Labyrinth of Lies Pits One Prosecutor Against the Holocaust

Here’s a hair-raising assignment: Imagine you’re tasked with capturing the social and psychological complexities of a nation’s crackup within the framework of popular moviemaking. What if Gone With the Wind had tried, in its swooning romance, to explicate Scarlett O’Hara’s slow-to-dawn realization of the hopeless immorality of the world she…

The Worst Man on TV: Does The Affair Want Us to Detest Noah?

In his 2014 book Difficult Men, journalist Brett Martin identifies bad-boy antiheroes as the defining feature of our current “Golden Age” of television. Tony Soprano, Don Draper and The Wire’s Omar Little dazzle with their multifaceted complexity: How deep the furrow in Tony’s troubled brow! How pensive the trail of…

Court From India Is One of the Year’s Best, Most Insightful Films

A super naturalistic study in class, bureaucracy, and censorial stupidity, Chaitanya Tamhane’s debut feature, Court plants viewers in the plastic chairs of an Indian court of law as 69-year-old protest singer Narayan Kamble (Vira Sathidar) is tried for a crime he didn’t commit by lawyers and a judge speaking a…

The Miami Jewish Film Festival Features a Billy Wilder Retrospective

After two successful years presenting retrospectives of Jewish filmmakers together, The Miami Jewish Film Festival and Miami Beach Cinematheque announce their 3rd annual Masters of Jewish Cinema series, featuring a retrospective celebrating Billy Wilder’s most iconic films. The series, charmingly titled Some Like It Wilder!, runs from October 14 through…