In “Golda,” Helen Mirren, acting with deft skill and control beneath one of those startling transformative prosthetic makeup jobs, portrays Golda Meir during the three-week cataclysm of the Yom Kippur War, which shook Israel to its bones in the fall of 1973. As the actor stands before us, we can believe our eyes that this is the Iron Lady of Israel. For here is that frown, those beetle brows, that coarse wavy hair tied into a bun like challah bread, that pugnacious nose, that stare of implacability designed to bore a hole in its beholder. Here, as well, is the woman who lit a thousand cigarettes, chain-smoking her way through the war-room anxiety and through the secret medical treatments she was undergoing at the time for lymphoma.
Yet the voice that emerges from this formidable figure is not what we might expect. It’s light, fast, and American, and Mirren gets it exactly right.
Yet the voice that emerges from this formidable figure is not what we might expect. It’s light, fast, and American, and Mirren gets it exactly right.
- 2/20/2023
- by Owen Gleiberman
- Variety Film + TV
One of the more unlikely stage-and-screen box office smashes in musical history, “Fiddler on the Roof” — based on stories of shtetl life in Tsarist Russia by Yiddish author Sholem Aleichem, and turned by writer Joseph Stein, lyricist Sheldon Harnick, and composer Jerry Bock into a song-filled saga about a poor milkman with five unmarried daughters and an aversion to change — defied conventional wisdom about whose stories could be universal.
It helps, of course, when your score is a treasure trove: “Tradition,” “If I Were a Rich Man,” “Matchmaker, Matchmaker,” “To Life,” and “Sunrise, Sunset” are all-timers.
We’ve already gotten one adoring film about the original Broadway show’s legacy, 2019’s “Fiddler: A Miracle of Miracles,” and now we have a second: Daniel Raim’s warm, engaging “Fiddler’s Journey to the Big Screen.” As its title makes clear, the documentary is about the beloved movie version directed by Norman Jewison,...
It helps, of course, when your score is a treasure trove: “Tradition,” “If I Were a Rich Man,” “Matchmaker, Matchmaker,” “To Life,” and “Sunrise, Sunset” are all-timers.
We’ve already gotten one adoring film about the original Broadway show’s legacy, 2019’s “Fiddler: A Miracle of Miracles,” and now we have a second: Daniel Raim’s warm, engaging “Fiddler’s Journey to the Big Screen.” As its title makes clear, the documentary is about the beloved movie version directed by Norman Jewison,...
- 4/29/2022
- by Robert Abele
- The Wrap
If you asked a random group of Israelis and a random group of Palestinians to describe the events that surrounded the founding of Israel in 1948, you’d probably come about as close as you could get to a world political “Rashomon.” The Israelis would likely tell the story of their nation’s founding as a heroic saga of Zionist destiny cloaked in historical justice. The Palestinians would likely tell the story of how they lost their nation, and would evoke that loss with the phrase they have always used to describe it: The Nakba (“The Catastrophe”).
Hundreds of Palestinian towns and villages were destroyed by the Israelis in 1948, and at least 750,000 Palestinians became refugees. To this day, however, to utter the words “The Nakba” is a taboo in Israeli society. Alon Schwarz’s documentary “Tantura” explores just why that is. And it does so by digging into what has been,...
Hundreds of Palestinian towns and villages were destroyed by the Israelis in 1948, and at least 750,000 Palestinians became refugees. To this day, however, to utter the words “The Nakba” is a taboo in Israeli society. Alon Schwarz’s documentary “Tantura” explores just why that is. And it does so by digging into what has been,...
- 2/1/2022
- by Owen Gleiberman
- Variety Film + TV
In May 1948, after the controversial approval of the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine, war broke out between Arab and Jewish factions in the region. The conflict began due to claims over the same land. Following the declaration of the new state of Israel by Israeli leader (and eventual Prime Minister) David Ben-Gurion, the new country claimed the land for itself through a war of independence. Palestinians refer to the same conflict as “Al Nakba,” or the catastrophe.
Continue reading ‘Tantura’ Review: An Israeli Documentary Remembers A Village Whose Truth Remains Buried [Sundance] at The Playlist.
Continue reading ‘Tantura’ Review: An Israeli Documentary Remembers A Village Whose Truth Remains Buried [Sundance] at The Playlist.
- 1/25/2022
- by Ned Booth
- The Playlist
Nazis — remember when they were largely a thing of the past? As Chris Weitz’s true-life thriller reminds us, long before there was an unfortunate smattering of irresponsible “The Nazi Next Door” articles clogging up your Twitter feed, there were literal Gestapo bigwigs and German war criminals living, secretly but side by side, among the postwar population of South American countries. (Sympathies to fascist ideologies, lax extradition laws, yadda yadda yadda.) Men like Adolf Eichmann (Sir Ben Kingsley), a former lieutenant colonel and a particularly nasty National Socialist who was...
- 8/29/2018
- by David Fear
- Rollingstone.com
There’s a certain kind of true-life thriller that benefits from being made in a rough-around-the-edges way. “Operation Finale” is one of those films. It’s a drama about how Israeli agents from the Mossad and Shin Bet, in 1960, learned where Adolf Eichmann, the infamous Nazi war criminal, had disappeared to — Argentina — and went on a hunt to capture him. They extracted him from a suburb of Buenos Aires, where he was hiding in plain sight, and brought him to Israel, where he stood trial for war crimes in the famous 1961 courtroom marathon that was more than just the trial of one man. In many ways, it dragged the full awareness of Nazi atrocities onto the world stage for the first time.
The last thing you want a movie like this one to feel like is a slick Hollywood suspense drama with famous historical names plugged in. “Operation Finale” doesn’t feel like that,...
The last thing you want a movie like this one to feel like is a slick Hollywood suspense drama with famous historical names plugged in. “Operation Finale” doesn’t feel like that,...
- 8/22/2018
- by Owen Gleiberman
- Variety Film + TV
Ben-Gurion: Epilogue, about the legendary founder of Israel, is not so much a documentary as an invaluable historical document. Featuring footage from a six-hour interview with David Ben-Gurion that has never been seen before, Yariv Moser’s film is essential viewing for anyone interested in Israeli history. Currently receiving its U.S. theatrical premiere at NYC’s Film Forum, where it is sharing a screen with the thematically complementary documentary The Settlers, the film should have an extended life in ancillary markets.
The interview with the 82-year-old former Israeli leader was held at his remote, isolated home in the Negev Desert in 1968,...
The interview with the 82-year-old former Israeli leader was held at his remote, isolated home in the Negev Desert in 1968,...
- 3/3/2017
- by Frank Scheck
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
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