What does it take to win two of the Tribeca Film Festival’s most prestigious prizes? Apparently, aside from talent, willpower and funding, a dose of inspiration from the JCC Manhattan will do the trick. Director and writer Rachel Israel’s film “Keep the Change” took home the Festival’s juried awards for Best U.S. Narrative Feature and…
The Tribeca Film Festival brings no shortage of Jewish topics this year, from Mel Brooks joking about the Holocaust, to an anti-Semitic Hungarian politician turned Orthodox Jew. Here are our favorite films about the chosen people playing at the New York event, which runs April 13-24. Last Laugh (USA) In this documentary, director Ferne Pearlstein…
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…
Kevin Pollak made his comedic debut a little more than 47 years ago, when his mother came home unexpectedly and caught him lip-syncing a bit about Noah and God from Bill Cosby’s first album. Her reaction: “You’ve got to do that for the Zuckers at Passover.” There were about 40 family and friends in attendance,…
Seth Meyers, Alicia Silverstone and Franz Kafka all in one bizarre, confounding quiz? It’s like something out of…oh, never mind.
Movies about the army are usually about fighting, sacrifice, a tense atmosphere and people in uniform plotting war strategies. “Zero Motivation,” the first feature film by Israeli director Talya Lavie, shows a different aspect of military life: Set in an army base in the Israeli desert in 2004, it tells the story of a group…
“Two-Bit Waltz” is a small independent film about teenage alienation that debuted at the Tribeca Film Festival on April 19. But before you say: “Thank goodness, that’s just what the world needs — another film about teenage angst,” here are a couple of facts you should know. First, yes, the film has moments best described…
Two films screening at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival show subtle and nuanced perspectives on Israeli life from a woman’s point of view. Talya Lavie’s first feature, “Zero Motivation,” [screening April 17 – 24,]( (http://tribecafilmfestival.org/filmguide/53208b38c07f5df7d20008a9-zero-motivation ‘screening April 17 – 24,’) focuses on a unit of female Israeli soldiers at a desert-based human resource center awash…
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