What To Watch
Moment keeps you in the know with updates and reviews of the latest shows and films playing in theaters and streaming on Netflix, Amazon and Hulu. Plus exclusive interviews with actors, directors and more.
Interview | Aviva Kempner’s ‘A Pocketful of Miracles’
Aviva Kempner’s recent film, A Pocketful of Miracles: A Tale of Two Siblings, is her most personal documentary yet. Kempner has dedicated her professional career to highlighting the lives of Jewish heroes whose inspiring lives are not widely known. Her past films include Partisans of Vilna, The Life and...
A Human Lens: Teaching the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Through Film
For the last ten years, literary and film critic Meital Orr has been teaching a course she developed titled “Re-examining the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict in Literature and Film” at Georgetown University. A professor at the university’s Center for Jewish Civilization, Orr has a doctorate in modern Jewish literature and a...
Visual Moment | A Cinematic Window on the Conflict
The devastating October 7 attack by Hamas on Israel and the ensuing war, along with the contradictory and perplexing media accounts of the clash, underscore the necessity for a nuanced understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. One way is through film, says literary and film critic Meital Orr, who teaches...
Watching ‘Israelism’ from Wesleyan
Movie Review: "Israelism" provides experiences of two Zionist Jews from childhood to adulthood to display hostile acts committed by Israel. ...
Jewish Film Review | A Requiem for Golda
Golda; 2023; 1 hr, 40 min; directed by Guy Nattiv; in theaters August 25 Viewers going into Golda knowing little about the film could be excused for thinking they were about to see a biopic of Golda Meir, who was born in Kiev in 1898, raised...
The Actors and Writers Strike from a Jewish Perspective
At midnight on May 1, the Writers Guild of America's contract with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) expired, and WGA’s members went on strike. The union’s last strike, which happened 15 years ago, lasted for 100 days and dealt a $2.1 billion blow to California’s...
Jewish Film Review | Jerusalem Balagan
Poster for the 2022 film Paris Botique, directed by Marco Carmel Paris Boutique 2022 81 minutes Director: Marco Carmel Mayane Films, United Channel Movies, United King Film Distribution Hebrew, English, French with English Subtitles Romantic Comedy When sophisticated Parisian-Jewish lawyer Louise, played by Joséphine Draï (Belle Belle Belle, Man Up!) is asked by...
Jewish Film Review | The Offering
Poster of the 2023 film "The Offering", directed by Oliver Park. (Photo credit: Decal Releasing) The Offering 2023 93 minutes Director: Oliver Park Genre: Horror Available for streaming on: Amazon Prime, Apple TV and YouTube “Do you want to do a mitzvah?” Saul Feinberg (Allan Corduner), the Hasidic owner of a funeral home...
Why Were 99 Percent of Holocaust Murderers Never Prosecuted?
Like every filmmaker, I have hundreds of ideas. But with each documentary film I make, there always seems to be a strange event that starts me off. This time, it was an antisemitic attack against me on the No. 73 bus headed from Piccadilly Circus to King’s Cross Station...
Jewish Film Review | When Austrian Justice Fails
A poster for the 2022 film "Schäcten - A Retribution", directed by Thomas Roth Schächten - A Retribution 2022 110 minutes Director: Thomas Roth Cult Film and Hallmann Entertainment Company German with English subtitles Drama, Thriller, Crime It’s 1962. Former SS officer Kurt Gogl, Nazi commandant of the Mauthausen concentration camp, responsible for...
Jewish Film Review | The Anguish of Losing Faith
Where Life Begins 2022 Directed by Stéphane Freiss Indiana Production and Ba.Be Productions 101 minutes Drama French and Italian with English subtitles Esther Zelnik has traveled with her large ultra-orthodox French family from their hometown of Aix-les-Bains to a scenic farm in Calabria, southern Italy, on their annual pilgrimage to select perfect citrons (etrogs) for the...
Uganda’s Abayudaya Jews Dream of Aliyah
Shalom Putti 2022 Directed by Tamás Wormser Artesian Films 91 minutes Documentary English and Hebrew A community of observant Orthodox Jews in Uganda, with no genetic link to Israel, wants to make Aliyah. Tamás Wormser (Vie de Chateau, The Wandering Muse, Travelling Light: Artists on the Move) has devoted seven years to charting the lives of...
Film Review: Talking Dirty With Golden Voices
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Qe4BOk2aNc&t=3s Golden Voices Released October 8, 2021 (USA) 1 hour 28 minutes Directed by Evgeny Ruman Music Box Films Hebrew and Russian with English subtitles Comedy, Drama, Romance PLEX, Amazon, Youtube, Apple TV “We are finally here, in the Holy Land–making a fresh start,” Victor Frenkel says hopefully as he raises a toast with his wife Raya. It...
‘The Vigil’: Dark Night of the Soul
Keith Thomas’s new horror movie The Vigil centers around a night of shmirah, the act of guarding a dead body from the moment of death until burial. Serving as a shomer, a guard, is an unnerving task and one that seems ripe for the horror genre. “I couldn’t believe...
Palm Springs: Build Your Own Palace in Time
Warning: The following article contains minor spoilers for Hulu’s Palm Springs “Time is like a wasteland. It has grandeur but no beauty. Its strange, frightful power is always feared but rarely cheered.”—Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Sabbath When the coronavirus outbreak hit the United States in mid-March, a wave of...
Homage to a Master Drama Teacher
Creating a Character: The Moni Yakim Legacy Released June 19, 2020; 1h 16min At the age of 17, Moni Yakim went to a Jerusalem theater to see a mime show. He was “utterly spellbound” at the “magical” performance by a figure creating “everything from nothing.” Moni, the youngest of six children...
“Incitement” Takes Us into the Mind of Rabin’s Assassin
Yaron Zilberman’s film Incitement begins with a scene of then U.S. President Bill Clinton on the White House lawn with Israel’s Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat of the PLO. It was a historic moment when peace between Israelis and Palestinians appeared possible and hope was palpable. But...
Much ink has been spilled on director Taika Waititi's portrayal of Hitler in his Nazi satire Jojo Rabbit, which just won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. Some have praised Waititi's take on the genocidal ruler, saying that his light and humorous version of the dictator provides useful...
The Best Jewish Movies of 2019, Part Two
Welcome to Chai Brow, Moment’s weekly arts column exploring contemporary film, TV and podcasts from a Jewish lens. When I launched this column for Moment back in September, I spotlighted the best Jewish movies I had seen so far in...
Does “Jojo Rabbit” Have Anything New to Say About Fascism?
Welcome to Chai Brow, Moment’s weekly arts column exploring contemporary film, TV and podcasts from a Jewish lens. Charlie Chaplin famously said that, had he known in 1940 the full extent of the atrocities the Nazis were inflicting on Europe’s Jews, he never could...
Welcome to Chai Brow, Moment’s weekly arts column exploring contemporary film, TV and podcasts from a Jewish lens. For a long time I’ve been trying to figure out why I love Noah Baumbach’s movies so much. The thing is, they’re about such insufferable people. This...
In ‘The Kingmaker,’ Lauren Greenfield Explores Rewritten Histories
Welcome to Chai Brow, Moment’s weekly arts column exploring contemporary film, TV and podcasts from a Jewish lens. Documentary filmmaker and photographer Lauren Greenfield has spent her career immersed in the world of the status-obsessed. Her breakthrough 2012 film, The Queen of Versailles, profiled...
Directors and Dictators: Jewish Films at the Chicago International Film Festival
Welcome to Chai Brow, Moment’s weekly arts column exploring contemporary film, TV and podcasts from a Jewish lens. I’ve been fortunate enough to attend film festivals all over the world, but I’ll always have a soft spot for the Chicago International Film Festival because...
The Best Jewish Movies of the Year—so Far
Welcome to Chai Brow, a new weekly arts column from Moment exploring contemporary film, TV and podcasts from a Jewish lens. I want to tell you about my two favorite Jewish movies of the year. The only problem is, I’m not sure if they...
Aviva Kempner on ‘The Spy Behind Home Plate’
The Spy Behind Home Plate, the fascinating story of the 1920s-1930s baseball catcher Moe Berg, is the latest film by Aviva Kempner, creator and producer of the award-winning documentary The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg. Kempner’s passion for telling stories about under-known Jewish heroes along with her lifelong...
In Scorsese’s ‘Rolling Thunder Revue,’ Bob Dylan Is More Myth Than Man
Netflix advertises Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese as “an alchemic mix of fact and fantasy,” an apt description for a film that appears to be a standard music documentary, but in fact is anything but. Like a typical documentary, the two-and-a-half-hour film combines live...
Bob Dylan’s ‘Blood on the Tracks’ Comes to the Big Screen
Director Luca Guadagnino, best known for his successful film adaptation of Call Me By Your Name and 2018 remake of the horror film Suspiria, announced that he is planning to adapt Bob Dylan’s 1975 album Blood on the Tracks for the screen. The news came a few weeks before the...