Are this year’s Oscar contenders letting you down? The New York Jewish Film Festival begins its 26th year on Wednesday, and as always, its slate of films is diverse enough to please the most demanding cinephiles. Here are five flicks worth braving the cold to see at the Film Society of Lincoln Center during the…
On January 11th, in partnership with the Jewish Museum and the Film Society of Lincoln Center, the Jewish Film Festival will return for its 26th edition. The festival offers a varied look at the world of Jewish film, both in terms of genre and time period. In addition to the newer films that make up…
In Quebec, the term “two solitudes” once described icy/cozy relations between the English and French. But in Maxime Giroux’s sublime “Felix and Meira,” which closes out this year’s New York Jewish Film Festival, the phrase seems apt for the Hasidim and hipsters of Montreal’s happening Mile End neighborhood, coexisting without actually engaging. The film’s title…
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…
In “The Strange Case of Wilhelm Reich,” shown recently at the New York Jewish Film Festival, Austrian writer and director Antonin Svoboda presents us with a sobering but odd theatrical feature about the controversial analyst and sex philosopher Wilhelm Reich. Reich, a Jewish refugee from Nazism who came to the United States in 1939, had…
A tale of adult children discovering the romantic mysteries of their parents’ past hardly presents new thematic territory. These discoveries are made after death thanks to the documentary evidence a parent leaves behind: letters, photographs, school reports, and war-related transcripts. Don’t a son and daughter in a sleepy farming community discover their mother’s hot and…
Made as a film for the French-German television network, Arté, “The Jewish Cardinal,” screening January 20 at the New York Jewish Film Festival, nevertheless has the scope and sobriety of a feature film. Without much of the bloat of the standard biopic, its focus is the period of French prelate Jean-Marie Aron Lustiger’s elevation through…
Diana Groó’s “poetic documentary” “Regina,” screening January 15 at the New York Jewish Film Festival, is constructed out of meager visual evidence. There is, after all, only one surviving photo of her subject, the Berlin-born Regina Jonas (1902-1944), who became the first ordained female rabbi. But if necessity is the mother of invention, then Groó’s…
די צװיי יאַטן פֿון „ייִדלײַף־קריזיס‟ אַמפּערן זיך וועגן גאָט בשעת חיימי ווערט באַהאַנדלט אין שפּיטאָל צוליב אַ דעליקאַטן ענין
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