The Bibi Files (2024)

This insightful documentary about Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who has been in power, on and off, for more than 17 years since 1996, is about the corruption charges that he has been facing. The parallels between his situation and the recently reelected American president are both startlingly clear and frightening that about half the population in both countries vote for a leader who is clearly a criminal who has the goal of enriching themselves at the expense of their country. The film consists of leaked interviews by the police with Netanyahu, his wife and his son, as well as the investigators’ interviews with Miriam Adelson and husband, Sheldon, the hotel and casino magnate who died in 2021. These longtime Netanyahu allies here sound, in admittedly brief clips, like they’re trying to distance themselves from Bibi and Sara. The video clips of police interrogations are interspersed with interviews by the filmmakers with journalists, politicians, and a childhood friend of the prime minister. The film makes a strong case that Netanyahu’s legal woes – the politician is charged with fraud, breach of trust and accepting bribes – mean that it’s very much in his interests to prolong Israel’s war on Gaza. Interviewees talk of wholesale quantities of champagne and cigars requested by Netanyahu from associates, with extravagant gifts of jewelry for his wife, Sara. Meanwhile, interrogation footage of her husband – a key component of the film – is eye-opening. He’s described elsewhere as an adept liar and the whole situation is a warning for other democracy’s that have autocratic leaders.

Catalina by Karla Cornejo Villvicencio

This is the second book by this author that I have read--the first was The Undocumented Americans, a short memoir of the author's time working as a volunteer translator for unaccompanied minors who were applying for asylum. It, like this, is a short work that speaks volumes about what it is to be an undocumented immigrant. It was a finalist for The National Book Award for non-fiction, and this was long listed for the award for Fiction this year. Catalina immigrated to the United States from Ecuador as a child, grew up in Queens living with her undocumented grandparents, and the book covers a year of her attendance at Harvard. This in some ways parallels the author's own life, and is meant to highlight the plight of students who are smart, have real potential, but without proper documentation, none of that is of much help to them. This is not so much a book about campus life as it is about the ties that bind immigrants, how those ties are remarkably different than their fellow students, especially at these elite universities, and how that anchors and also limits them. The author is one to watch--she is a compelling story teller with a lot to say, and I would recommend this.

Black Box Diaries (2024)

This documentary, which made the list of nominees for the 2025 Best Feature Length Documentary Oscars, shines an unflattering light on Japan's rape culture. Not that there was any doubt about this, but #MeToo extends beyond the borders of the United States, and this is a story that reveals that to be true. The story begins in 2015, when JPnese journalist Shiori Ito — then a 26-year-old intern at Thomson Reuters — went out for a drink with renowned TV reporter Noriyuki Yamaguchi, only to become intoxicated and taken against her will to his hotel room. Her allegations of ensuing rape are brusquely dismissed by police: Under a century-old Japanese law that has only recently been revised, sexual assault wasn’t necessarily defined by non-consent, especially if the victim’s resistance was not violent. Ito methodically lays out a national culture built to protect men’s honor first in such situations — in particular well-protected men like Yamaguchi, whose friends in high places include Shinzo Abe, then Japan’s Prime Minister (spoiler alert--he does not come off well here either). Discouraged by both the authorities and her family from taking the matter any further — at potential cost to her reputation and career prospects — Ito nonetheless goes public with her accusations in 2017, pursuing legal action against Yamaguchi and finding a publisher for her tell-all book “Black Box,” a volume intended not just to relay her experience but to prompt a reevaluation of Japan’s archaic sexual assault laws. Undeterred when the prosecution review board rules that she has no case, she transfers it to civil court instead, whereupon her fortunes gradually begin to shift, even as she faces hostility from the media and hate mail from the general public. This is a compelling tale--it opens with CCTV footage from the hotel where she was raped showing that we was carried into the hotel and tries to escape several times and then follow with Ito's interview with the driver that night backing up her story that she wanted to leave and her attacker wouldn't let her. We know the ending, and the film unfolds to show just how hard it is to get justice for sexual violence in Japan.

Veronica by Mary Gaitskill

I am slowly (very slowly) working my way through books on the New York Times Best 100 Books of the 21st Century that I had not read when it came out, and this is one of them. I was unfamiliar with the author, but she is apparently known for her attention to sex at the fringes and the people who live there. Allison is the heroine and the book vacillates between where she is now and where she once was. She is a former model now in her late 40's, and haunted by her friendship with Veronica, an older woman who died of AIDS. Alison herself has hepatitis C now and cleans offices. Once beautiful, she has not aged well. She lived fast and hard and it shows. She takes fistfuls of codeine so she can move her arm, injured in a car accident, enough to be able to wash windows as part of her job. It is hard for her to reconcile her decrepitude with her glittering memories of being a model in Paris -- a life that crashed to a close after an affair with a powerful, corrupt agent ended badly. This is a cautionary tale, what could happen if you grasp at the brass ring and slip badly in pursuit of it. It is tightly written and all too believable.

The Remarkable Life of Ibelin (2024)

Here is the thing. This is a movie about a young man who was born with an illness that would inevitably lead to an early death after a long period of decline. So this is a tough story, and it stirkes close to home for me. My youngest son had a brain tumor when he was five years old and had surgery, radiation, and 18 months of chemotherapy, so I know what it is like to fear for your child's life, to mourn the things that they will miss, and to grapple with the reality that death might come too soon for them. Some people might run to the hills rather than watch this, but I lean into it. Ironically, it is my childhood cancer survivor, now an adult himself, who wanted to watch this. Mats Steen was born in 1989, and before he was even a few years old, his parents knew something was wrong with his development. He was diagnosed with a truly cruel disease called Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy, which weakened his physical state with each passing year, leading to his death at the age of 25. The opening half-hour details his existence through interviews with his emotionally vulnerable parents & sister, alongside home videos that make his fading physical condition palpable. After he died, his parents discovered that Mats had spent possibly as much as 20,000 hours in a game called “World of Warcraft,” where he created an avatar named Ibelin. To say he had a rich online life would be an understatement, and it is presented in his own words, through the game, as well as with interviews of players who he had relationships with in the game. It really allows for an understanding of not only why this experience mattered to him, but how much Mats shaped the lives of others through his encounters. He made friends, had his first crush, encouraged growth in others, and found his best self. A lot of modern culture derides screen time as a fruitless pursuit, but this illustrate its potential connective value, how it can bring people together in ways that forever change them, and in that light, is strangely uplifting.

The War Below by Ernest Sheyder

Civilization would not exist were it not for miners. Every year the world’s oldest industry supplies hundreds of megatons of the primary metals and minerals that are essential to all subsequent industries—from medical devices to kitchen appliances, aircraft, toys, power plants, computers and cars. In order to build the things that we are hoping will save us from our rapidly changing climate, things such as electric vehicles, solar panels, cell phones, and millions of other devices, it means the world must dig more mines to extract lithium, copper, and other vital building blocks. Hence it’s consequential when the governments of Europe and the U.S. implement policies requiring that global mining expand, and soon, by 400% to 7,000%. Where will it all come from? Mines are deeply unpopular, even as they have a role to play in fighting climate change and powering crucial technologies. These tensions have sparked a worldwide reckoning over the sourcing of necessary materials, and this book tries to unravel the complexity of the issue and reveals the ongoing brawl between industry titans, conservationists, community groups, policymakers, and many others over whether the habitats of rare plants, sensitive ecosystems, Indigenous holy sites, and other places should be dug up for their riches.

Wallace and Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl (2024)

This is a movie for all ages--which cannot be said of many animated features this year. Bring the kids, they will have fun with this one. Feathers McGraw, the enemy of the Oscar-winning “The Wrong Trousers” has returned in all his silent glory, glowering from a prison (or, in this case, a zoo) cell and planning his revenge. Back at home, Wallace seems more co-dependent on Gromit than ever, but everything changes when he invents a “smart gnome” named Norbot, who can help Gromit in his garden and perform other tasks around the house. When Feathers hacks Norbot, it leads to a hysterical army of angry robot gnomes and a battle between the old-fashioned Wallace & Gromit and the future. Built on a foundation of comedy that comes from the silent era, this is just beautifully structured, a perfect rhythm of plotting and humor that works for all ages. It’s just so comforting to see something this creatively spry and uncluttered in its approach-—there’s something funny about using the human toil required to make stop-motion to tell what’s basically an anti-AI story—but more than anything there are simple charms in this lovely little film, one that gets in, entertains you, and gets out.

Life And Death Of The American Worker by Alice Driver

This book chronicles the worker experience at the Tyson plant in Arkansas, but it could be about any meat packing plant. The stories here are very specific, telling about specific workers and their families, but as a health care provider in Iowa, where the governor declared meat packing plant employees to be essential workers, where there was absolutely no effort to impose safety or distancing in the work place, and in April of 2020 over 700 employees at a meat packing plant in eastern Iowa tested positive for COVID. Many were hospitalized and quite a few died. They were largely middle aged and immigrants. The same is true at Tyson. The employer controls all aspects of the supply chain, and they control all aspects of the employee work experience, including health assessment and maintenance. There is nothing that is independent, so when there is a chemical spill, the company controls the narrative, and the workers have no ability to be treated appropriately, independently, or fairly. It is exactly what you would expect and deeply disturbing at the same time.

Memoir of a Snail (2024)

This is an animated movie, but think more Life Of A Zucchini than something more silly and Happily Ever After. This is the story of two children, twins named Grace and Gilbert, but if is by no means a story for kids. Grace, who is telling her life story to her favorite pet snail, Sylvia, after the death of the last person on Earth she cared about, her best friend Pinky (a wonderful Jacki Weaver). It’s a story of notable hardship. Mom died in childbirth. Dad was a paraplegic who didn’t live long enough to raise Grace or her twin brother Gilbert (voiced by Kodi Smit-McPhee in adulthood). The twins were split after Dad passed, sending Grace to a pair of swingers—yes, this is a shockingly adult stop-motion movie, likely setting a new record for nudity in the form—and Gilbert to a family of religious fundamentalists on the other side of the country who use and abuse him. Much of the movie consists of letters sent back and forth between Grace and Gilbert, vowing to return to each other as soon as they can escape the shells that life has placed on them.

What I Ate In One Year by Stanley Tucci

I like the author's view on food as well as Italian food in general, and so this should have been a slam dunk win for me, but it just wasn't. It is essentially a diary of the food that he eats and prepares over the course of a calendar year, interspersed with what he is doing and who he is doing it with, and the narrative lacked the humor that I would need to be completely caught up in it. Because he is an actor, and one who was filming a movie the year this was written, and because his wife is a literary agent and the sister of an actor, there is some name dropping that happens as well--which is a distraction and a bit of a detraction for me, but it might appeal to others. The positives for me were: 1. the Italian food--he and his wife like to cook, as do my spouse and I, and they make some very good food between them over the year. 2. I was intrigued by the cookware that he developed--he seems fussy about the things he cooks with and the next time I need to buy some pans, these will be at the top of my list. They say you can use them on induction cook tops, and my pasta pot cannot be, for example. 3. I am going to check out a cookbook he likes by Julius Roberts, because again, he seems fussy. 4. I felt validated in bringing home things to cook with when I travel and for packing my own food to bring when we travel by car. I am a bit of a lightweight compared to him where that is concerned. 5. The restaurants he eats in may be worth checking out--London and Rome are the two cities where he eats out a lot, so I guess I will just have to go back to them to see if this is in fact the case. All in all, you have to be deeply into food or deeply into actors to really love this book but it isn't a tough read, it has that going for it. And I definitely would not turn down an invitation to have him cook for me.