Results tagged “bostonjewishfilmfestival”

This year's Boston Jewish Film Festival closed yesterday, showing Camera Obscura in the afternoon and wrapping up with a showing of Within the Whirlwind in the evening. We had the pleasure of watching the former movie, adding to the list of films we enjoyed in this iteration of the festival. more ›

There's a scene in Daniel Burman's Empty Nest--a film we reviewed earlier this year for a screening sponsored by the Boston Jewish Film Festival--where the two main characters, a husband and wife, arrive at Ben Gurion International Airport and are summarily subjected to a search of their possessions, the passport authorities doubting their intentions. Suddenly the wife puts a stop to it. "We're Jewish," she says, "I know the dances," and just as quickly she and the agents break into a rendition of an Israeli folk dance. It's a punctuated moment of glee in what had been a mostly tempered affair. more ›

Eli and Ben, the opening film for this year's Boston Jewish Film Festival, is a far more muted affair than last year's The Deal. In this post-Madoff world, the showy tale of a Hollywood flim-flam man whose defining strength is his ability to talk story, the ability to effortlessly pile layers of lies on top of each other, is somehow out of step and no longer palatable. There's been too much artifice already. Times call for quieter, more restrained movies such as this one, a coming-of-age story that looks not so much at the loss of an innocence as a genealogy of morality. Bonus: Eli and Ben also happens to be a pretty good movie. more ›

Daniel Burman's Empty Nest (El Nido Vacio) is a steadily somber film punctuated by moments of extreme joy and visual expressionism. Largely a domestic story, the movie follows Leonardo (Oscar Martinez), a successful playwright, as he navigates the breakdown of his personal life. His is the subtle breakdown of children moving away and ebbed romance rather than the sudden, dramatic breakdown of marriage, and, as such, it requires a different sort of language than the high theatricality of a Revolutionary Road. There's the need for a tenderness and emotional restraint, and Burman treats his characters with detached love even as he moves them into surreal places. more ›

With December movies always released in Boston a good fortnight or more after their LA/New York premieres, it seemed only fitting to wait a few days before posting our year in review. Of course, between the MFA, the Harvard Film Archive, the Brattle Theater, and other venues, Boston had great film events almost every night of the year (You do read Happenings, right?), and we could have easily turned this look back into a representation-is-as-big-as-the-whole allegory ala Synecdoche, New York or Borges' Exact Map. But, instead, we'll stick to the conventional format and highlight a few of the recent past's more notable moments. more ›

The excitement of documentary filmmaking is that you never know exactly where the story will take you. The makers of startup.com probably never set out to make a morality tale about the outsize egos of internet start-ups, or "the rise and fall of the American dream" as the tagline eventually proclaimed, nor does one imagine that the filmmakers of Holyland Hardball intended to make a movie about cultural separation and the rise and fall of American dreamers. But the end result is a thoroughly entertaining documentary movie about misplaced altruism, about the desire to do something for someone else, without ever stopping to think about whether or not the "good deed" is wanted at all. more ›

Tonight marks the first official night of the 20th Boston Jewish Film Festival. Since it began, the BJFF has grown to be one of the premier festivals in the region, regularly screening challenging films like The Pianist and Au Revoir, Les Enfants. Part of the festival's rise is undoubtedly tied to the sudden, rapid growth of Israeli Cinema. While Israeli movies may lack the "it" status (itness?) of Romanian films, Israeli Cinema has quietly become one of the world's finest, providing the curators with a reliable stream of exceptional films. In recent years, the BJFF has screened the Academy Award nominated Beaufort, the Camera D'Or winning Jellyfish, and the brilliant Nina's Tragedies. more ›