40 years ago David Fantle and his writing partner, Tom Johnson, saved up enough money from their summer jobs to fly to Los Angeles for interviews with Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly. They were 18-years-old Minnesotans with no credentials other than chutzpah and a love for Golden Age cinema. They had never done anything like…
This December, Universal Pictures will re-release “Schindler’s List” on the occasion of the Oscar-winning film’s 25th anniversary. As Slate reports, the Holocaust drama that earned Steven Spielberg his first Academy Award for Best Director will return to theaters on December 7. The film, about the German industrialist Oskar Schindler (Liam Neeson, who was nominated for…
As I watched “BlackkKlansman” in a Colorado theater filled with white folks, I felt bored and extremely irritated. While Spike Lee’s latest joint is aesthetically beautiful, the content feels boring and reductive. I don’t think any black or Jewish person needs a flashy movie just to tell them that the Klu Klux Klan is dangerous….
There are moments in “Memoir of War” where you’d be forgiven for experiencing déjà vu. I’ve seen this empty Paris cityscape before in Antonioni’s “L’Eclisse.” I’ve endured this long, tracking shot through a crowd in Godard’s “Weekend.” I’ve heard the consonant voiceover in Alain Resnais and Marguerite Duras’ “Hiroshima Mon Amour.” But if you look…
Science fiction universes ought to aspire to “Star Trek’s” charge to “explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before.” So why do so many works of sci-fi seem content to timidly remain with the same ugly stereotypes we have here on earth?…
“It’s a lot darker than a Disney movie,” Paula Bernstein says to a chirpy talk show host who has just compared the magical coincidences of her separated-at-birth story to a fantasy from the wonderful world of Uncle Walt. The host is gobsmacked by the facts that Paula and her identical twin sister Elyse Schein both…
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…
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