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Film Review: “Navalny” – Powerful Documentary About Putin’s “Extremist” Challenger Premieres at Sundance

January 28, 2022
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We learn that Navalny — if we didn’t know it already from reporters who cling to Putin’s charismatic nemesis — is a persuasive man who has gotten a long way on his wits and courage.

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Book Review: “What Just Happened” — Memorable Thoughts on “A Long Year”

January 27, 2022
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From the pandemic’s beginning, Charles Finch uses the crisis as a nearly daily backdrop for musings on all sorts. The results are at once cathartic, frightening, exasperating, and often hilarious.

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Film Review: “Jockey” – (A Battle to Get Back in the Saddle)

January 27, 2022
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An upstart young rider confronts an aging jockey. Yet there’s nary a cliché.

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Film Reviews: Sundance 2022, Dispatch #4 — Trauma and Terror

January 27, 2022
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When given a choice, tend to choose films that are fairly harrowing to watch. The next three Sundance Fest films on my slate were often disturbing, but also powerful and inspiring on many levels.

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Opera Review: Arabs on the Operatic Stage — Meyerbeer’s 1814 Comic Opera about the Mysterious ‘East’

January 26, 2022
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Long before the often-prejudicial portrayals of Middle Easterners in Hollywood films, opera composers crafted insightful works from 1001 Nights.

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Book Review: “Ghost Geographies” — Dark but Magical Stories of the Dispossessed and the Stateless

January 26, 2022
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Tamas Dobozy is an anarchist in the best sense of the word: it’s not chaos he’s enamored of but a way of life untrammeled by political oppression, bureaucratic horrors, legal absurdities.

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Film Reviews: Sundance 2022, Dispatch #3 — What Remains

January 25, 2022
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I’ve seen a really interesting assortment of films so far. I can’t recite them all from memory,  but they’re not blurring into each other, either. Not yet, anyway.

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Book Review: “All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days” — Innovative History of a Female Anti-Nazi Resistance Leader

January 25, 2022
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What holds this wildly ambitious book together and drives the narrative is Rebecca Donner’s unwavering, partisan voice.

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Film Review: “Mad God” – God’s in His Heaven, All’s Forsaken With the World

January 24, 2022
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Think Ray Harryhausen by way of the Quay brothers or Jan Švankmajer and you’ll have a vague sense of the sort of magnificent black magic that animatesMad God.

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Book Review: “From a Distant Relation” — Drowning in Yiddish

January 24, 2022
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What is evident throughout these superb tales of turn-of-century shtetl life is their authenticity.

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