Joshua Henkin opens his third novel with a dramatic setup. Leo Frankel has been killed while reporting from Iraq for Newsday. He waskidnapped and videotaped in a way reminiscent of how American journalist Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter, was killed in Pakistan in 2002. Over the past decade, dozens of newspeople have been killed each year in war zones, making this a timely subject for fiction. But Henkin places Leo's dramatic death offstage, telling it in sketchy snippets.
Nora Ephron brought us two of the most indelible scenes in contemporary cinema — and they're startlingly different.
There's the infamous "Silkwood shower," from the 1983 movie, with Meryl Streep as a terrified worker at a nuclear power plant, being frantically scrubbed after exposure to radiation.
Then there's the scene in which Meg Ryan drives home a point to Billy Crystal at Katz's Deli, in 1989's When Harry Met Sally. You know — the one that ends with "I'll have what she's having."
Adam (Jan Mizigar, left) sits with his glue-sniffing brother, Marian (Martin Hangurbadzo). Adam tries to avoid a path of crime in Gypsy, but family regularly draws him into one.
Credit In Films
Miroslav Gulyas as Zigo, a crime boss in his Roma village and Adam's uncle turned stepfather.
Dad just died violently. Mom married the man who might be his killer. And now the dead man's ghost is appearing to his son.
That plot comes from Hamlet, of course, but Slovak director Martin Sulik's Gypsy is not otherwise Shakespearean. There are no soliloquies and little dialogue. The prince is 15 and inarticulate, and his Ophelia is entirely sane. She's about to be exiled from her community for the same reasons that nearly everyone else in this tale is victimized: poverty and prejudice.
Quvenzhane Wallis, who was 6 at the time of production, plays Hushpuppy in Beasts of the Southern Wild, a fantastical tale about self-reliance and community after a storm in Louisiana.
Credit Jess Pinkham / Fox Searchlight Pictures
Wink (Dwight Henry) raises Hushpuppy with heavy doses of tough love.
Quvenzhane Wallis, the pint-sized African-American star of the wonderfully inventive film Beasts of the Southern Wild, was plucked from a Louisiana elementary school, and she's a find on many levels.
Six years old when the film was in production, Quvenzhane has a halo of wiry hair and enormous black eyes that flash fear and ferocity in quick succession. She's a mini-warrior in proudly flexed biceps and white rubber boots, and when, late in the film, well-wishers tog her up in a girlie dress and braids, she deflates, though not for long.
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