Film

Writer: Lisa Clair Director: Eugene Ma Reviewer: Adrienne Sowers Lisa Clair's new play The Making of King Kong, presented by Target Margin Theater, is an ambitious piece that examines racism, sexism, and classism through a darkly comedic portrayal of the creating of the film King Kong, directed by Merian C. Cooper and starring Fay Wray. Leaning into the problematic components of ...

Director: Carol Mansour Reviewer: Rich Jevons 12 Palestinian women discuss their lives before and after the diaspora, each connected by their love of embroidery. It is the story of their homeland and their accounts are intensely personal. The documentary begins with the bold statement: Those women who remained in their homeland were accused of non-existence. It was said to them: ...

Director: Eron Davidson & Ana Nogueira Narrator: Alice Walker Reviewer: Rich Jevons Ana Nogueira (a white South African) and Eron Davidson (a Jewish Israeli) make their debut documentary comparing the systems of apartheid in South Africa and Palestine. It makes parallels through using archive footage, interviews, and commentary and presents a convincing case for both the way injustice is being ...

Writers: Sergey Chetverukhin, Danila Kozlovsky, Andrey Zolotarev Director: Danila Kozlovsky Reviewer: Maryam Philpott One thing we know about sports films is they’re not really about sport at all, but tales of human endurance, adaptability and teamwork, often rescuing the lead character from some terrible personal circumstances or an equally difficult temperament. Daniel Kozlovsky’s new film The Coach showing as part of ...

Music: Asher Goldschmitt Director: Sara Colangelo Reviewer: Rich Jevons Maggie Gyllenhaal plays Lisa Spinelli who has a day job as a kindergarten teacher. She lives out a fairly banal existence but has aspirations to be a successful poet. Her attempts at poetry for her evening class in creative writing are fairly uninspired. That is until she starts to plagiarise the ...

Writers: Aleksey Chupov, Jeffrey Hylton, Natalya Merkulova, Aleksey Samolyotov, Klim Shipenko Director: Klim Shipenko Reviewer: Maryam Philpott The middle years of the twentieth-century were dominated by the US-Russia space race, of which Hollywood has arguably been the biggest winner. Since the arrival of 2001: A Space Odyssey along with Star Trek in the 1960s and cemented by Star Wars in the 1970s, the ...

Writer & Director: Ingmar Bergman Music: Erik Nordgren Reviewer: Rich Jevons Wild Strawberries (Smultronstället) from 1957 is written and directed by the Swedish Svengali Ingmar Bergman and tackles the eternal question of our mortality and the meaning of our lives, especially as one approaches old age. Professor Isak Borg (played by silent cinema actor-director Victor Sjöström) is a 78-year-old widower. ...

Writers: Alfred A. Cohn. Harry Pollard and Aaron Hoffman Director: Harry Pollard Reviewer: Maryam Philpott Films Festivals are not just an opportunity to see the latest releases before anyone else, most include a classics strand, revisiting new prints of influential older works from the earliest days of cinema. At this year’s UK International Jewish Film Festival held from 8-22 November, ...