In the only Urdu/Hindi film he ever made, Indian cinema’s Bengali language grandmaster Satyajit Ray used chess as a metaphor, setting it against the backdrop of the crumbling Navabi rule over Avadh (Lucknow), and its imminent take-over by the British East India company. It was simply called Shatranj Ke Khilari (The Chess Players). Another chess film, a 30-minute short made in 1988, was called Queen Sacrifice. The present film manages with just a pawn sacrifice! Two feature-length recent ...

Page One: Inside the New York Times looks at the inner workings of one of the world’s most influential news organizations in an age of technological transition.  The one-time “New York Times Effect”, where second-tier media outlets follow the NYT by a day, is dependent on a daily print distribution cycle.  Today, as noted by NYT’s Bill Keller, “WikiLeaks doesn’t need us.  Daniel Ellsberg did.”  Page One investigates how “The Grey Lady” adapts to the landscape of 24/7 inform...

Marco Bechis’ Birdwatchers could have gone horribly awry.  Surficially an extinction survival story, pitting a dwindling indigenous people against the encroachment of the outside world that encircles and threatens to strangle, it could have been a treacly morality tale espousing the nobility of the native against the evils of modernity and our collective lost way.  But it is not. What it is, is a take on competing interests making a place for themselves that has echoes of Israel and ...

  Wednesday, June 13-------We've all seen it in the movies.....a man or woman who has been in a deep coma suddenly wakes up and becomes a kind of savant about the thin line between life and death. It is fascinating stuff, and never more compelling when it happens in real life, and not just to Robert De Niro in the film AWAKENINGS. Four patients who made the incredible transition from comatose to consciousness are profiled in the film COMA, directed by award-winning documentarian Liz Garbus....