IT is 14 degrees above zero as a group of wine lovers converges in a vineyard on the Niagara Peninsula. Frosty bundles of Riesling grapes hang on rows of vines in the pale, gathering daylight. A storm the night before has left behind six inches of fresh snow. More
If we’re lucky, Thursday’s summit will turn out to have been the last act in the great health reform debate, the prologue to passage of an imperfect but nonetheless history-making bill. If so, the debate will have ended as it began: with Democrats offering moderate plans that draw heavily on past Republican ideas, and Republicans responding with slander and misdirection. More
Near the end of “A Prophet,” one of those rare films in which the moral stakes are as insistent and thought through as the aesthetic choices, there’s a scene in which the lead character, Malik, travels to Paris to kill some men. The scene reverberates with almost unbearable tension but is briefly punctured by a seemingly throwaway image: Seconds before he begins shooting, thereby sealing his fate, you see him catch sight of a pair of men’s shoes showcased like jewels in a boutique window in a rich Parisian quarter. He does a double take, a reaction that might mirror that of the anxious viewer who wonders why he doesn’t just get on with it. More
If “Toe to Toe” were a young-adult novel, it would be embraced and argued about in classrooms and eagerly read by thoughtful teenage girls. The film’s observations about race, class and friendship are clear and accessible without being overly didactic, and its sometimes harsh candor about female sexuality would not be unfamiliar to devotees of contemporary adolescent literature. But because it is a movie — the first nondocumentary feature film by the writer and director Emily Abt — “Toe to Toe” is likely to languish in art-house limbo, far from the eyes of its ideal audience. More
Leaping from Helena, Mont., to Split, Croatia — by way of Old Hollywood — Kimberly Reed’s compelling documentary, “Prodigal Sons,” is filled with revelations.
Some of these are emotional, as when the filmmaker returns home to Helena after a 20-year absence to find that her high school friends treat her no differently from when she was a handsome jock named Paul McKerrow. Others are circumstantial, like the bombshell that reveals her adopted brother, Marc, as a blood relative to Hollywood royalty. More
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