A new Holocaust film grammar is forming about what it means to be a succeeding generation, suspended between the impulse to forget and the urgent need to remember — and to understand how suppressed memories have warped families. I don’t know how close writer-director Jeremy Davidson’s own family is to…
A new Holocaust film grammar is forming about what it means to be a succeeding generation, suspended between the impulse to forget and the urgent need to remember—and to understand how suppressed memories have warped families. I don’t know how close writer-director Jeremy Davidson’s own family is to the Shoah,…
The Yiddish shtick that opens Joel and Ethan Coen’s new movie — a Jewish peasant stumbles on an old Hasid who may or may not be an evil spirit — is pretty clumsy. But at least it tips its hat to the great existential comedy that A Serious Man might…
Martin Provost’s lyrical but bracing portrait of the early-20th-century French painter Séraphine Louis begins and ends with a quietly ecstatic shot of the artist nestling up to the rustling leaves of a majestic tree. In Provost’s vision, the dirt-poor country housekeeper’s elemental flower paintings, derided by her bourgeois neighbors, are…
Did you know that goy god Steve McQueen got an early walk-on on a Jewish television sitcom? That’s just one of the tasty tidbits in Aviva Kempner’s celebratory but clear-eyed portrait of Gertrude Berg, the creator, writer, and star of The Goldbergs, which, against the odds, grew into a huge…
The ushers at a packed screening of Michael Moore’s latest movie, Capitalism: A Love Story, came proudly decked out in T-shirts bearing slogans like “Make Love, Not Capitalism” and “Capitalism, We Have a Problem.” The shirts and the movie are brought to you by those filthy Reds: Overture Films —…
One of the best of a new breed of indigenous movies prying open the Pandora’s box of German suffering in World War II, A Woman in Berlin takes on the mass rape of German women by victorious Russian soldiers entering the country in 1945. Skillfully adapted and directed by Max…
Quick! Noel Coward: sage or supercilious bitch? No matter where you stand, Stephan Elliott’s deliciously cheeky screen adaptation of one of the satirist’s lesser-known jabs at the British upper crust will charm your pants off. The movie opens with a contemporary rendition of Coward’s “Mad About the Boy,” impressively sung…
Seventeen years ago, when Reservoir Dogs was setting American cinema on fire, Quentin Tarantino drove up to his favorite watering hole, a Hollywood Denny’s, in a tiny Geo that I mistook for a rental car. During a scheduled hour-long interview that stretched into nearly three, I nagged him about the…
Late in the infectiously frisky documentary The Cove, an older man calmly gate-crashes an international conference on whaling with a television screen strapped to his chest, showing bloody images of the mass slaughter of dolphins in a pretty cove off the coast of Japan. It’s a show-stopping publicity stunt by…
If you think it’s impossible to underestimate the cultural significance of American Idol, go see British filmmaker Havana Marking’s documentary about its Afghani imitator, a smash hit television show whose musical wannabes run the gamut of Afghanistan’s bruising ethnic divisions. The even more socially and geographically heterogeneous audience votes for…
The stately Japanese movie Departures comes into theaters trailing some justified ill will for having trounced the critical favorite, Israel’s Waltz With Bashir, for Best Foreign Film at last year’s Academy Awards. It’s not hard to fathom what academy voters, who skew mature, saw in Departures, an earnest appeal for…
Two weeks after jowly Matthew Perry transformed into pretty Zac Efron to relive his adolescence in 17 Again, Warner Bros. releases Ghosts of Girlfriends Past, another backward and backward-looking child-is-father-to-the-man rom-com. Matthew McConaughey stars as NYC celebrity photographer Connor Mead, a horndog who tries to convince his kid brother, about…
The Soloist opens with newspapers thudding onto lawns, a quaint sight that makes the movie practically a period piece, even though the events that inspired it took place within the past four years. An old-fashioned tale for a newfangled world, the movie turns on a series of columns begun in…
Lovely to look at but too slow and deliberate to get lost in, Jan Troell’s Everlasting Moments is a tribute to still photography filtered through a portrait of working-class life wracked by war and want in early 20th-century Sweden. Written by Niklas Rådström from a story shaped by Troell and…
Duplicity It’s little surprise that, for his second film as director, Michael Clayton director Tony Gilroy leans heavily on his favored tropes of international espionage and cutthroat capitalism. The surprise is that Duplicity is a comedy — about two people who love each other more than they could ever trust…
There are many similarities between Laurent Cantet’s terrific The Class and any of the following schoolroom chestnuts — Mr. Holland’s Opus, Dangerous Minds, and To Sir, With Love. There are the structural similarities: misbehaving students, an educator who wants them to succeed, and big thoughts about the classroom as urban…
If Joaquin Phoenix, who plays a lovelorn bachelor in James Gray’s Two Lovers, were 12 years old, the movie might make a touching, if not noticeably fresh, romantic drama for tweens. Not that adults don’t nurse unhealthy crushes and regress madly under the pressure of hopeless infatuation, which may be…
The smirky, overbearing, and subliminally hostile romantic primer He’s Just Not That Into You — which sold a regrettable 2 million copies when it was published in 2004 — seizes on some partial truths about the gender wars and blows them up into evolutionary gospel, as follows: Since cave-dwelling times,…
Will there be a special Academy Award for Best Aryan Costume Design this year? Everywhere you turn lately in the movies, it’s swastika flags and SS uniforms. Although the Holocaust movie has been on hiatus for a while, lately it seems as if everyone is trying to squeeze in his…
Back in the early 1980s, a prominent professor I knew was accused of sexually harassing a colleague. This man was a compulsive flirt who couldn’t get within feet of a woman without coming on to her, so it wasn’t altogether a surprise. But long before an internal inquiry cleared him…
You don’t have to have been raised on colonial Brit lit, classic melodramas, Westerns, war movies, or Gone With the Wind to figure out the likely outcome of Baz Luhrmann’s Australia within its first 15 minutes, but any or all of the above will help. Tightly wound and corseted posh…
