Ping-pong, or table tennis, has been a part of the Olympics since 1988, and the three teen players profiled in Top Spin make it clear why. Their athleticism is undeniable; they move so quickly the footage of their competitions looks undercranked. The level of technique is further mystifying, as they make the ball move in […]
Chantal Akerman’s No Home Movie places her mother in the center, but the film’s real star is death. It hangs ever present over the movie, making itself felt more acutely in the sad light of the filmmaker’s recent presumed suicide, days before she was scheduled to present this film at the New York Film Festival. […]
It’s hard to imagine a more fascinating place on earth than Chile. If we had to pick one country to show an alien race what varying geographical features our planet has to offer, it would probably be that country. It has more than 4,000 kilometers of coastline and the highest volcano and part of the […]
Like MetLife and its commercial use of Snoopy, Laurie Anderson deploys her cute canine as an entry point to mull a subject people usually avoid thinking about: death. The depiction of the life and 2011 death of her rat terrier, Lolabelle, at first seems like those endless photos of and commentary on beloved pets posted […]
There is a lot to learn from Malala Yousafzai. Three years ago in her Swat Valley village in Northwestern Pakistan, the Taliban shot Malala, then 15, for daring to speak out in favor of girls’ education. Rather than let that stop her, Malala has grown into a world leader and the youngest Nobel Peace Prize […]
(The writer of this review in no way intends to injure relations between the Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia.) In recent years, natural disasters, violent atrocities, and political turmoil have been wrestling for headlines and the public’s attention. Any one instance of bad news becomes painfully easy to forget in a world of trending stories scrolled […]
There was a time in Africa when albino children were starved, poisoned, or drowned at birth before neighbors could discover their existence. Albinos were said to jinx the home. Husbands rejected wives who gave birth to a child with albinism, or rejected the child. Albinos were thought to be soulless, ghosts that walked among the […]
Embarrassingly, the first Tab Hunter film I ever saw was Grease 2 (1982). He played the hunky biology teacher opposite his longtime costar Connie Stevens. It wasn’t until many years later when I saw him in John Waters’s Polyester (1981), and even then I didn’t really understand his pop cultural significance. The documentary Tab Hunter […]
Saeed Torres is no James Bond. A middle-aged man working as a school chef, he fits no stereotype of a spy. But in the fall of 2011, he revealed to David Sutcliffe and Lyric Cabral that he was a “civilian operative” working for the F.B.I. The filmmakers initially present him in a way that makes […]