Latest news with #Karsh
Gulf Today
28-05-2025
- Gulf Today
Thief of famed Churchill photo sentenced to jail: Canadian media
A Canadian man who stole the famed portrait of a scowling Winston Churchill in a brazen international art heist was sentenced to jail Monday, according to local media. The "Roaring Lion" portrait of the late British prime minister had been gifted to the Fairmont Chateau Laurier hotel in Ottawa by the late Armenian-born Canadian photographer Yousuf Karsh. Taken by Karsh after the wartime leader addressed the Canadian parliament in 1941, Churchill's scowl becoming a symbol of British defiance in World War II. In August 2022 hotel staff noticed the photograph, hanging in a reading room next to the main lobby, had been replaced with a forgery, and Ottawa police in 2024 announced they had found the culprit. According to Canada's public broadcaster CBC, the man, Jeffrey Wood, pleaded guilty to forgery, theft, and trafficking property obtained by crime in March. He was sentenced to jail for a duration of two years less a day on Monday at an Ottawa courthouse. CBC reported that Justice Robert Wadden told Wood that he was guilty of stealing a "cultural and historical" portrait that was a "point of national pride." In 2024, Ottawa police said that with the help of public tips and forensic sleuthing, they had found Wood living just west of Ottawa while the stolen portrait was in Italy. The portrait had been sold through an auction house in London to a buyer in Italy, both of whom were unaware it was stolen, police said then. It was returned to the hotel last September. The image is arguably the most recognized of Churchill and widely circulated, even appearing on the British five pound note. In an account posted on his official website, Karsh said making the portrait "changed my life." He had captured Churchill's churlish expression immediately after plucking a cigar out of the British leader's mouth. "By the time I got back to my camera, he looked so belligerent he could have devoured me," Karsh said. "It was at that instant that I took the photograph." Agence France-Presse
France 24
27-05-2025
- France 24
Thief of famed Churchill photo sentenced to jail: Canadian media
The "Roaring Lion" portrait of the late British prime minister had been gifted to the Fairmont Chateau Laurier hotel in Ottawa by the late Armenian-born Canadian photographer Yousuf Karsh. Taken by Karsh after the wartime leader addressed the Canadian parliament in 1941, Churchill's scowl becoming a symbol of British defiance in World War II. In August 2022 hotel staff noticed the photograph, hanging in a reading room next to the main lobby, had been replaced with a forgery, and Ottawa police in 2024 announced they had found the culprit. According to Canada's public broadcaster CBC, the man, Jeffrey Wood, pleaded guilty to forgery, theft, and trafficking property obtained by crime in March. He was sentenced to jail for a duration of two years less a day on Monday at an Ottawa courthouse. CBC reported that Justice Robert Wadden told Wood that he was guilty of stealing a "cultural and historical" portrait that was a "point of national pride." In 2024, Ottawa police said that with the help of public tips and forensic sleuthing, they had found Wood living just west of Ottawa while the stolen portrait was in Italy. The portrait had been sold through an auction house in London to a buyer in Italy, both of whom were unaware it was stolen, police said then. It was returned to the hotel last September. The image is arguably the most recognized of Churchill and widely circulated, even appearing on the British five pound note. In an account posted on his official website, Karsh said making the portrait "changed my life." He had captured Churchill's churlish expression immediately after plucking a cigar out of the British leader's mouth. "By the time I got back to my camera, he looked so belligerent he could have devoured me," Karsh said. "It was at that instant that I took the photograph." © 2025 AFP
UPI
27-05-2025
- UPI
Canadian who stole iconic Winston Churchill portrait sentenced
Ottawa Police members pose for a photo in Rome, Italy, in September of 2024 during a ceremony marking the repatriation of The Roaring Lion portrait of Sir Winston Churchill. The famed photo had been stolen from an Ottawa hotel in the winter of 2021-2022. On Monday, the thief, Jeffrey Lain James Wood, was sentenced to two years less a day in prison. Photo courtesy of Ottawa Police Service/ Facebook May 27 (UPI) -- A Canadian man who pleaded guilty to stealing an iconic portrait of Sir Winston Churchill from a storied Ottawa hotel more than three years ago has been sentenced to two years less a day in prison. Jeffrey Lain James Wood received his sentence Monday in an Ottawa courtroom, CBC reported. He had pleaded guilty in March to forgery, theft over $5,000 -- or $3,640 USD -- and trafficking property obtained by crime. The Roaring Lion is a world-famous photograph of Churchill taken by renowned Armenian-Canadian photographer Yousuf Karsh in 1941 in the Canadian capital of Ottawa. A resident of Ottawa's famed Fairmont Chateau Laurier for nearly two decades, Karsh moved out of the hotel in 1998, and upon his exit, gifted the hotel seven photographs, including the Churchill portrait, which hung on its walls until the pandemic hit. According to the Chateau Laurier, the photograph was stolen between Dec. 25, 2021, and Jan. 6, 2022, and was replaced by the thief with an imitation, "deceiving everyone until a hotel staff member discovered the theft" that August. Ottawa police said the hotel employee had noticed differences with the frame and the wire mechanism, which led to the discovery of the fake print, complete with a forged Karsh signature. An investigation brought Ottawa police to the attention of a Roaring Lion print that was said to be from the Karsh estate and was up for sale at London's Sotheby's auction house. It was then sold to a buyer in Genoa, Italy. Ottawa police said neither the buyer nor the auction house knew the photograph was stolen. Police then learned that the seller was Wood, a man in his 40s from Powassan Ont., who had created a fake identity and credentials in an effort to move the famed photograph. Wood was arrested and charged on April 24, 2024. The photograph was returned to the hotel in September of that year and returned to its walls on Nov. 15, 2024.
New York Times
30-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Forget Grotesque Sights. David Cronenberg Does Grotesque Desires.
In David Cronenberg's newest film, 'The Shrouds,' a widower named Karsh Relikh, played by Vincent Cassell, takes a woman on a blind date to his dead wife's grave. They stop in front of her tombstone — a double plot, with empty space for Karsh to occupy in the future — and pay their respects in a very Cronenbergian way. On a screen on the headstone is a real-time image of his wife's body, decaying in its grave, captured by the high-tech metallic 'shroud' she was buried in; it is also transmitted to a smartphone app that allows Karsh to zoom and rotate the image at will. This technology allows people to remain connected to their loved ones by watching their bodies disintegrate, like a mash-up of the Buddhist corpse meditation and a mindfulness app. 'I can see what's happening to her,' Karsh says, enraptured, as his date squirms in discomfort. 'I'm in the grave with her. I'm involved with her body the way I was in life, only even more.' You know what you are about to be shown: a body in some state of decay. But as the screen traces the desiccated shape of Karsh's wife, Becca, with tender slowness, the effect is still irrationally startling. Death has rendered Becca's elegant features down to an anonymized skull. Even so, there is someone on the screen whom Karsh recognizes and responds to at the deepest emotional level. You feel disgust, of course, but also a secondhand intimacy. What's shocking is not the rotting body but the affection with which it is viewed, a tenderness that allows you to continue looking. You are not encountering death in the abstract, impersonal and horrific: You are seeing it anew, through the devoted gaze of the lover who has been left behind. These days there is nothing so shocking about seeing gruesome things on film. Horror movies are now mainstream, and it's common for at least a few of the biggest releases at any given megaplex to offer some kind of grisly fright. Violence is also more common than ever on the screens of our laptops and phones, where social media catalogs accidents, bombings and dead children with eerie nonchalance. Despite all this, Cronenberg's films remain difficult to digest. They are full of disconcerting bodily transgressions, rooted in aberrant desire. They get under the skin, repulsing even viewers accustomed to the usual Hollywood blood and gore. His last film, 'Crimes of the Future,' from 2022, prompted one dissatisfied reviewer to write that it 'should be renamed crimes against humanity.' Perhaps this is because of the way Cronenberg's movies tend to relish the things that are most terrifying to the audience. Other horror films share the viewer's repugnance, even reinforce it; only Cronenberg asks you to imagine what it would be like to be erotically transfixed by a car crash (as in 'Crash') or by tenderly performing ornamental surgeries on your partner (as in 'Crimes of the Future'). His films invite you into a morality that does not yet exist, hinting at the possibility that the values and norms of your world could be supplanted someday. In a recent interview, he pointed out that we already possess the technical know-how to make something like his fictional death shrouds: 'It's an imagined technology probably nobody really wants, but I'm saying: What if somebody did want it?' Rather than dwelling in the horror of transgression, his interest is in what lies beyond — in transgression's intimate life. Lately it feels as if movies are more Cronenbergian than ever, obsessed with triggering our fear of the body's capacity for gruesome transformation. 'The Substance,' a hit from the French director Coralie Fargeat, served up the story of an aging actress who creates a younger, sexier double of herself to stay on top of her body-obsessed industry — but suffers a rapid and freakish decrepitude when the double decides to go rogue. 'Mickey 17,' a science-fiction romp from the Oscar winner Bong Joon Ho, follows a high-risk worker who is used as an experimental guinea pig, then cloned and tossed ruthlessly down a recycling chute. In each, we see bodies agonizing under the burden of a monstrous social system. But each, arguably, approaches its material from a conventional moral standpoint. Fargeat's story just exaggerates our misogynistic fear of aging into a full-blown spectacle, where viewers squirm at the idea of a monstrously aged and disfigured Demi Moore realizing that her index finger has become the wizened necrotic digit of a crone. What's missing in the film — which Fargeat herself says was influenced by Cronenberg's 'The Fly' — is the invitation to feel differently about the impasses of body image and aging. The story simply performs 'fear fulfillment': the affirmation of dread we already hold inside us about aging, loss and rejection. No matter how bad you think growing old is going to be, 'The Substance' seems to say, it'll actually be worse. 'The Shrouds' is just the most recent in a late-in-life sequence of Cronenberg movies that do the opposite: Instead of terrifying you by showing you something you are already terrified of, these stories reveal squeamish new possibilities. Cronenberg films used to look into the future; 'Videodrome,' from 1983, even coined a phrase, 'Long live the new flesh,' that has lived on as a celebration of biological matter extended and mutated by its entanglement with technology. (Never fear, those stories seemed to say: Once the future has made you into something unrecognizably alien, it won't feel alien anymore. It'll feel like home.) But in this recent work, the 82-year-old Cronenberg seems more interested in looking back at mortality, a problem that no technology has been able to solve. He shows that once-new flesh aging, breaking down, sinking into disability. He also shows its vulnerabilities opening up new avenues for emotional connection. Karsh Relikh finds a sort of renewal in his romance with a blind woman, who places her hands directly on his face to learn about him, inviting him back into a world of touch. In 'Crimes of the Future,' the widespread loss of the sensation of pain leads to a culture of erotic surgery, in which lovers explore and reshape one another's bodies. In contrast with the bodily regimes of Fargeat and Bong — and horror directors like Julia Ducorneau and Cronenberg's own son, Brandon — Cronenberg's is an almost optimistic vision. It's just an extremely unusual one. When we think about aging, we think about the abjection of the flesh, its inevitable disintegration, the rigidity of its path through the world. The most striking thing in 'The Shrouds' is how this vulnerability is refigured as an enticing point of potential. The losses that Karsh's wife suffers in her long battle with a rare cancer — an amputated arm and a mastectomy — are recast as eerie and unnerving, but also startlingly erotic. They make her body more unmistakably her own. The horror comes instead in the form of Karsh's virtual assistant, an A.I. avatar who happens to have Becca's voice and appearance: It begins to lash out, mimicking Becca's disfigurements and gyrating lasciviously. Becca's disintegration emphasizes the parts of her that endure; the avatar, on the other hand, is a parody of that real flesh, an uncanny and malevolent imitation. It is the versions of Becca that won't decay — the digital copy, the nightmares Karsh has of her painful last days — that are monstrous, nothing like the woman he longs for. The real version, the one that lingers on in the shroud, is at peace. Unlike the screen, which mummifies an image, the shroud allows for the passage of time, the ability to change, the heightened meaning that mortality gives to what we do while we still live. 'I lived in Becca's body,' Karsh tells Becca's identical twin sister, as he struggles to explain his grief in living on after her. 'It was the only place I really lived.' Death is sublime and terrifying, life-ending and life-giving. What it's not, as Cronenberg has told us throughout his long and strange career, is the end.
Yahoo
29-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
The Best New Movies of April 2025
(L-R): Jayme Lawson as Pearline, Wunmi Mosaku as Annie, Michael B. Jordan as Smoke, Miles Caton as Sammie Moore, and Li Jun Li as Grace Chow in Sinners. Credit - Warner Bros. Pictures The Oscars are behind us, and the summer movie season hasn't yet hit us full blast: Springtime is always the point at which some of the best new movies of the year start showing up. Often, these movies are merely enjoyable—and thank God for that. But this particular spring season has been especially strong, bringing us at least two pictures we'll still be talking about at the end of the year. Here are five of the best movies released in April. As a thriller, David Cronenberg's The Shrouds isn't a very good film: the plot mechanics feel like an afterthought, tied up in the end with a messy shrug. When I revisited the film recently at a New York City theater, I overheard a couple of young Cronendudes casually grumbling about how bad they thought it was. Yet there's something about this mysterious, tender picture—a story of grief, and almost-renewal—that's not easy to shake. Vincent Cassel stars as Karsh, a man mourning the fairly recent loss of his wife—she's played, in several dream sequences, by Diane Kruger. Karsh has invented a special shroud that allows the living to witness the decomposition of the dead, a way of bringing physical intimacy into the grave; he has also made this technology available to others, opening a cemetery equipped with a number of these special shroud-enabled tombs. (There's also a chic, high-end restaurant on-site, a wicked Cronenburgian touch.) One night, the cemetery is plundered; graves are tipped over, their wi-fi connections disabled. Karsh's sister-in-law (also played by Diane Kruger) and ex-brother-in-law (Guy Pearce) try to help him unravel the mystery of who might do such a thing, and why. Meanwhile, Karsh struggles to find his way back to life. The Shrouds' true center is Kassel's performance. He translates grief into a restless electrical energy; you can practically feel it vibrating through his agile, lanky frame. You don't need to have fought in a war to make a great war movie: though neither Steven Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola, nor Stanley Kubrick did, the movies they made about the horrors of combat endure. But you could argue that the stakes are higher when a filmmaker who's been to hell and back sets out to express the truth of his experience. Iraq War veteran Ray Mendoza has teamed with Civil War and Ex Machina director Alex Garland to make Warfare, which dramatizes the day in 2006 a team of Navy SEALs, Mendoza among them, entered an apartment building in Ramadi province, Iraq, on a treacherous surveillance mission. Within just a few hours, al-Qaeda forces had tossed a grenade in their midst, injuring two SEALs, one of them sniper and medic Elliott Miller (played in the movie by Cosmo Jarvis). Miller was even more seriously wounded, along with another SEAL (Joseph Quinn), when an IED exploded outside the building as they were being evacuated. Mendoza and others who took part in the mission (played by a group of fine young actors including D'Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai, Charles Melton, and Will Poulter) pieced the story together from memories of that day. Miller doesn't remember the day's events at all, and Mendoza has said that he wanted the movie to be 'a living snapshot' for him, a way of honoring all that he lived through but can't recall. Warfare, beautifully crafted, tells the harrowing story of the men's rescue in real time. If a movie can be elegant and brutal at once, this one is. [] Sigrid Nunez's 2018 novel The Friend is a gorgeous, unsentimental novel about friendship, the selfish nature of writing, and the way loving an animal can change us, not always in the ways we expect. Scott McGehee and David Siegel's film adaptation can't quite capture the prickly subtlety of the book—yet on its own, it still works as a lively and thoughtful reflection on the way the death of a loved one can complicate rather than simplify our feelings for that person. It's also, of course, a movie about what it means to love an animal: Naomi Watts stars as a writer and academic, living in a tiny, rent-controlled Manhattan apartment, who inherits a dog from an older ex-lover (Bill Murray). But this isn't just any dog; it's a noble giant, a Great Dane known as Apollo. (He's played by a fabulous animal actor named Bing.) What happens when a creature of such magnificence takes up residence—and a lot of space—in a no-dogs-allowed studio? That's the main dramatic fulcrum of The Friend, though in the end, the story is really about how the dog you're not sure you want becomes the dog you don't want to live without. What makes Ryan Coogler's extraordinary horror entertainment Sinners, set in the 1932 Mississippi Delta, so effective—so chilling, so hypnotic, and occasionally so grimly funny—is the way it yields to mystery, never seeking to overexplain. Michael B. Jordan plays twin brothers, Smoke and Stack, returning to their hometown from a stint in prohibition-era Chicago. Flush with cash, and toting cases of booze, they hope to open a juke joint that very night. They enlist their cousin, blues prodigy Sammie (Miles Caton), to provide the entertainment, and within a few hours of opening, the place is a smash hit—until a trio of vampire hillbilly musicians, led by Jack O'Connell's scarily seductive Remmick, show up at the door, begging with utmost politeness to be let in. Sinners is one of the great vampire movies of the modern age, mining the legend of these perpetual outsiders who desperately yearn to belong, but whose silky promises are rooted in treachery. Mostly, though, Sinners is alive to the mystery of music: the way, for centuries, white people and Black people seemed to hear and feel music differently, until somehow the sounds they were hearing, and making, merged and blurred into a kind of aural futureworld, one that's still unfolding today. Sinners is gory, seductive, pitiless. But there's also something wistful about it, as if its characters had glimpsed a possibility of freedom, unity, and happiness that, nearly 100 years later, is still out of reach. [] Kevin Macdonald and Sam Rice-Edwards' documentary traces an eventful year in the lives of John Lennon and Yoko Ono, who moved from their English estate to a small apartment in New York's Greenwich Village in 1972. They sought a connection with other artists and radicals; they also watched a lot of television, immersing themselves unapologetically in modern American life with an almost naïve enthusiasm, tuning in to, say, The Mary Tyler Moore show just as everyone else did. Then again, TV was different then, essential for cultural connection among humans, and in this illuminating, detailed doc, Macdonald and Rice-Edwards show how television, as well as the vitality of New York, galvanized Lennon and Ono as artists and activists. The movie is anchored by footage from the August 1972 One to One concert the duo organized as a response to Geraldo Rivera's truly shocking exposé of the Willowbrook institution, where children with disabilities were horrifically maltreated and abused. Their anger at this cruelty—revealed to them through the little television that graced their economically sized Bank Street apartment, which is re-created in the film—moved them to act. If nothing else, One to One reminds us of one of the gravest dangers of the modern world: That of becoming anesthetized to human suffering around us. Contact us at letters@
