Two estranged sisters strive to reconcile in Dorit Hakim’s spare and moody movie, Moon in the 12th House, which is now available on the ChaiFlicks streaming platform. It unfolds over several weeks at two locales in Israel — a nightclub in Tel Aviv and a pastoral moshav. Lenny (Yaara Pelzig) has become her father’s primary […]
Until it was unceremoniously closed in 2009, the Huronia Regional Centre in Orillia, Ontario, was essentially a grim warehouse for developmentally disabled youth. Barri Cohen’s half-brothers, Alfred and Louis, lived and died there under abysmal conditions. Her heart-wrenching documentary, Unloved: Huronia’s Forgotten Children, which opens in Toronto on September 16, sheds light on an institution […]
Giles Alderson’s British thriller, Wolves of War, is thoroughly formulaic. Scheduled to be released on VOD and digital platforms on September 13, it takes place in Germany in 1945 during the dying days of World War II. The plot could not be more straightforward. British commandos are parachuted over Bavaria to rescue an American scientist […]
Ido and Yael Zand’s “fish-out-of-water” documentary, Gut Shabbes Vietnam, is captivatingly intriguing and appealing. Now available on the ChaiFlicks streaming platform, which specializes in Jewish and Israeli topics, it is mostly set in Ho Chi Minh City, which, until Vietnam’s unification in 1975, was known as Saigon. The film opens in 2006 in Jerusalem as […]
Carl Laemmle was truly one of the pioneers of the Hollywood movie industry. He founded and managed Universal Studios, which would be the biggest film producer in the United States. And he launched the careers of, among others, the director John Ford and the actress Mary Pickford. This German Jewish immigrant is profiled in James […]
Amid the dark clouds of the Holocaust, there was a remarkable silver lining. Not a single Jewish citizen of Bulgaria, an ally of Nazi Germany, was murdered. Indeed, all 49,000 Bulgarian Jews survived this unfathomable ordeal. Jacky and Lisa Comforty, whose ancestors hail from Bulgaria, explore this asterisk in the annals of the Holocaust. Their […]
Fifty seven years had elapsed since I watched Ship of Fools, and now I had the chance to revisit it thanks to the Turner Classic Movies channel. Would Stanley Kramer’s 2 hour-and-29-minute feature film be as absorbing, perceptive and impressive as it had been in 1965? Or would it be an outdated and kitschy relic best […]
Kantemir Balagov’s somber Russian-language movie, Closeness, set in the North Caucasus town of Nalchik, is a tense drama with a twist. Currently being screened online by the Toronto Jewish Film Foundation, it takes place in 1998, seven years after the breakup of the Soviet Union, and focuses on a Jewish family suddenly facing a crisis. Avi […]
Joseph Goebbels, Nazi Germany’s minister of propaganda, recognized the importance of movies as the regime’s primary method of communicating with and winning over the masses of Germans. From the moment Adolf Hitler ascended to power, Goebbels calculatingly used the film industry to his and the Nazis’ advantage. During an eventful period of 12 years, he was the […]
Metro- Goldwyn-Mayer released a morale-boosting film during World War II that has since been recognized as a Hollywood classic. It was recently broadcast by the Turner Classic Movies channel. Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, directed by Melvyn LeRoy, with a screenplay by Dalton Trumbo, is based on a book written by Ted Lawson, a pilot who […]