The year of Leonard Bernstein’s centenary, already widely celebrated, just got even better: Jake Gyllenhaal, your Serious Jewish Actor crush, is going to play Bernstein in a forthcoming biopic. As Deadline reports, Gyllenhaal will produce and star in “The American,” which will begin filming this coming fall from a screenplay by Michael Mitnick, adapted from…
Olivier Assayas’s 1994 film “Cold Water” was a coming of age film in more ways than one. A teen romance set in the heady aftermath of Paris’s May ’68 uprising, the film showcases adolescent angst, romance, and the friction that accompanies the first encounters with something larger than oneself. For Assayas, it also represents, “The…
LOS ANGELES (JTA) — 1993 was a dramatic year in the memorialization of the Holocaust. In April, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum opened its doors; 45 million visitors later it is a fixture adjacent to the National Mall in Washington, D.C., not only telling the story of the Holocaust but demonstrating the ongoing significance of…
Among its various achievements, the 1943 thriller “Le Corbeau” (or “The Raven”) earned its director, Henri-Georges Clouzot, a lifetime ban from filmmaking. Clouzot had made his caustic movie during the height of the Nazi occupation of France for a German-controlled production company called Continental Films, which had been created by Joseph Goebbels to pacify French…
In 2000, the Israeli Defense Forces produced a major feature film that tackled one of the army’s most taboo subjects, the rising number of soldier suicides. The IDF Army Spokesperson’s Film Unit, headed by Michael Yohay, was given virtually unlimited access to the army’s resource: helicopters, tanks, hundreds of extras and permission to film at…
Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece “2001: A Space Odyssey” was released in April, 1968, which makes it fifty years old this year. It reinvented the science fiction genre but significantly was underpinned with Jewishness. “2001” was backed by MGM, a studio otherwise known as “Mayer’s Gantze Mishpochah.” It was perceived as a very Jewish firm abroad in…
In the end, the Jews come back. They’re warmly dressed, smiling, clean and apparently none the worse for wear. It’s a convivial scene, a meeting between men who misunderstood each other but never meant harm. Two young girls in light-colored dresses present flowers, in recognition and appreciation: We’re so glad you’re here. The end of…
What movies make essential viewing for someone seeking to understand the United States? Ask Martin Scorsese, and he might say — as he did, per a Film Journal International report, at a recent panel discussion in New York — that movies that meet the criteria “look squarely at the struggles, violent disagreements and the tragedies…
Do you remember when Ridley Scott directed a film about Exodus, featuring Christian Bale as Moses? I didn’t until about five minutes ago, when “Exodus: Gods and Kings” (2014) came up in a Google search. I am dumbstruck as to why I went to go see it in theaters, but I have a feverish memory…
Steven Spielberg has said that he got into filmmaking mainly to defuse anti-semitism; to earn the respect and admiration that he couldn’t get as an isolated child. His quintessential success, “E.T.” (1982), is the story of his own childhood reconstructed, where the sensitive and cerebral daydreamer is vindicated by an otherworldly power. Anyone who says…
If longshot candidate for New York State governor Cynthia Nixon pulls off a surprise win in November, she won’t join the rarefied club of Jewish governors of New York like Herbert Lehman and Eliot Spitzer. The one-time child actress and star of “Sex and the City” would, however, bring to her office a deep and…
