Arts & Culture | Film

Realistically Speaking

01/18/2011 | George Robinson | Special To The Jewish Week | Film

Sometimes, after watching a really good documentary, I find myself wondering why anyone would want to make a fiction film when reality is so much more compelling, frightening, entertaining, funny and so on. I had that feeling several times while watching films from the last week of the New York Jewish Film Festival, and never more so than after viewing “Crime After Crime,” “The ‘Socalled’ Movie” and “Black Bus,” three of the strongest non-fiction films to turn up at this event in many years.

Jewish Film Fest’s ‘Open Destiny’

01/12/2011 | George Robinson | Special To The Jewish Week | Film

In one of her short stories, Grace Paley writes, “Everyone, real or invented, deserves the open destiny of life.” Such a splendid statement, the quotation turns up twice in Lilly Rivlin’s splendid new documentary on Paley’s life and work, “Grace Paley: Collected Shorts,” which plays in this year’s New York Jewish Film Festival. The sentiment behind the sentence is so open-handed and wholehearted that it could be applied to the best films in the festival, including Rivlin’s own offering.

‘Vir Bist Du, Romeo?’

01/11/2011 | Lehman Weichselbaum | Special to The Jewish Week | Film

He was a Satmar dropout, a street kid getting by on credit card and airport baggage claim scams. She was a prodigal daughter, also from a Satmar family, knocking around as a student in Europe and Israel, asking the questions and plying the lifestyle no good chasidic girl should.

Phil Ochs: No Direction Home

01/04/2011 | George Robinson | Special To The Jewish Week | Film

It is undoubtedly simplistic to suggest that a single incident can shape the way a person lives his entire life. Even the survivor of a catastrophic accident is more than the accumulated scars and physical deficits thus incurred. But watching Kenneth Bowser’s new documentary, “Phil Ochs: There But For Fortune,” it is impossible not to register a story that the great singer-songwriter’s brother Michael recalls from their childhood in small-town Ohio.

The Life And Times Of The Jewish Artist

01/04/2011 | George Robinson | Special To The Jewish Week | Film

The price one pays for being an artist is frequently sizeable. The call to the arts is often rooted in alienation and a sense of difference. To follow that path is to risk ostracism and penury. And other than your fellow artists, who else will understand your choices?

The Year Of Myth-Busting

12/28/2010 | George Robinson | Special To The Jewish Week | Film

The schlemiel is dead. A beloved figure in post-World War II Jewish-American fiction, drama and film, he suffered a spectacular death by vivisection over the course of a couple of fascinating years of films that re-imagined him in a rather less affectionate light.