Adina Hoffman

Eric Rohmer’s films are notoriously talky. In his Six Moral Tales, Comedies and Proverbs, and Tales of the Four Seasons cycles, the restlessly sexy, searching characters spend most of their time lounging on lawn chairs and engaging one another in meandering, often faltering, philosophical exchanges on topics from temptation and renunciation to the charms of […]

Mira Nair’s new comic melodrama Monsoon Wedding opens with a shot of a frowning man trying to prop up a traditional Indian marigold bower, then flits straight to his agitated cordless-phone conversation with a clownish “event manager.” As we soon learn, the frowning man is Lalit Verma (Naseeruddin Shah), a well-to-do New Delhi suburbanite, and […]

Orphaned Cambodian amputees, Bosnian war widows, prepubescent Liberian soldiers, Rwandan rape victims forced to bear and raise the children of their attackers. . . . The upcoming Human Rights Watch International Film Festival (which will travel to Boston, New York, Berkeley, and London over the course of the next few months) plunges viewers headlong into […]

A description of sandi Simcha DuBowski’s documentary Trembling Before G-d sounds like the start of a bad ethnic joke: Did you hear the one about the gay Orthodox Jew? The film, however, is no joke at all, as it focuses on the dire plight of religiously devout Jewish homosexuals. Shot in ghoulish yellow shades, the […]

Set in a single, grim Michigan motel room, Richard Linklater’s latest film, Tape, has an air of let’s-put-on-a-movie spontaneity–and concentration–that’s often missing from contemporary American pictures. This refreshing charge derives in part from the film’s terse concept (a trio of high-school friends are reunited 10 years after graduation), but it also comes from the low-cost, […]

In the remarkable opening moments of a 1995 film by Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf, a cameraman sits on the roof of a car as it makes its way slowly through a mob of Tehrani males–most of them thin, mustachioed, hungry-eyed. The camera records, the throng pushes and swells, and soon a near-riot breaks out as […]

S everal of my favorite and most tattered books are cookbooks, and when I visit a foreign country, one of my first purchases is usually a volume of recipes, which (if the book is good) provides a sort of sensory shortcut into the heart of the place and people in question. Some travelers rely on […]

A fter several millennia’s worth of Orpheus-and-Eurydice stories, it stands to reason that Brazilian director Carlos Diegues’s contemporary filmic retelling of the myth, called simply Orfeu, feels like a trip inside a formidable echo chamber. Most distantly, Diegues’s movie rejoins the Orpheus tales of Aeschylus, Virgil, and especially Ovid, whose love-struck, lyre-playing Thracian was a […]

T he two main characters in South African playwright Athol Fugard’s classic chamber drama Boesman & Lena are a poor mixed-race couple. Their shanty has been razed by the “whiteman’s bulldozers,” leaving them to wander the dismal mudflats near Port Elizabeth, and as the play opens Boesman picks a spot for the night by silently […]

T he new movie by Joel and Ethan Coen, O Brother, Where Art Thou? is a picaresque comic strip “based”–as the credits inform us with the filmmakers’ trademark brand of knowing tongue-in-cheekiness–“upon The Odyssey by Homer.” Set in the Deep South during the Depression, the movie does borrow certain figures from the ancient Greek epic […]