Vita Activa: The Spirit of Hannah Arendt
Israeli director Ada Ushpiz applies the argument that “the personal is political” to Hannah Arendt’s life to understand her perceptions and to provide context for the controversy over Eichmann in Jerusalem.
Film-Forward
I Saw the Light
The biopic checks off all the major highlights of country singer/songwriter Hank Williams’s life—to a point.
Hello, My Name Is Doris
Wearing its heart on its colorful sleeve, this Sally Field starrer works very hard to have the central character make sense.
Here Come the Videofreex
In 1969, a group of hippies interested in new technology, but with no regular access to equipment, were given a budget and video cameras by the CBS network—see how the revolution was televised.
Rabin, the Last Day
Horribly, terrorism and assassinations seem more common now than when Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was gunned down while he was leaving a peace rally in Tel Aviv on November 4, 1995. Writer/director Amos Gitai’s frighteningly relevant and insightful re-creation of the days leading up to that murder is a sophisticated analysis of the ways […]
Sound of Redemption
Spoiler alert: Unlike several of this past year’s other touted musician bio-documentaries—Amy, Janis: Little Blue Girl, and Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck—saxophonist supreme Frank Morgan did not overdose on drugs. Sound of Redemption: The Frank Morgan Story has resonances with the usual Behind the Music tales of success, addiction, recovery, and comeback. However, the strong […]
Winter on Fire
This revolution was televised. Winter on Fire: Ukraine’s Fight for Freedom opens on Day 92, February 20, 2014, with a reporter in a makeshift helmet ducking after shots ring out, before he plunges in to help drag bodies away from the chaotic streets of Kiev. Such vivid coverage was enough to get more people out […]
Censored Voices
Censorship always adds the allure of the forbidden to material, and that notoriety seems to be the case with Censored Voices. With rare archival footage, director Mor Loushy illustrates this collection of audio interviews with Israeli veterans of the 1967 Six Day War that were taped almost immediately after Israel captured the West Bank, East […]