“Do not seek death. Death will find you. But seek the road which makes death a fulfillment.” — Dag Hammarskjöld, Markings While his reporting sometimes comes across as performance art, journalist Mads Brügger (“The Saint Bernard Syndicate”) has gone beyond satire in his searing documentary Cold Case Hammarskjöld. Winner of the best directing award at…
In his play, “The Glass Menagerie,” Tennessee Williams alludes to one of the characters as the “Gentleman Caller.” He is the character in the play that is supposed to be realistically rendered to complement the rest of the cast who comprise a group of dreamers. Williams describes him as “a symbol . . . the…
Recapturing old memories can be challenging, especially when the line between what really happened and what may have happened is so fragile. Like Joanna Hogg’s recent film memoir, “The Souvenir,” Chilean director Dominga Sotomayor Castillo (“Thursday Till Sunday”), in her third feature Too Late to Die Young (Tarde para morir joven), is uncertain where memory…
“Fuck your TV. I’ve got my T-Rex.” “It’s OK in the swamp, especially if you’re the number one toad.” Leto, written and directed by Kirill Serebrennikov (“The Student”), has received much buzz because of the director’s house arrest — apparently because he is no friend of Vladimir Putin. It has also been criticized for not…
“I’ve been havin’ some hard travelin’, I thought you knowed. I’ve been havin’ some hard travelin’, way down the road” — Woody Guthrie According to Yann Martel, author of the Booker Prize-winning novel “Life of Pi,” “stories are important because everything is in how we perceive it and nothing is really real until we say…
A reasonable question many people may raise regarding Sobibor, a feature film about the Holocaust in general, and about a particular concentration camp, in particular, is what can it add to our understanding of the nature of the “final solution” by those that perpetrated it, and those that fell victim to it? It’s true that…
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty, —that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know” — John Keats While it is generally agreed that imagination plays a prominent role in artistic creation, it is apparent to all but some academics and literary biographers with a particular agenda, that art cannot exist…
