Sophie Scholl—The Final Days, directed by Marc Rothemund, reconstructs the last six days in the life of anti-fascist student Sophie Scholl. She was arrested in February 1943 for distributing leaflets at the University of Munich and, together with other members of the student resistance movement Weiße Rose (White Rose), was executed shortly after.

Everything about this performance felt right

The Polish theatre company Teatr Piesn Kozla, (translated as The Song of the Goat Theatre Company) recently performed its award winning production of Chronicles—a lamentation, as part of the international presentations of this year’s Sydney festival.

The outcome of two years of research, Chronicles is breathtaking in its use of “lamentation”, to portray part of the ancient Sumerian epic of Gilgamesh the King, part-man, part-god, and his search for immortality.

“In these crises … there is too much civilization, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce¹.”

And, today, we might add: and too much imagination. Today’s world is overflowing with creativity, which is being stifled.

Vidas Secas, directed by Nelson Pereira dos Santos, based on the novel by Graciliano Ramos

The 1963 classic film Vidas Secas (Barren Lives), by director Nelson Pereira dos Santos, newly released on DVD by New Yorker Video, is one of the pivotal works of Brazil’s Cinema Novo. Based on the novel by Graciliano Ramos, the documentary-style film is set in Brazil’s drought-plagued sertão, or northeastern backlands.

In light of the fact that the Ramos novel has often been compared to John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, it may not be coincidental that the film’s narrative begins in 1940, the year that John Ford filmed Steinbeck’s work.

Robbins’ newest play, an adaptation of Orwell’s ‘1984,’ speaks directly to the Bush administration’s perpetual war on terror.

After his incandescent plays about the death penalty (“The Exonerated”) and the media in Iraq (“Embedded”), it seemed inevitable that actor-writer-director Tim Robbins would continue to fearlessly produce politically charged theater.

In his newest production by Los Angeles’ Actors’ Gang ensemble, a corrosive play based on George Orwell’s novel “1984” and adapted by Michael Gene Sullivan, director of the San Francisco Mime Troupe, Big Brother is here and torture is us.

A visit to the land of the hypocrites

A Good Woman, directed by Mike Barker; screenplay by Howard Himelstein, based on Lady Windermere’s Fan by Oscar Wilde

“And what sort of lives do these people, who pose as being moral, lead themselves? My dear fellow, you forget that we are in the native land of the hypocrite.”

—Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

In A Good Woman, the filmmakers have updated Oscar Wilde’s 1892 play, Lady Windermere’s Fan, to the 1930s and relocated it from London to Italy’s Amalfi coastline. Director Mike Barker has borrowed a line from another of Wilde’s plays, A Woman of No Importance, as the film’s epigram: “The only difference between saints and sinners is that every saint has a past while every sinner has a future.”

Before anyone tags me a race traitor, Uncle Tom, O’Reilly-phile, Wanksta, Cosby Jr., or any of the other sundry slurs reserved by blacks, for blacks who commit the street sin of not keepin’ it real, let me say this: I love hip-hop music: The way BB King loves Lucille. The way the “silly rabbit” loves Trix cereal. From the hip-the hop-the hibby-hibby hop of Sugar Hill Gang to the near existential ruminations of Black Thought and the rest of The Roots, the art form has taken its place as a bona fide American cultural gift to the world.

The New World, written and directed by Terrence Malick

The most recent film by American director Terrence Malick, The New World, treats in an elliptical and lyrical manner the famous events surrounding the landing of British colonists in Virginia in 1607. Every American schoolchild knows or once knew the legend of Captain John Smith, one of the English company, rescued from execution by the Indian maiden, Pocahontas. Whether the incident ever took place is a matter of some controversy (Smith, a renowned self-promoter, did not write about it until 17 years later), or if it did, whether Smith was, in fact, a participant in a ritual that never threatened his life.

Match Point, written and directed by Woody Allen

Woody Allen’s new movie, Match Point, begins with a shot of a tennis court as a voice-over introduces one of the film’s central themes: “The man who said ‘I’d rather be lucky than good’ saw deeply into life. People are afraid to face how great a part of life is dependent on luck. It’s scary to think so much is out of one’s control. There are moments in a match when the ball hits the top of the net, and for a split second it can either go forward or fall back. With a little luck, it goes forward and you win…or maybe it doesn’t, and you lose.”