Screens at CIFF: 10/7 & 10/15 World Premiere: 12 December, 2010, Israel The word on the street is that Rabies, a collaboration between first-time writer-directors Aharon Keshales & Navot Papushado, is that it’s the first slasher movie ever made in Israel. This is almost true: I cannot speak for the state of ultra-violent horror in […]
Time for another Israeli film about how the terrible conflicts in that region are ultimately between well-intentioned people on both sides who just want to go about the business of being human, but can’t quite figure out how! Ah, yes, it’s an evergreen subject, but no matter how often we see Israeli filmmakers approach this […]
To my mind, Iran currently has one of the most interesting and important national cinemas in the world right now, so About Elly is a film for which I had, perhaps, unreasonably high expectations. On first glance, it’s rather unlike what we’ve become accustomed to thinking about when we think about Iranian cinema; and this […]
If the new Israeli film Lemon Tree seems an awful lot like many other Israeli films in the last several years, it’s not really hard to understand why. The big thrust in Israeli message pictures of late (much like their far less widespread counterpart, Palestinian message pictures) has been to dramatise intimate stories of what […]
By turns irritating, confounding, and endlessly fascinating, the animated Israeli documentary Waltz with Bashir is, at the very least, not the kind of movie that comes along all that often. I can’t say that it’s unlike any movie you’ve ever seen before, not knowing what movies you’ve seen, but it’s certainly unlike any movie I’ve […]
The leading face in contemporary Iranian cinema, director Abbas Kiarostami can hardly be accused of making accessible, obvious films. Nor does his wonderful 1999 film The Wind Will Carry Us even count as his easiest work, though with its inexpressibly dry, absurdist sense of humor, it’s possibly his most entertaining, given a flexible definition of […]
The Song of Sparrows is an easy, charming crowd-pleaser, produced by Iran’s resident master of crowd-pleasers, Majid Majidi (whose Children of Heaven was an Oscar nominee for Best Foreign Language Film, making it perhaps unsurprising that Song of Sparrows was just announced as Iran’s submission for that category this year). None of which should be […]
The jellyfish does not swim, but instead drifts through the ocean on the currents, gently moving through the waves with no aim other than to encounter its food as it floats. So too does the charming and sensitive Israeli film Jellyfish, the 2007 winner of the Cannes Camera d’Or, drift without much in the way […]
I really did think I had Dear Mr. Waldman pegged early on. A flashback to a little boy who falls in love with American movies, and loses sight of his own culture as a result? And he has a torturous relationship with his parents? And it was co-produced by notorious Yoram Globus, late of Cannon […]
My only explanation is that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences hates the Israeli film industry. Thanks to the stringent enforcement of an arbitrary rule involving how much of what language is spoken onscreen, the fairly brilliant comedy The Band’s Visit was rendered ineligible for the arcane Foreign Language Film Oscar, leaving a […]
A film with few precursors and few successors, The Battle of Algiers practically demands the use of hyperbole, so here I go: this is one of the most unique films in history, freely blending cinéma vérité inspired faux-documentary, psychological profiling, social commentary, Marxist anti-colonialism, horrifying violence, and good old-fashioned raw emotional power that all add […]
On the one hand, I had one of those great film festival moments with Scream of the Ants, where the print of the movie was caught in the mail and so we had to watch a screener DVD. On the other hand, a screener DVD was self-evidently not the best way to see the film, […]
