Film

Joseph Dorman has a confession to make.

“I love compulsive talkers,” he says, laughing. “I’m very interested in talk.”

The original French title of the new comedy “The Names of Love,” which opens on June 24, was “Le Nom des Gens.” That loosely translates as “the name of people” and, for a film that is very much about the nature of identity and self-definition, it is a more apt title. On the other hand, since the film is a sweet-natured romantic comedy, maybe things are best left as they are.

 Art is here: http://www.musicboxfilms.com/bride-flight#stills

The obvious question is, “Does the New York area really need another film festival?”

The not-so-obvious answer, given by Regina Gil, the founder of the Gold Coast International Film Festival, which opens its inaugural event on June 1, is an emphatic affirmative.

It often seems that we’ve become emotionally numb to talk about Nazis and Hitler. We toss around the word “Nazi” with such impunity these days that the essential meaning of who Hitler was and what the Nazis represent appears entirely lost.

Some worry that ignorance and latent anti-Semitism lurks behind our lax standards, but many suggest otherwise: it’s Holocaust fatigue, they say, a culture saturated not with too little knowledge about Nazis, but rather, too much.

When Rabbi Israel S. Dresner got a call 50 years ago asking if he’d be willing to go on a Freedom Ride aimed at desegregating bus stations in the South, he did not hesitate.

“Remember, I’m a guy who grew up in the 1930s when Hitler was on the rise,” Rabbi Dresner, now 82, said in a recent interview from his home in Wayne, N.J. “How can I not be against racism?”

In 2008, Shlomi Eldar, a prominent Israeli television journalist, was asked to do a segment on a baby Palestinian boy suffering from a lethal blood disease, and an Israeli doctor’s attempt to save him. But Eldar was reluctant.

One of the pleasant side benefits of this year’s Israel Film Festival, now in its 25th year, is a profusion of unfamiliar names and even unfamiliar genres

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For Julian Schnabel, the storm that followed the release of his new film, “Miral,” about a Palestinian woman who joins the first intifada, has not quite passed.

A week before the film debuted in late March, prominent Jewish groups criticized Schnabel, whose film was screened at the United Nations main hall. The American Jewish Committee, for instance, said that the film has “a clear political message, which portrays Israel in a highly negative light.”