It was a hot summer day and I was probably barefoot  -- running around the neighborhood or on our bikes with the other kids, dreaming about our lives amid the drama of the1960’s. We were young enough to remain unscathed by most of it.  Still, we learned to say thin… Read full post »

    Nearly nine years after George Bush unleashed that hellfire otherwise known as Shock and Awe on a slumbering Baghdad, the war is finally over. The American troops have all come home.
    But that profound act seems to have barely registered as a bli… Read full post »

    He grew up in the wilds of New Jersey – a world and a generation away from the horrors of World War II. But despite being ensconced in that comfortable cocoon, writer Paul Grossman found himself obsessed with that war and the holocaust that decimated Europe’s Jews.
&nb… Read full post »

        There were secret sorrows – terrors and slights that followed them from their days growing up in Newark, N.J.  and into the home they made for us in Suburbia.
         They grew up in the 1930s and 40's &nda/… Read full post »

    The first movie I ever cried in was "Gone With the Wind."   I don't mean just small, lady like sniffles and tears wiped away surreptiously with a dainty handkerchief. I'm talking about full out sobbing.
     We… Read full post »

    “The Normal Heart,” which had its theatrical debut in 1985, was writer Larry Kramer’s detonation from the heart – a long anguished scream in the face of society’s indifference to the AIDS crisis.  
     … Read full post »

     The soundtrack that played as my father lay dying of a particularly virulent form of lung cancer during the Thanksgiving week of 1988, was Paul Simon’s album Graceland.  We played it constantly  -- it was like a soft lullabye – the Africa… Read full post »

      When I first read Erica Jong’s "Fear of Flying," I  was 22 and on a plane going from Athens to  Tel Aviv. The book had been published in 1973 – and when it found me, it was 1979 – and I was enroute to Is… Read full post »

      In 1997, I was going through hell – The man I was in love with was going to marry someone else and the job I loved had just disappeared.  "The English Patient," the film directed by Anthony Minghella – from the novel by Michael Ondaatje… Read full post »

      I don't remember the Bay of Pigs, which happened about 50  years ago -- April 17 -- which was yesterday.  But I do remember the Cuban Missile Crisis -- the fear in my parents faces and in all the adults aroun… Read full post »

    French filmmaker Francois Ozon’s new film,  Potiche, stars Catherine Deneuve as the quintessential bourgeois trophy wife in late 1970s France.   Deneuve plays the wife of  Robert Pujol, the grumpy head of an umbrella factory.  When the workers… Read full post »

Amid the horror and wreckage of the Japanese tsunami and earthquake that has killed thousands, there are other living beings that need our help.  I don't know how many -- but I'm sure there are thousands and thousands of animals that have been left homeless and abandoned in the wake of… Read full post »

  An Ardent Fan Talks About the Actress She Loves

  By Annie Stone



     She's the Star who has never disappointed her – the most unique actress of her generation  whose "intense, raw reservoir of emotion” has  not been surpassed by anyone… Read full post »

      I  have to admit  it. I cried at the end of Larry King  Live last night.  In fact I cried through most of it.  No – I didn’t tune in every night – and there were years where I barely glanced in his direction. But It truly… Read full post »

     ‘The Black Swan’, the critically acclaimed new film starring Natalie Portman,  is about so much more than ballet. To me, it was about the terror of transformation, of taking the next necessary step in one’s evolution and the inner monsters one m… Read full post »

     “The Social Network” was a Crashing Bore. There. I’ve said it. Yes I’ve read all the rave reviews calling it a masterpiece, comparing it to True Masterpieces like The Graduate – and calling it a film of our time.  But to paraphrase Rhett… Read full post »

      As Norma Desmond, the fading film actress who saw her star go dim over the Hollywood over which she once had reigned said in Billy Wilder's classic film Sunset Boulevard:  "We didn't need dialogue. We had faces!" 
       A… Read full post »

        She is tiny now, a bit frail – she is after all nearly 99 years old. But when Ruth Gruber, the famed photojournalist whose photos of Jews stranded on the Exodus in 1947 shocked the world – when she speaks, her voice is strong, clear and vibrant/… Read full post »

  I t’s been forty years since Director Robert Altman brilliant anti-war film “Mash” burst upon the culture. Starring Elliott Gould, Donald Sutherland, Tom Skerritt and Sally Kellerman as Army doctors and nurses toiling to save lives on the Korean front -- the film… Read full post »