Melody Gardot had a cycling accident when she was 19, and was rendered disabled. She had her pelvis fractured, her spine damaged and she suffered trauma. Now, she is “making sweet music” like the birds she commands in “If The Stars Were Mine” of her latest album. 2006 gave us the absolutely delicious Worrisome Heart. [...]

“It’s human to lie. Most of the time we can’t even be honest with ourselves.”
So says a nameless commoner (Kichijiro Ueda). He has come upon a priest (Minoru Chiaki) and a woodcutter (Takashi Shimura) in a broken-down gatehouse identified by an overhead sign: Rashomon. It is Akira Kurosawa’s celebrated 1950 mystery, set in feudal Japan, [...]

In 1943 when George Orwell wrote Animal Farm, his caustic critique of Stalin’s Russia, the Soviet Union was so popular in the United States and Great Britain that he couldn’t find a publisher for his novel. In fact, the Russians were so strongly associated with the fight against the Nazis that it wasn’t until [...]

Bob (Roger Duchesne) is a gambler and ex-con who has managed to stay out of trouble for a number of years. He’s a legend in the neighbourhood and a mentor, of sorts, to Paolo (Daniel Cauchy) who, despite his status as a con, is somewhat naïve in terms of how he deals in the underworld. He trusts the wrong people and Bob takes it upon himself to pull Paolo out of situations that clearly spell trouble for him. Little does he know that he’ll be the one who facilitates Paolo’s ultimate fall.

As you gaze at the cover of the book, you see a pair of eyes - intense, disjointed eyes that allude at a conflict of perspectives or emotions within an individual. Perspectives on love-and-hate-relationship with a country, on obsessive love, identity and belonging, and on perceived social standing. In The Reluctant Fundamentalist, that individual is Changez. - The brilliant boy from Lahore, who manages to get into Princeton with a generous scholarship. On a pleasant day in Lahore, Pakistan, a bearded “[ex]lover of America” reveals to a fearful American stranger his love affair..

Italian filmmaker Paolo Sorrentino is to mark his English Language debut with Sean Penn as a middle aged rockstar in This Must Be the Place, according to Variety.
The film shows Sean Penn as a bored and retired man, who takes on the quest to look for his father’s executioner, who turns out to be an [...]

Woody Allen is up-front about the themes of his 1989 comedy-drama Crimes and Misdemeanors, but so clear and insightful about them that we don’t mind the direct approach. It is an argument about God. Where is He? Does the world adhere to moral certitude according to His laws? Or is it chaos, a nihilist mash-up of mankind’s basest, most cynical impulses? I last reviewed Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring, which poses the same question but seems more optimistic about the answer. Where Bergman saw at least the potential for redemption..

Australian writer Christos Tsiolkas won the 2009 Best Book prize at the esteemed Commonwealth Writers’ Awards ceremony that was held at the Auckland Writers and Readers Festival on Saturday. Tsiolkas, an author of 6 novels, 6 plays and 2 screenplays won the award for his latest book The Slap that is told through the voices [...]

There is yet another film in the pipeline for actor Mickey Rourke after the world wide success of his much acclaimed film The Wrestler. The actor will appear in a remake of the 1986 classic British Gangster flick Mona Lisa. Rourke will replace Bob Hoskins as George, a petty criminal who gets knotted in the [...]

You can really wreak havoc if you lock up a writer, a lexicographer and a chemist in a room and make them share a desk. The lexicographer will successfully cripple the writer’s flow of prose by pointing out his split infinitives and ridiculing his mixed metaphors. The writer will definitely mess up the lexicographer’s carefully [...]