More in ‘Film’

Today kicks off Oscar week (the ceremony takes place next Sunday night), and the Los Angeles Times helps get things rolling with the observation that Ajami—the Palestinian-Israeli Arabic-language movie that has become Israel’s third consecutive Best Foreign Language Film nominee—is a decidedly unpolitical flick. The directors, the LAT notes,
Are preoccupied with human dynamics ...

Today in Tablet Magazine, Nathan Thrall brings us up-to-date on Iran’s nuclear program with a helpful timeline. Senior Writer Allison Hoffman considers The Girl on the Train, a new French film that explores non-Jews’ desire “to access some of what being Jewish has to offer”—specifically, the history of suffering. We interview noted intellectual and journalist ...

Earlier this month, Israel for the first time chose an Arabic-language film, Ajami, as its Oscar submission; the movie was co-directed by Jewish and Arab filmmakers and follows a series of mafia-style killings in Ajami, an Israeli-Arab neighborhood in Jaffa, next to Tel Aviv. So what do Ajami’s residents think of the film? “It’s nothing ...

• In what sounds like a joke from the movie L.A. Story, a synagogue in Miami has erected a “drive-through sukkah” in the middle of its parking lot for lulav-shakers on the go. [Miami Herald]
• Michael Mann, the creator of such films as Public Enemies, Miami Vice, and Last of the Mohicans, is set to ...

• The results of an online poll have been tallied, and the National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia has the top 18 American Jews for its “Only in America Gallery”; honorees include Sandy Koufax, Emma Lazarus, and Estee Lauder. [JTA]
• Technology may have marred a once placid holiday in Israel, but pictures show ...

Some Lebanese critics are dismissing the Israeli film Lebanon, which won the award for best picture at the Venice Film Festival last week (and just got picked up by Sony), says Agence France-Presse. The film, based on director Samuel Maoz’s experience during Israel’s 1982 war with Lebanon, is shot from the perspective of four Israeli ...

• Artists and writers including Jane Fonda and Naomi Klein sent a letter of protest against the Toronto International Film Festival for a planned segment focusing on films from Tel Aviv, which they say is tantamount to a propaganda campaign. [Reuters]
• In an interview with Evangelical pastor John Hagee, Elie Weisel said, “Whenever anyone does ...

• A new film to be directed by Darren Aronofsky features Natalie Portman and Mila Kunis engaging in “ecstasy-induced hungry aggressive angry sex.” But, of course, the real question is: “Does the story that surrounds the sex”—a psychologically probing tale of a Russian ballerina and her doppelganger—“disappoint or excel?” [ScriptShadow]
• The Nation’s blog speaks ...

We’ve been told that Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, which depicts a group of Jewish-Americans sent to kill as many German soldiers as they can, provides the greatest vicarious thrill to contemporary Jewish viewers, who get to watch some of their own tell the Nazis just where they can stick that Holocaust of theirs. But according ...

Even if you hold a low opinion of Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, which opens today—like, say, Tablet Magazine’s Liel Leibovitz—you can perhaps take some consolation from the fact that the Holocaust-revenge-fantasy flick is likely not even close to the most vulgar, unseemly movie ever made about the Shoah. That distinction, rather, is said to belong ...