Arts & Culture | Film

Daddy’s Girl?

06/06/2012 | George Robinson | Special to the Jewish Week | Film

Sometimes a film’s first few shots tell you almost everything you need to know. Consider the case of “Off-White Lies,” the 2011 directorial feature debut of Maya Kenig, playing here Tuesday, June 12. In the film’s first shot we see a close-up of Libby (Elya Inbar), an adolescent girl dragging a suitcase and carefully carrying a potted plant across an air terminal, her face a mix of uncertainty and determination. Kenig cuts to an overhead shot that isolates the girl in the frame; she is surrounded by the unreadable space of the terminal’s featureless floor.

A Lens For Healing

05/22/2012 | George Robinson | Special to the Jewish Week | Film

Seen together, filmmakers Emad Burnat and Guy Davidi could be one of those clichéd “odd couple” pairs so beloved of unimaginative contemporary Hollywood action comedies. Davidi is Israeli, tall, thin, weedy, mercurial. Burnat is Palestinian, shorter, solid, graying and insistently sober in demeanor. The peculiarly theatrical atmosphere of a morning with them is amplified by the central object in the chic quiet of their Midtown hotel — a large cylindrical aquarium filled with exotic fish.

Israeli Filmmaker Aiming ‘Big’ On Herzl Project

05/15/2012 | Eric Herschthal | Staff Writer | Film

Imagine a biopic about Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism, directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Daniel Day-Lewis. Talk about a dream team. But the match-up is a wild dream that the accomplished Israeli director and former Hollywood filmmaker Shimon Dotan got one step closer to realizing last month.

Netanyahu Recalls His Heroic Brother

05/15/2012 | Staff Report | Film

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, commenting on “Follow Me,” a documentary film opening here this week on the life of his heroic older brother, Yonatan, told The Jewish Week: “This film will show an American audience about Yoni’s humanity, his leadership, and his commitment to Israel.”

Yonatan Netanyahu, a highly decorated Israeli soldier, was killed leading the Entebbe rescue in Uganda in 1976 that saved the lives of more than 100 Israeli hostages.

Second Avenue Redux

05/15/2012 | George Robinson | Special to the Jewish Week | Film

The story of Boris and Bessie Thomashefsky is a classic American success narrative. Although they were born only a few miles apart in “the middle of a Ukrainian nowhere,” as their grandson Michael Tilson Thomas puts it, they met in Baltimore when he was performing with a traveling Yiddish theater troupe and she was a star-struck girl working in a tobacco factory. They went on to fame and acclaim, stars of the Yiddish theater from the late-19th Century until the Depression.

A Father-And-Son Team Take On Freud And Mahler

05/15/2012 | George Robinson | Special to the Jewish Week | Film

When he began working with his father, Percy Adlon, on the script for their new film “Mahler on the Couch,” Felix O. Adlon felt a heavier than usual weight on his shoulders.