1974 was among the worst years of Steven Spielberg’s young life. His second feature, “Jaws” ran over time and over budget. The mechanical shark — known to the crew as “Bruce” — kept malfunctioning. Shooting at sea proved more difficult than anyone could imagine. The film’s most bankable actor, Robert Shaw, was often drunk on…
Yes, we know: Robert Redford, razor-jawlined golden boy of American cinema, is not Jewish. And yet! The actor and director, who announced his intention to retire from the former vocation on August 6, has spent many years meaningfully adjacent to American Jewish culture. He romanced Barbra Streisand in “The Way We Were,” served as Paul…
This year’s New York Film Festival will mark a major moment for Jewish film. The Film Society of Lincoln Center, which hosts the 56-year old festival, announced the festival’s main slate lineup on August 7. Filmmaker brothers Joel and Ethan Coen, 88-year old documentarian Frederick Wiseman and visual artist Julian Schnabel are on the bill…
In a DVD extra for his 2006 film “Inland Empire” the director David Lynch said, “If you’re playing the movie on a telephone, you will never in a trillion years experience the film.” But Lynch’s exhortation hasn’t stopped ex-DreamWorks Animation CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg, who’s betting big money that tablet and mobile viewing of cinema-quality content…
Many people assume that the hardest part of being an Orthodox woman is following the religious code. But it’s not — it’s playing by the social rules. The new documentary “93Queen” follows Judge Ruchie Freier, a Haredi woman, through the founding of the first all-female Orthodox EMT group, Ezras Nashim, and Freier’s campaign for Civil…
Last weekend, the sixth installment of the “Mission: Impossible” film franchise, “Mission: Impossible – Fallout,” rocketed to the top of the box office. The movies track the travails of Impossible Missions Force (IMF) master spy Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) as he hangs from helicopters, brawls on narrow walkways and sprints through cobblestone alleys in a…
Pott’s disease is a form of tuberculosis that bypasses the lungs and takes up residency in the bones, particularly the vertebrae. It is this macabre ailment that afflicts Emmanuel, the protagonist of Romanian director Radu Jude’s new film “Scarred Hearts,” playing at Manhattan’s Anthology Film Archives starting July 27. By the time the movie begins,…
At 92, Mel Brooks is a lot of things: A Kennedy Center award recipient, a titan of both stage and screen even a vampire grandfather in the recently-released “Hotel Transylvania 3,” but for all these distinctions he reduces himself to one thing. “I’m just a Jew comic,” he tells David Denby in a new profile…
An early screenplay Stanley Kubrick which was believed to have been lost just re-surfaced after sixty years. The screenplay, written in 1956, was titled “Burning Secret” and was an adaptation of Viennese novelist, Stefan Zweig’s 1913 novella of the same name. The novella is told from the perspective of a twelve-year old Jewish boy. He…
Towards the end of his career, Stanley Kubrick began presenting some of the less attractive qualities of a genius. His hygiene became dubious, he was famously gruff with reporters, allegedly abusive to his actors and notoriously gnomic when it came to interpretations of his work. So a recently unearthed clip of him explaining one of…
Claude Lanzmann, the French Jewish journalist, author, and filmmaker who died on July 5 at age 92, was not a believer in the proverb “live and let live.” As he explained in his memoir “The Patagonian Hare,” his celebrated film “Shoah” (1985) required aggressively pursuing Nazi murderers to demand explanations of their crimes. Fortunately, Lanzmann…
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