Everything you always wanted to know about Fiddler on the Roof and more. With a name like Norman Jewison, the last question the producers of the movie adaptation thought their choice for director would ask was, “What would you say if I told you I was a goy?” Anecdotes like …
Oppressed Jews singing and dancing in Czarist Russia. The Broadway rendition of Sholem Aleichem's stories is transferred to the screen by way of the chokingly atmospheric photography of Oswald Morris. Topol, in the role of Tevye, senses his big movie chance, and his overzealousness shows through the thickest makeup on …
A worthy companion to Max Lewkowicz’s Fiddler: A Miracle of Miracles, the 2019 documentary that placed the origins of the 1964 Broadway play into historical context. Picking up where Lewkowicz left off, Daniel Raims’ expedition carries us from stage to cinema. The film version was directed by Norman Jewison who, …
Family film from Germany about a group of schoolchildren who escapr from kindergarten to free their grandparents from the old folks home.
The Irish psyche unfurled in a squabble over a patch of green, which an "outsider" from America wants to cover in concrete. For all its smallness, a movie of tall corn -- of mechanical dramaturgy (see the auction scene, where the American hides under an umbrella until "Fifty pounds once, …
The Twilight Zone, or something very like it, in Iowa. A disembodied voice, more precisely a stereophonic and cyclonic whisper, prevails on a transplanted city man (Kevin Costner) to carve a baseball field out of the cornstalks — and onto it come "the great Shoeless Joe Jackson" (batting from the …
Peter Sellers's final film, released posthumously. In these circumstances, it adds a certain something, if not exactly humor, for him to take on the role of an enfeebled Fu Manchu, who at 168 years old has still not managed to conquer the world and is now gathering the secret ingredients …
The cast members of A Fish Called Wanda -- John Cleese, Jamie Lee Curtis, Kevin Kline, Michael Palin -- reassemble in different characters (Kline in two characters: son and snowy-haired father) and in an English zoo, and count on the fond remembrance and good will of the audience to pull …
An all-star history of the environmental movement. Narration by Robert Redford and Meryl Streep! The Sierra Club! Love Canal! Earth Day! Greenpeace! Amazon Deforestation! Global Warming! Don't ask for a coherent point, except maybe that different people have cared about the environment in different ways and for different reasons at …