This photo of James Gandolfini waving suddenly looks eerily ominous. Gandolfini who just died far too early at age 51 will be sorely missed. If ever there was a natural, he was it. No matter what the part, no matter if an entire series like the Sopranos or a Broadway play rested on his shoulders or if he appeared onscreen or onstage in a supporting role, he occupied the space so stupendously—and not because of his girth—that anyone one

Sofia Coppola’s latest is about as interesting as the vapid microcosm in which it takes place: the small world of a bunch of half-wit Louboutin- and Vuitton-obsessed rich kids in L.A. They come up with the brilliant idea of finding out on the internet when this or that celebrity is out of town so they can sneak in the empty house and get their hands on the objects of their dreams. It’s mansion after mansion, gaudy and kitsch and

Can anyone be considered absolutely unique in a field as crowded as cinema? Definitely, if you’re Esther Williams who died this week at age 91. Swimming is how the Californian brunette with the athletic body and easy smile made her mark and found her way into the hearts and lockers of innumerable servicemen. No one will remember any of her movies made in the 1940s and 1950s but to a public old enough to have been around in her heyday, her

Seen from the outside the situation in the Middle East conflict—the plight of Palestinians in the Territories, the sense of insecurity of Israelis, the second-rate status of Arab Israeli citizens--may seem both hopeless and distant. Hopeless it may be but distant it certainly is not for the millions who live it every day. The point is forcefully brought home by the excellent film “The Attack” by Lebanese-born director Ziad Doueiri, based on

Forty years ago, Jep Gambardella (Toni Servillo ) wrote a book that became an instant best-seller and is still read and more or less remembered—by some as a frothy and irrelevant intellectual joke, by others as a life-changing and profound work of literature. What Gambardella himself is reminded of when people mention the book is that he hasn’t written another one since, not for lack of wanting to but more for lack of time

Stories, whether in film or in literature, generally follow an arc. Things happen to a character or characters that we judge and like or dislike according to their personalities and their choices; situations develop, conversations take place, a certain point is reached, and there is a conclusion. In an Asghar Farhadi film (winner of an Academy Award for Best Foreign Film for “A Separation,”) only the conversation part is certain. In his new film, “Le Passé,” (“The Past”) shown in competition at the Cannes Film Festival, people talk, not hearing each other—as when they talk through a glass pane in an airport—or hearing wrong, or hearing too much.

Lucky the [few] viewers of Baz Luhrman’s "The Great Gatsby" who come to the film virgin of the book, without even a brush with it in high-school. They can dive into the vulgarity of the jazz age depiction, replete with fireworks, flowing champagne, Charleston and period sound-track (with a dash of Jay-Z for the would-be cute and saucy note, much like the sneakers in Coppola’s “Marie Antoinette”). They can spend a dazzling two-plus hours