Napoleon
Being Winston Churchill
No More Arcs
Inner Harbor
Card 'Em
Several Worlds
Ajami Kino International The Last New Yorker Brink Films North Face Music Box Films A Palestinian, Scandar Copti, and an Israeli, Yaron Shani, have co-written, co-directed, and co-edited Ajami. This title is the name of a multi-ethnic district in the city of Jaffa, so it fits the film, not merely in facts but in feeling. Copti and Shani knew what they were doing and why they were doing it. READ MORE >>
A Pawn, A Queen
Police, Adjective IFC Films The Young Victoria Apparition The Romanian director Corneliu Porumboiu shows once again that, for him, film is a means of looking at an idea. The operative word is “looking.” The subtitles of Police, Adjective convey that his dialogue is reasoned and seasoned, but it rarely seems primary. Chiefly, it enhances what we are watching. Ideas are hardly a novelty in films, but some such works present their ideas visually, as do Porumboiu’s. READ MORE >>
The Republican Health Care Blunder
The United States is on the doorstep of comprehensive health care reform. It's a staggering achievement, about which I'll have more to say later. but the under-appreciated thing that strikes me at the moment is that it never would have happened if the Republican Party had played its cards right. READ MORE >>
In the Shadow of the Patriarch
All dictators, from Creon onwards, are victims. --Gabriel García Márquez I. Many years later, in the course of writing his memoirs, Gabriel García Márquez was to remember that distant afternoon in Aracataca, in Colombia, when his grandfather set a dictionary in his lap and said, "Not only does this book know everything, it’s the only one that’s never wrong." The boy asked, "How many words are in it?" "All of them," his grandfather replied. READ MORE >>
The Real Banker Boondoggle
Few issues since the collapse of venerable Lehman Brothers one year ago have caused as much consternation as performance bonuses for bailed-out bankers. Yet, even among sophisticated observers, there is confusion about what really happened. So, with the benefit of a year's perspective, how should we think about banker compensation in the context of bank bailouts? READ MORE >>
Discipline and Decline
Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600-1947 By Christopher Clark (Harvard University Press, 776 pp., $35) On his way back from self-imposed exile in Paris, in 1844, Heinrich Heine caught a first glimpse of Prussian soldiers in Aachen, a city in the far west corner of Germany: I wandered about in this dull little nest For about an hour or more Saw Prussian military once again They looked much the same as before. [ ... ] READ MORE >>
