The Romanian filmmaker Radu Jude interrogates his country’s antisemitic history and its echoes in the present.
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A new biography of the philosopher misses the shortcomings of the Marxist tradition.
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The new season of the hit Israeli show Fauda continues in its portrayal of brutish Israelis and cowardly Palestinians.
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A new work addresses the long-neglected mass politicide of communists in Indonesia.
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Ex-fascist diplomat Curzio Malaparte's masterpiece blends the real, the improbable, and the impossible in Soviet Russia.
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A new history of the revolutionary criminals who rejected any possibility of revolution coming from the degraded masses—and turned their revolt into an individualistic one.
Read Moreby Mitchell Abidor OCCASIONALLY DERIDED for being too broad and hasty in its estimation of individual films, Siegfried Kracauer’s 1947 study, From Caligari to Hitler, nevertheless stands as a classic of film criticism. Its old-fashioned, Old-World vision of German cinema from its beginnings until the arrival in power of Hitler, and its focus on the unity […]
Read Moreby Mitchell Abidor Discussed in this essay: The Origin of the Jews, by Steven Weitzman. Princeton University Press, 2017, 408 pages. AT THE END of Steven Weitzman’s Origin of the Jews, a scholarly but eminently accessible account of the search for the origin of the Jews (which we should not confuse with their beginnings), the […]
Read Moreby Mitchell Abidor THE ANNUAL FESTIVAL of works by new and newish directors, New Directors/New Films, will be running from March 29 – April 8 at the film Society of Lincoln Center. I had the opportunity to see a few of those on view in advance. The crisis that has crushed workers in Europe and […]
Read Moreby Mitchell Abidor Discussed in this essay: Being Wagner: The Story of the Most Provocative Composer Who Ever Lived, by Simon Callow. Vintage, 232 pages, 2017 IN THIS AGE of doorstop biographies, the actor and biographer Simon Callow’s breezy 200+ pages on Richard Wagner, Being Wagner, appear to be a quirky, quixotic venture. How to squeeze so tumultuous a […]
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