Raoul Peck’s latest film, “The Young Karl Marx”, is above all a story of clashing ideas. The film follows adversaries-turned-best-buds Marx and Friedrich Engels as they attempt to both understand and subvert the capitalist system. Inevitably, the film traces the conflicts that arise when radical thinkers try to change the world. The material may sound…
“Some people would find it stifling or, you know, contained, but I love it. It’s thrilling, for my whole life to exist in one small zone,” Nick muses to Naomi, a visitor from out of town shortly into Alex Ross Perry’s “Golden Exits.” Like Nick, the film is nestled snugly into a well-defined portion of…
Elliott Saiontz’s bedroom is crammed with collections. His walls are covered with stickers of football teams and players. There are also dozens of karate trophies, pottery projects and framed autographs of athletes, political figures, even the members of his favorite band, Train. There are a lot of autographs too. But in a corner of the…
Few American musicals have won more sustained audience devotion than “West Side Story,” the 1957 brainchild of an all-Jewish creative team. Playwright Arthur Laurents, choreographer Jerome Robbins, composer Leonard Bernstein, and lyricist Stephen Sondheim, collaborated, despite sustained tensions, to produce a musical that has been staged around the world for six decades and inspired an…
The documentary “RBG,” a chronicle of the life and career of the United States’ most pop culture-prominent Supreme Court Justice, appears to have made a decisive impact at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. Ruth Bader Ginsburg, speaking with NPR’s Nina Totenberg after the film’s premiere, presented opinions on Kate McKinnon and the #MeToo movement; as…
Heidi Ewing’s and Rachel Grant’s documentary “One of Us,” recently shortlisted for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Film, portrays with compassion and thoroughness the lives and world of three young Hasidic Jews — Ari, Etty and Luzer — who have, at tremendous personal cost, abandoned their insular communities in Brooklyn and Monsey, New York…
It’s difficult to think of a more compelling title for a Ruth Bader Ginsburg biopic than that of one forthcoming in 2018: “On the Basis of Sex.” Yet that phrase, which evokes the still-relevant endeavor to ensure that women will not be treated differently than men because of their gender, was not originated by the…
In the post-Weinstein moment, Woody Allen is something of an anomaly. His adopted daughter Dylan Farrow has publicly restated her decades-old accusation that Allen sexually assaulted her when she was seven years old; in 2016, Allen’s son Ronan Farrow, whose deeply reported stories in the New Yorker on the allegations against Weinstein and Weinstein’s attempts…
One little-discussed aspect of all of the problems in the world is that they can distract people from the news about movies. The world is an endless conveyor belt of horrors, and this can keep one from finding out about what films exists. The Forward considers it a mission to help remedy this; read on…
There’s an old joke: Two fish are swimming around in a fishbowl when one asks, “How’s the water?” “What the hell is water?” the other fish responds. In “The Shape Of Water,” Guillermo del Toro’s newest tour de force film, the lonely, mute Elisa (Sally Hawkins) is miserably acclimated to her everyday, mundane routine —…
The announcements of most Hollywood remakes prompts groans and eye rolls. Yesterday, however, heralded news interesting enough to make one say, “OK. Let’s see where this goes.” The Hollywood Reporter broke the news that the directors of “Good Time,” brothers Ben and Josh Safdie, are set to remake Walter Hill’s 1982 buddy cop film “48…
