More in ‘Film Adaptations’

One night, in the mid-60s, my wife at the time, Ginger Friedman, turned to me and said she had read a short story in Reader’s Digest and loved it. I was suspicious. The magazine rarely printed fiction. What little they published was of a homespun variety.
“You didn’t love it,” I said, after reading the story. ...

On the 12th floor of a once-grand Pittsburgh skyscraper, a staticky radio plays A Flock of Seagulls. Five women, including me, are wearing fishnets; one has a side ponytail. It’s not 1983, but we’re all trying to look as if it is. We’re at the open casting call for the film version of Michael Chabon’s ...

The first thing one notices about Richard Gere in his otherwise sensitive performance as Saul Naumann, the domineering patriarch of a Jewish family in existential tailspin in Bee Season, is that he doesn’t seem very Jewish. Neither, for that matter, does Juliette Binoche, the magnificent French actress who plays Miriam, Saul’s silently suffering wife with ...

The clever subversion of Jonathan Safran Foer’s 2002 novel Everything Is Illuminated, which described a young American Jew’s search through Ukraine for a woman who may have saved his grandfather’s life during the Holocaust, was that the American’s “self-discovery” tour was actually more revealing for his Ukrainian guides: young Alex confronts Ukraine’s legacy of anti-Semitism ...