Arts & Culture | Film

‘Extremely Loud’ Screenwriter On Turning The Novel Into A Film

01/12/2012 | Eric Herschthal | Staff Writer | Film

The screenwriter Eric Roth isn’t in want of an Oscar. He already has one for “Forrest Gump,” and has been nominated several more times for films like “Munich” and “The Insider.” But Scott Rudin, the producer behind Roth’s latest film, “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close,” which opened in December in New York and Los Angeles to qualify for the Oscars, and gets a nationwide release on Jan. 20, has made no secret that he intends to win one.

A ‘Passion’ To Tell Entebbe Hero’s Tale

01/10/2012 | Gary Rosenblatt | Editor And Publisher | Film

Yonatan Pinchot, 14, of Silver Spring, Md., has a special connection to new documentary film called “Follow Me,” telling the personal story of an authentic, modern-day Israeli hero.

Movies Around The Clock

01/10/2012 | George Robinson | Special to the Jewish Week | Film

Jewish thought tends to classify time in highly specific quantities: seven days from Shabbat to Shabbat, 49 days of counting the Omer, generation to generation.

Identity In The Spotlight

01/03/2012 | George Robinson | Special to the Jewish Week | Film

Identity is who we are, what we are. For Jews, identity is complicated, the product of 4,000 years of history, several thousand years of exile across the entire globe, initiating contact with people and cultures unlike our own. The result of all that intermingling is the savory stew that is Jewish culture, and a principal theme of the first week of this year’s New York Jewish Film Festival.

Putin’s Prisoner

11/23/2011 | George Robinson | Special to the Jewish Week | Film

Russian history in the past century has consisted of a series of leaps from the frying pan of czarist rule into a relentless series of fires of varying degrees of infernal intensity.

The “return” to power of Vladimir Putin — does anyone really think he was away? — bodes ill for any dream of positive change in the former Soviet Union. It certainly spells continued prison time for Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the former head of the Yukos oil company, who has been imprisoned in Siberia for more than seven years on charges of tax evasion.

What Lies Beneath

11/15/2011 | George Robinson | Special to the Jewish Week | Film

The objects themselves are insignificant. Seven gold coins, a dirt-encrusted wristwatch, a bracelet. Taken together, they might be worth several hundred dollars but their value really can only be calculated in human suffering and the power of memory.