Arts & Culture | Film

The Banality Of ‘Eichmann’

11/09/2010 | George Robinson | Special To The Jewish Week | Film

‘Eichmann,” a drama about the interrogation of the Nazi war criminal by an officer of the Israeli police after his capture in 1960, has been sitting on the shelf since 2007. Once you have seen the film it is not hard to understand why. What is harder to understand is why someone has actually chosen to release it.

Israel, In All Its Complexity

11/02/2010 | George Robinson | Special To The Jewish Week | Film

Film festival programmers frequently feel themselves caught in the middle between dueling imperatives. On the one hand, it is important to show the best films available within the scope of the festival. On the other hand, it is also important to have those films spark a dialogue, a conversation that will continue long after the sound of applause has faded away. When the film festival has an extra-cinematic agenda, that two-way tug-of-war becomes more complicated and sometimes even painful.

For A Kenyan Child, A Swedish-Jewish ‘Angel’

10/29/2010 | George Robinson | Special To The Jewish Week | Film

In Talmud Yerushalmi it is written, “I myself found fully grown carob trees in the world; as my fathers planted for me before I was born so do I plant for those who will come after me.”

There is a retired schoolteacher living in Stockholm, Hilde Back, who may never have read that sentence, although she is Jewish.

Abraham’s Children: Alone, Together

10/26/2010 | Eric Herschthal | Staff Writer | Film

One approaches “Three Faiths: Judaism, Christianity, Islam,” a new exhibit of religious texts at The New York Public Library, with caution. The animating idea might cause you to roll your eyes at its surface naiveté: at a time of heightened tensions among Muslims, Jews and Christians, the curators suggest we should emphasize what we all share in common.

Or should we?

A Suicide In The Family

10/12/2010 | George Robinson | Special To The Jewish Week | Film

Beginning writers and filmmakers are always told, “Write what you know.” While that is certainly sound advice, it should come with a warning label that reads, “May lead to hurt feelings among friends and family, screaming, yelling, possible bloody nose.” Mariana Chenillo, whose superb first feature film “Nora’s Will” opens on Friday, managed to avoid all of those pitfalls, but drawing on her family history for the film’s story was not without its nervous moments.

French Dialogue, ‘Navajo’ Subtitles

09/29/2010 | George Robinson | Special To The Jewish Week | Film

By a curious coincidence, the two new feature films in this year’s New York Film Festival that deal directly with Jewish themes are the work of two older masters of European cinema, neither of them Jewish: Manoel de Oliveira and Jean-Luc Godard. It would be hard to imagine two more dissimilar films than Oliveira’s “The Strange Case of Angelica” and Godard’s “Film Socialisme,” as even their titles suggest. Perhaps those differences are derived from the distance between their birth dates: 1908 in Oliveira’s case, 1930 in Godard’s.