The Oscar-winning Palestinian film director Hamdan Ballal has said that Israeli settlers who attacked him were aided by two Israeli soldiers, who beat him with the butt of their rifles outside his home and threatened to kill him. In an interview with the Guardian, Ballal, one of the four directors of the film No Other … Read more
Congressional Republicans laced into PBS and NPR on Wednesday, accusing the country’s biggest public media networks of institutional bias in a fiery hearing that represented the latest salvo against the American press by close allies of the Trump administration. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Georgia Republican who organized the hearing — which she called “Anti-American … Read more
You never forget your first visit to Café Flesh. Mine took place in June 1986: it was a month before my 15th birthday and I was spending Saturday afternoon, as I often did, at the notorious Scala cinema in tawdry, pre-gentrified King’s Cross. I don’t know which staff member thought it appropriate to allow an … Read more
The stereotype of comedians is that they’re compulsively “on”, finding it difficult to revert to normal off-stage behavior when so much of their life revolves around getting laughs from a crowd. That makes Andy Kaufman particularly unusual, even this many years later: he is a comedian who worked so hard to raise questions about whether … Read more
Calls to eliminate government funding for NPR and PBS may have reached a peak, but the two networks have been living under that threat for decades. Congressional Republicans have periodically attempted to defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the government-backed organization that administers hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer funding directed to public broadcasters … Read more
Last summer, the basketball podcast “Mind the Game” ended under unusual circumstances. The dynamic between its co-hosts had been transformed: After their ninth episode, one host, JJ Redick, became head coach of the other host, LeBron James of the Los Angeles Lakers. It was not clear whether “Mind the Game” would continue; Mr. Redick, a … Read more
After spending the summer as a Redcoat, I arrived at Butlin’s Metropole hotel in Blackpool. As I walked in, the entertainments manager asked, without hesitation, “Can you do an act?” “No,” I said. “Shit,” he said, and the tale unravelled. The summer Reds had gone and we were starting up the winter season. But the … Read more
Like many British schoolchildren, Ava Pickett chanted the “Divorced, beheaded, died” rhyme about Henry VIII’s six wives – and it has stayed in her head ever since. So much so that her play 1536 pivots around the last days of the second wife, Anne Boleyn. Pickett’s history lessons covered Boleyn’s magnificent rise – which sparked … Read more
At the end of the first series of The Change we left our menopausal heroine (and never had those two words been seen together before Bridget Christie came along) in the Forest of Dean, dressed as the Eel Queen, finding joy in all her transitions. That is until her hapless husband showed up to drag … Read more
Marco Berger’s films often begin, in one way or another, with a knock on the door. A young gay man steps into a summer house, or sometimes a luxury villa, typically inhabited by a group of attractive young men on holiday. As homoerotic tension simmers, the hyper-masculine environment is charged with banter, dares, and provocative … Read more