Film/TV
671 results
Page 53
Gene therapy and "The Forever Fix'
The day medicine changed: Are you ready for gene therapy?
If you don't know about gene therapy, you will soon. Thanks to gene therapy, a boy destined to become totally blind has begun to see clearly for the first time in years. As Ricki Lewis persuasively argues in The Forever Fix, he's just the beginning.
Articles
4 minute read
The BBC's "Jekyll'
The mother of all midlife crises
How would we react to a Jekyll-Hyde split personality in the post-Freudian age? The BBC's “Jekyll” provides a possible (and entertaining) answer.
Articles
3 minute read
Lost Soviet classic: Klimov's "Agony'
Anarchy vs. order in pre-Soviet Russia (and guess who wins?)
Agony, Elem Klimov's 1975 masterwork about Nichols II and Rasputin, was banned in Brezhnev's Russia, which isn't surprising. That is it was made at all, and on an epic scale that clearly required substantial state resources, is the real mystery.
Articles
6 minute read
Joseph Cedar's "Footnote' (2nd review)
Honor thy father
Joseph Cedar's Footnote is a savagely brilliant comedy of ideas that humanizes as prickly a set of personalities— Israel academics at the summit of Talmudic studies— as one could hope (or fear) to meet. It also raises significant issues of honor, authority and truth.
Footnote. A film directed by Joseph Cedar. At the Ritz Five, 220 Walnut St. and other Philadelphia venues. For show times, click here.
Articles
10 minute read
"Martha Marcy' and the truth about cults
Beyond ‘Helter-Skelter': The not-so-awful truth about cults
As a movie, Martha Marcy May Marlene is an extremely scary thriller. As an examination of the cult phenomenon, it's simplistic propaganda the likes of which I— an authority on cults— haven't seen in 30 years.
Articles
8 minute read
Drew Goddard's "Cabin in the Woods'
Horror flick with a conscience
At last: A horror film that asks its audience, “Why are you paying to see young people being butchered?”
Articles
3 minute read
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Joseph Cedar's "Footnote' (1st review)
Pornography for bibliophiles, or: Footnotes for Footnote
Writing, books and acts of reading and arguing about books and publications and words and ideas are to Joseph Cedar's Footnote what martial arts are to Jackie Chan movies. And I've got the footnotes to prove it.
Articles
4 minute read
Agnieszka Holland's "In Darkness'
The Holocaust, as close as it gets
Agnieszka Holland's In Darkness, based on the true story of a Polish Gentile who kept a dozen Jews alive in the sewers of Lvov, is as close as anyone has come to depicting the most infernal event of human history without trivializing it— a moral accomplishment no less than an artistic one.
Articles
7 minute read
Claude Lanzmann at the Free Library
How to describe the indescribable?
In Philadelphia to promote his autobiography, the formidable Claude Lanzmann touched on his personal Jewish heritage, his experience as a wartime resistance fighter, his relationship with Jean-Paul Sartre, and the making of his classic Holocaust documentary, Shoah.
Articles
5 minute read
Education and "The Wild Bunch'
Everything I needed to know about learning, I learned from The Wild Bunch
What motivates kids to learn? Sam Peckinpah's violent 1969 Western is as good a place as any to seek the answer.
Articles
2 minute read