A highly regarded contemporary Tibetan Buddhist teacher once joked that his American students— especially in California— get most uneasy when he brings up aging. What makes his native Chinese students most visibly distressed is the topic of romantic …Read more
The Upper West Side is the perfect spot for the strivings of Eros and Thanatos to be poetically unraveled. On Wall Street, such strivings would be torn asunder; in the suburbs they’d be glossed over, and everywhere else, there’d be jokes. Direct and …Read more
If you crossed Patch Adams with King Lear and sprinkled a light coating of Travis Bickle, the result might be Franny, Richard Gere’s benefactor of the title. Franny has a mysterious relationship to a family, which borders on sociopathic. He seems to …Read more
The last three minutes of Patrick Vollrath’s compelling short, Everything Will Be Okay are among the most harrowing moments ever shown on film. If doing so wasn’t a brazen spoiler, one could write a thesis just on these final moments alone. Where the …Read more
The most ignored minority in Europe and most abused victims of human trafficking/hate-crimes, are the Roma (gypsy) people. The majority live in Romania, but are not considered Romanian (an unfortunate etymological coincidence), in fact they are const …Read more
With his grizzled Humphrey Bogart looks and impressive acting abilities, actor Koji Yakusho built a 15-year career that’s made him the Tom Hanks of Japan. You’d never guess this from The World of Kanako, where he plays rage-on-tap ex-cop Akikazu Fuji …Read more
When people must blanket their rooftops with photos of their children so that drones don’t attack them, something is wrong with our vision, our objectives, and the instruments of those objectives. Drone is a must-see documentary: a sobering, disturbi …Read more
Co-directors Holly Morris and Anne Bogart’s Kickstarter-backed film shows none of the horrific deformations that mainstream media covered following 1986’s Chernobyl nuclear reactor explosion. Rather, The Babushkas of Chernobyl is an important and ins …Read more
