Bad Shabbos (2024)

This saw limited release in December last year, as reflected by a Christmas tree on screen, but got wide release in late May. Now a local theater has been hosting a Jewish film festival. Thanks to my mom for calling my attention while I'm in the area.

Observant Jew David (Jon Bass) is engaged to Meg (Meghan Leathers), who is preparing to convert. He invites her and her Wisconsin Catholic parents, John (John Bedford Lloyd) and Beth (Catherine Curtin) to a Friday night dinner at the New York City apartment of his parents, Ellen (Kyra Sedgwick) and Irv (Stephen Singer), where they'll also meet his brother, Adam (Theo Taplitz); his sister, Abby (Milana Vayntrub); and Abby's boyfriend, Benjamin (Ashley Zukerman). Perhaps it's just as well that Meg's parents are running late, because Adam pulls a prank that accidentally kills Benjamin. Not wishing to get Adam in trouble, his family conspires with Meg and friendly doorman Jordan (Cliff "Method Man" Smith) to hide Benjamin, hurry dinner along, and whisk Benjamin to his apartment before a less friendly doorman (Alok Tewari) starts his shift.

Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret. (2023)

Judy Blume's classic was one of my favorite assigned reads in junior high. My sister probably liked it better still, and my mom has looked forward to seeing the movie. As it stands, I remembered enough to notice a few minor deviations, mostly to save screen time.

Margaret (Abby Ryder Fortson) is unhappy to move from New York City to New Jersey right before sixth grade begins, partly because it puts distance between her and her favorite grandma (Kathy Bates). In no time, classmate Nancy (Elle Graham) inducts her into a secret club with two other members (Amari Alexis Price and Katherine Kupferer). They mostly talk about matters of puberty, whether bodily changes or a growing interest in boys. Margaret also has a growing interest in religion, having been raised without one by a lapsed Christian mom (Rachel McAdams) and a lapsed Jewish dad (Benny Safdie). But it's hard for her to keep praying civilly when things don't go her way.

Uncut Gems (2019)

I previously expressed a minor interest in this picture, but I kept putting it off because it looked dark. I'd also learned that it had the fourth most instances of the F-word, right behind The Wolf of Wall Street, which is no plus in my book. Still, its popularity cannot be denied, and when I saw that it would stop streaming on Netflix May 8 (sorry if you're reading too late for easy access), I tarried no longer.

In 2012, New York jeweler Howard (Adam Sandler) imports a large black opal from Ethiopia. He hopes to auction it off and pay his multiple debts to impatient lenders, not least Arno (Eric Bogosian), his soon-to-be-ex-brother-in-law. But superstitious NBA star Kevin Garnett (himself) borrows it for luck, and getting it back in time for the auction isn't easy....

The Fabelmans (2022)

My first theater outing with my parents in 16 months had to be planned pretty far in advance. What could interest them this much without relevance to music? Why, my namesake, Steven Spielberg. And this is not just popular but loosely autobiographical.

In the early '50s, roughly seven-year-old Sam Fabelman (Mateo Zoryon Francis-DeFord, later Gabriel LaBelle) nervously goes to a movie theater for the first time. The depiction of a train crash stuns him, and his coping mechanism is to replicate it with model trains. His mother, Mitzi (Michelle Williams), asks him to video-record the crash so he can watch repeatedly without further damages. Moviemaking, with help from his three younger sisters and fellow Boy Scouts, becomes his passion over the years, thanks to a sense of control. But as the title implies, this isn't just his story, and conflicts with his mom and dad, Burt (Paul Dano), threaten his trajectory.

The Book Thief (2013)

From the title, I was not at all surprised to learn that this is adapted from a book. More surprising to me is the mixed response: Less than half the critics on Rotten Tomatoes like it, yet the mainstream audiences mostly do. And this isn't some dopey entertainment fest.

In the '30s, at age 12, Liesel (Marie-Sophie Nélisse) gets transferred from her mother to foster parents Hans (Geoffrey Rush) and Rosa (Emily Watson) in a fictitious German town, for reasons she doesn't immediately understand. Having lost her kid brother to illness en route, she starts a habit of swiping fictitious books for comfort, despite being illiterate at first. That deficit and her habitual silence toward new acquaintances make it hard for her to make friends, and Rosa's cranky to begin with, tho at least neighbor Rudy (Nico Liersch) has a semi-requited crush on Liesel. But she gets a bit more practice with friendship when a nearly dead young Jewish man, Max (Ben Schnetzer), calls in a family favor for shelter from the Nazis.

Licorice Pizza (2021)

Not once does anyone on screen mention licorice or pizza. The title comes from a real-life record store chain that existed in the story's setting of 1973 SoCal. That's the kind of unappealing randomness I sooner expect from the Coen Brothers or Quentin Tarantino than from Paul Thomas Anderson. But Anderson was trying something a little more comedic than he ever directed before, so I'll give him that. And once I read a description, it seemed as good a place as any to start catching up on Best Picture nominees.

The Netflix jacket turns out to be misleading again. Yes, Gary (Cooper Hoffman) is a high-earning Hollywood actor in high school, but the focus is not on his acting career, his schoolwork, or even his classmate interactions. Rather, he aggressively courts Alana (Alana Haim), in her late 20s, as soon as he lays eyes on her, and then he recruits her assistance in business ventures unrelated to his acting, like waterbed sales. Basically, he wants to grow up even faster.

My Favorite Year (1982)

From the title, I assumed that the story would take place over the course of a year. Instead, it's only a few weeks, tops. All we really get from the title is a setting in the past and an occasion that is, like most comedies, happy in the end.

In 1954 New York, junior sketch comedy writer Benjy Stone (Mark Linn-Baker) is excited to have Alan Swann (Peter O'Toole), an Errol Flynn knockoff, guest-star on his show. Alas, the now burnt-out Swann is prone to stinking drunkenness, philandering, and tardiness if not absenteeism. Stone pleads with Sid Caesar-like show star Stan Kaiser (Joseph Bologna) to give Swann a chance all the same. Kaiser agrees on the condition that Stone watch Swann like a hawk. No problem, right?

The Two of Us (1967)

I finally got another disc delivery for the first time since last year. It's rather hard to coordinate the timing with streaming, so this meant yet another foreign-language flick about a Jewish guy. Oh well, still not all that similar.

In occupied Paris, the Langmann family is laying low, tho not quite to an Anne Frank extent. Eight-year-old Claude (Alain Cohen) keeps calling unwelcome attention to himself, so his parents send him to live in the countryside with the parents of a friend of theirs, who will gladly take care of a pseudo-grandchild for however many months. (The French title translates to "The Old Man and the Boy.) That arrangement is safer overall, but Claude has to maintain a charade of being Catholic like them. They -- perhaps especially the outspoken old man (Michel Simon), who asks Claude to call him Pépé -- believe the propaganda about Jews.

Menashe (2017)

I can safely say that this is the first movie I've ever seen where the main language is Yiddish, possibly with a little English mixed in, unless there are more clear cognates than I thought. It's also rare for having English subtitles nearly all the time but being made and set in the U.S., so I wouldn't feel right adding a "foreign" tag.

The title character (real name Menashe Lustig) is an underachieving middle-aged kosher grocery clerk in Brooklyn. His wife died a year ago, and his Hasidic rabbi (Meyer Schwartz) has ruled that preteen son Rieven (Rubin Niborski) must live with Menashe's brother Eizik (Yoel Weisshaus) until Menashe remarries. Menashe likes hanging with Rieven as much as possible but drags his heels about exploring the possibility of remarriage, not because it feels too soon but because his arranged first marriage went poorly.

Jojo Rabbit (2019)

In my rush to see more Academy nominees, I once again chose what was playing at a good time and was not a remake. I went in thinking, "Well, the title suggests a lighthearted comedy...but it's about Nazism? This isn't the Mel Brooks era." When I saw the name Taika Waititi, I understood. Turns out he wrote the screenplay back before What We Do in the Shadows.

In 1945 Germany, ten-year-old Johannes (Roman Griffin Davis) avidly joins the Hitler Youth, but his refusal to kill a rabbit at boot camp earns him the titular mocking nickname. In his attempt to make up for it with awesomeness, he wounds himself enough to be relegated to non-combat work near his urban home. One day, he discovers Jewish late teen Elsa (Thomasin McKenzie) hiding in a secret passage within his house, but he doesn't dare tell anyone, partly because his abetting mother, Rosie (Scarlet Johansson), would get in serious trouble. (I'm not sure why Elsa persuades him not to tell even Rosie.) For the sake of knowing the enemy better, "Jojo" demands that Elsa share information on Jews in general, to be put into an illustrated book. You can guess how his mind changes during research.

It (2017)

You may have noticed that most of my reviews for the month have reported lackluster thrills. I decided that my best bet for a decent scare on Halloween was a recent, popular, R-rated horror based on a vintage Stephen King hit. It was either that or A Quiet Place, and I figure on saving the latter for a while after Tremors.

The fictitious town of Derry, Maine (of course), has a disproportionate rate of mysterious disappearances and/or deaths, especially among kids. A new wave emerges in the late '80s. Seven preteen or early teen misfits rapidly catch on to the cause as it, or rather It, tries to claim them too. It takes many shapes, but you've seen its favorite: Pennywise the clown, often announcing his presence with one or more red balloons.

Shalom Bollywood: The Untold Story of Indian Cinema (2017)

This may be the most obscure film I've ever reviewed. It presently has no Wikipedia entry and only seven votes on IMDb. But since I usually like documentaries about the industry, I gave it higher priority than other entries in the local Jewish film festival that had my dad interested. (The few docs directed by Danny Ben-Moshe that don't have a Jewish focus are even more obscure.)

As you probably knew, Jews make up such a small percentage of the Indian population that most lists of religions in India lump them under "other." But in the second most populous nation, that still allows several thousand -- more than enough to leave a significant impact on Bollywood. In particular, they've had the advantage of a relatively permissive faith with regard to depictions on screen. Here's a hint: The poster shows dancing cartoon women.

The Boy in the Striped Pajamas (2008)

This film had sat on my streaming list a long time before getting dropped. When I learned that my dad had received the DVD, I decided to join him for it. It's probably for the best that I waited, because heavy dramas can be easier to watch with company.

Bruno (Asa Butterfield in his breakout role), age 8, isn't happy about having to move from Berlin to the Polish countryside because of his military dad, Ralf (David Thewlis), getting a new post. With little to do by day when not under a propagandist tutor, he decides to explore the strange "farm" he can see from his window, against his parents' wishes that he not wander in that direction. There he sees the "farmers" behind an electric fence and meets the titular boy his age, Shmuel (Jack Scanlon), who's hiding from work at the moment but doesn't dare play. You probably already know more about the situation than Bruno does.

Julia (1977)

Every so often, I move all the entries on my Netflix queue with a listed wait time to the top and see what comes next. If not for this method, I might have put Julia off indefinitely. How often am I in the mood for a dark-looking '70s drama whose title is a woman's name? Still, it had acting awards, an Academy Best Picture nomination, and direction by the seemingly underrated Fred Zinnemann, so I'd have to see it eventually.

In the '30s, Lillian Hellman (Jane Fonda) is a rather famous writer, thanks in part to schmoozing with the even more famous Dashiell Hammett (Jason Robards). But an old friend, Julia (Vanessa Redgrave), recruits her for a mission that would normally go to a non-Jewish nobody: smuggling funds for the resistance in Nazi territory. Julia's too injured to do the task herself. It's too bad they couldn't meet again under better circumstances; indeed, meeting at all is iffy....

Ivanhoe (1952)

In the interest of narrowing my many choices, I usually avoid movies with IMDb overall ratings less than 7, barring unusual circumstances like a vacation. Adaptations from classic literature are an exception. This version seemed like the best way to get the gist of the story in less than 2 hours, tho I read up on key divergences. Besides, it did well at the box office and garnered some Academy Award nominations.

In 1194, Wilfred of Ivanhoe (Robert Taylor) has discovered that the missing King Richard (aptly named Norman Wooland) is being held for ransom. Rather than taking the prison by storm, Ivanhoe runs around seeking money from people who prefer him to regent Prince John (Guy Rolfe). During this endeavor, he re-encounters his crush, Rowena (Joan Fontaine), and two John-aligned nemeses from the Crusades, Bois-Guilbert (George Sanders) and de Bracy (Robert Douglas). In surprisingly large roles, both financially and plotwise, are a pair of Jews: patriarch Isaac (Felix Aylmer) and his daughter, Rebecca (Elizabeth Taylor, no relation to Robert), the latter earning the jealous eye of Rowena and the lustful eye of Bois-Guilbert.

Mr. Skeffington (1944)

I immediately found this title a little odd, because Bette Davis's face takes up the poster. Indeed, her character of Fanny Trellis/Skeffington gets the bulk of the screen time and is no less interesting than Claude Rains as Job Skeffington. Why not Mrs. Skeffington? Surely her marriage in the first act comes as no surprise to any viewer, especially those who read even the briefest summaries.

Fanny starts out as the most sought-after bachelorette in New York in 1914. Little do her suitors know that her aristocratic parties hide the truth: Her good-for-nothing brother Trippy has spent the bulk of their fortune, and his crimes to acquire more only dig them deeper. But Trippy's titular boss already takes an interest in Fanny and offers himself as a rich and forgiving husband -- even letting her continue to entertain suitors. Of course, marriages of "convenience" have a habit of being inconvenient in other ways.