Every family history has dark periods. But how do you come to terms with the knowledge that your father is a notorious mass murderer? “A Nazi Legacy: What Our Fathers Did,” a 90-minute documentary that had its world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival in April, tackles this issue with great depth and sensitivity. It…
Iris Apfel is not your bubbe’s bubbe. But by the end of the documentary “Iris,” you’ll wish she was yours. Apfel, a spunky 93, has spent a lifetime successfully navigating the fine line between eccentric and icon. She mixed charity goods from flea markets with designer clothes to create looks that made her a fashion…
Over the past three years, filmmaker Josh Seftel has filmed a murder, a suicide and a stroke. He has filmed obesity, loneliness, homelessness and alcoholism. And a sad birthday party or two. The subject of these scenes is always the same: photographer Philip Toledano, who plagued by fears of his own mortality, decided to create…
As the French say, the more things change, the more they stay the same. That’s the sad take-away from the tense new drama, “24 Days.” The movie, which is about the kidnapping, torture and savage murder of a young French Jew, will likely fill you with a mixture of rage and despair, especially because the…
“Because I Was a Painter” is an occasionally interesting but rarely compelling documentary about art that came out of the concentration camps. It fails because director Christophe Cognet keeps the artists themselves at arm’s length. The result is an intellectual exercise devoid of emotion. The film begins with a shot of summer leaves blowing in…
In Yiddish theater lore it’s told that when the great actor and heartthrob Boris Thomashefsky mounted a production of “Hamlet” on Second Avenue, the sign outside read, “Shakespeare’s Hamlet: Translated and Improved.” The story is apocryphal — it might not have been Thomashefsky, and it might not have been “Hamlet” — but the episode illustrates…
A version of this post appeared in Yiddish here Like all actors attempting to break into the notoriously difficult profession, Michael Levi Harris is seeking to stand out. Luckily, Harris has a talent that is almost unique: he has an exceptional knack for languages. Not only can Harris speak many tongues but he also has…
When it comes to Israeli-Palestinian relations, there’s much to be cynical about lately. The 50-day long carnage resulting from Operation Protective Edge this summer, the frozen peace process, the dueling speeches by Netanyahu and Abbas at the U.N. — and then there’s the festering issue of Israel’s minorities. This week, Israel’s new president has come…
When some of us hear “Gaza,” we picture bombs or rockets or rubble. What if, instead, we pictured an adorable little girl in a pink hat? Or a grandfather playing with his grandchild? Or young men handing out ice cream cones? A new short film by Palestinian filmmaker Hadeel Assali is an ingenious exercise in…
The critic Irving Howe was not thinking of the writer-director Paul Mazursky, who has died at the age of 84, when he wrote of Jewish humor: “Laughter and trembling are so curiously intermingled that it is not easy to determine the relation between the two.” Yet he might as well have been. Born Irwin Mazursky…
Samer Bisharat, star of Oscar-nominated “Omar,” in Project X / YouTube If you’ve ever seen the movie “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” you’ll immediately be reminded of it after watching the newly released short film “Project X.” The basic plot is the same. Except instead of Jim Carrey trying to erase Kate Winslet from…
