Honeymood movie still
08 Oct
Arts & Culture, Latest

In ‘Honeymood,’ Wedding Night Balagan

In Honeymood, director Talya Lavie makes piercing observations about fraught relationships, family tensions, marital doubts, lingering affections for past loves and the challenges of long-term partnerships. Thrown into the mix is a mysterious ring with a sensitive past best kept secret—which, of course, it would not remain. 

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Passage to Sweden Film Poster
27 Aug
Arts & Culture, Latest

Scandinavian Morality During WWII

Passage to Sweden Released January 27, 2021 (USA) 58 minutes Directed by Suzannah Warlick Bubble Soup Productions Documentary, English Why do countries behave so differently toward their religious and ethnic minorities? Are nations’ education systems so divergent that their citizens develop distinct moral codes? How much does leadership matter? Why do some ordinary people risk their lives to save others?  In her recently released documentary, Passage to Sweden, director, producer and writer Suzannah Warlick examines these vital questions through the prism of the little-known story of Scandinavian Jews’ (and those in Budapest who were rescued by Swedish national Raoul Wallenberg) widely differing experiences during World War II. Warlick shot 130 hours of material from which she has skillfully woven a treasure trove of archival film footage, photographs and interviews with people who lived in Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Hungary through the war...

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Still from Shiva Baby
14 Jul
Arts & Culture, Latest

A Funeral Farce (Shiva Baby)

Shiva Baby Released April 2, 2021 (USA) 1 hour 17 minutes Directed by Emma Seligman Neon Heart Productions Comedy, English When Danielle’s overbearing mother presses her into attending a shiva, a series of disasters converge over the span of several hours. Shiva Baby, directed by Emma Seligman, is a taut, finely scripted comedy in which emotional tensions, hidden secrets and discomforting personal interactions tumble out so swiftly that the audience is on tenterhooks wondering where this car crash will end. Danielle, played by Rachel Sennott (High Maintenance, Call Your Mother), is a bisexual woman who has just graduated with a degree in gender business studies, but she is aimless and unemployed. She has told her parents that she has what she euphemistically calls a part-time “babysitting” job that, in reality, involves getting paid for sex with a married man. Her parents’ desire for...

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Movie Review: Tango Shalom
19 Mar
Arts & Culture, Latest

Tango Shalom | The Dancing Rabbi of Crown Heights

Tango Shalom Released February 11, 2021 1 hour 55 minutes Directed by Gabriel Bologna Convivencia Forever Films Comedy, Family, Dance: English Hasidic rabbi Moshe Yehuda is a father of five whose Hebrew school is on the verge of bankruptcy. His brother, Rahamim, is entangled in a scam while simultaneously begging for help to pay for his upcoming wedding to, oy, a progressive woman. This disastrous state of affairs is exacerbated by their mother’s antipathy toward Rahamim’s fiancée, Marina Zlotkin, as well as her son’s future mother-in-law, Leah. Rabbi Yehuda, a talented amateur hora dancer in his spare time, tramps across Brooklyn in search of paid employment. With no end in sight to his mounting tsuris, he and his family face disastrous financial and emotional ruin. But then one day, while waiting at a bus stop, Moshe hears music coming from a Latin...

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Movie Review: The Vigil (2019)
03 Mar
Arts & Culture, Film, Latest

‘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 there had never been one” focused on a shomer, Thomas tells me over Zoom. Although perhaps it’s not so surprising considering the paucity of Jewish horror films out there. Even those with Jewish components usually use them more as gimmicks than as elements integral to the story. (Remember Matisyahu popping up as a dybbuk-fighting rabbi in The Possession.) With The Vigil, which is almost entirely in Yiddish and set in ultra-Orthodox Brooklyn, Thomas sets out to create a film “rooted in real Jewish experience and thought.”  The...

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