Vincere
IFC Films

Mid-August Lunch
Zeitgeist Films

Here, remarkably and remarkable, is a new film by Marco Bellocchio, a survivor of the Italian post-World War II directing galaxy. His first two films, Fist in His Pocket (1965) and China Is Near (1967), announced the arrival of a talented troublemaker. His subject was the bourgeois family in relation to a changing society--“the connection between the family and the wider political

Recently I was rummaging through the living mess of papers in my office--my nachlass, however hard-driven, will not be a hard drive--when I discovered a fading sheet I had not seen in decades. It was a copy of a letter that was given to me by a little man in the municipal hall in Hebron in 1980. I had traveled to Hebron to look into an incident that occurred a few days earlier on Purim, a triumphalist holiday on which Jews are enjoined to revel in inversions and to drink themselves out of their capacity to distinguish between good and evil.

Meyer Schapiro Abroad: Letters to Lillian and Travel Notebooks

Edited by Daniel Esterman

(Getty Research Institute, 243 pp., $39.95)

I.

Images of African immigrants rioting in the streets of a small southern Italian city, throwing rocks, blocking roads, and breaking store and car windows, briefly exposed a shocking reality: the existence of Italy’s growing migrant-labor population, mostly Africans, an estimated 20,000 of them working under inhuman conditions, living in abandoned buildings or improvised structures without heat or working toilets, sleeping four (even five) to a mattress while laboring off the books for about $30 a day.

Earlier today I was nodding along to Chris Orr's good-humored critique of 2012, but, you know, news like this makes me think more people really need to see the movie and learn not to antagonize supervolcanoes:

In Ruins
By Christopher Woodward
(Pantheon Books, 280 pp., $24)
Click here to purchase the book.