Talk about coincidence. Or premonition. A few days ago, getting ready for a trip to Lisbon, I remembered the great Alain Tanner film “In the White City” (“Dans la ville blanche” in the French original; 1983) and watched it on You Tube. Bruno Ganz was fabulous as always, as the AWOL ship mechanic, not easy as he spends the entire time going up and down steps in the Alfama or mailing letters and only occasionally interacting with other people. I don’t think I’d had one conscious thought

Finney, one of the greatest, is gone but images from his tremendous cinema resume come flooding our memory. The role in Arthur in “Saturday night and Sunday morning” (1960) of course, his heavy working- class features immediately making cinema history, and from then on and on, in an extraordinary variety of parts. My favorite, of course, remains Sir in “The Dresser” (1983) alongside long-suffering Tom Courtenay, another great

Other film critics have been remarkably kind to “Bohemian Rhapsody,” the biopic about Freddie Mercury, frontman for Queen, for whom the word legendary would have had to be invented if it didn’t exist already. Why the Bryan Singer film hardly deserves praise: 1. It’s a by-the-book biopic, hitting all the predictable spots, erasing any point of contention or lingering on possible painful or controversial topics. God forbid

Much praise has been heaped on "BlacKkKlansman" the new Spike Lee feature based on a daring tale as told in the book by the same name by author Ron Stallworth. The action takes place in the seventies, in the heady times of Vietnam War protests, desegregation and black power movements. These last, as we now know, went nowhere. The lucky African-Americans fill prisons, the less lucky ones are murdered on street corners

For better or for worse, Ian McEwan doesn't see much virtue in religious beliefs or faith. To him, they are a hindrance at best, an absurdity at worst. Founders and practitioners of various religions and cults come up with a logic completely devoid of reason, one that’s meant only to establish their power on the sheep that follow them. Not mincing words, he makes the point in “The Children Act,” for which McEwan wrote the script on the

For a woman, surely, there can't be many life experiences as dreadful as rape. Even so- called "consensual" sex can be hard to bear when, for work-related or other reasons a woman has to give in to a man in whom she has no interest, in the best of cases, or by whom she is repulsed, in the worse. Think creepy, porcine Weinstein. But rape, sexual harassment, abuse, pay inequality, when pay there is--and you can no doubt add to the list

Those of us film lovers lucky enough to have known the cornucopia of the seventies and eighties remember that in the midst of films by great auteurs (who, for some, had started their career way earlier) Pasolini, Fellini, Scola, Bergman, Herzog, Wender, Fassbinder, Resnais, Rivette, Von Trotta, Wajda and so many others in an undending list of quasi geniuses, anything by the Taviani brothers was the promise of a miracle.