Set among the bleak row houses of Depression-eraLiverpool, Stephen Frears’s new film, Liam, is yet another sepia-tinted tale of a cute, dimpled Catholic boy (played here by Anthony Burrows) whose diet consists mostly of bread, potatoes, and interminable school sermons that promise only hellfire and damnation. “What does sin do?” his teacher asks in a […]
Adina Hoffman
Adina Hoffman is the film critic for The Jerusalem Post and
the author of House of Windows: Portraits from a Jerusalem Neighborhood.
Posted inFeatures
Beyond the Multiplex
In “The Moviegoers,” a bleak New Yorker article from a few years back, the film critic David Denby bemoaned both the current state of movie culture and the marginal role of serious criticism in shaping popular taste. According to Denby, the commercialization of the whole enterprise has brought about a brand of slicked-up, dumbed-down cinema […]
Posted inFeatures
Pretty in Pink
In the black-and-white introduction to Chinese director Zhang Yimou’saward-winning film The Road Home, a citified businessman returns, with down parka and four-wheel drive, to the remote mountain village where he grew up. His father has just died, and he has come back to this rural, snowbound enclave to help prepare for the funeral. Devastated by […]