan in 1542 by way of Jesuit missionaries from Portugal who brought gunpowder and religion. They were welcomed mostly for the weapons they brought and their religion was allowed to be practiced openly. Christianity was banned, however, after reports circulated of missionary intolerance towards the Shinto and Buddhist religions, and there…
Florence Foster Jenkins singing voice was flat and off-key, yet her generosity to others, friendship with music greats such as Arturo Toscanini, and love of music brought happiness to many during the dark days of World War II. Labeled by some intemperate critics as “the worst singer in the world,” she is given something of…
