Currently Browsing: Second City Tzivi
Palestinian prodigy receives a scholarship to attend a prestigious high school in Jerusalem. Consequences are highly specific but also universal. A Borrowed Identity appears in American theatres in the midst of an acrimonious, contentious, and long overdue conversation about “privilege.” Hopefully, many Americans now understand that part of “privilege” is the ability to close your eyes to […]
Director Felix Moeller thoughtfully addresses the question of what to do with films made in Germany during the Nazi Era: destroy them, preserve them or just let them rot. (3.5/5) ************************* Felix Moeller’s new documentary Forbidden Films opens in an eerie location which looks like the site of a low budget SciFi film set in an abandoned […]
Two sad-sacks meet one day in the middle of a slushy Montreal winter. She is a young woman from a Hasidic family and he is a much older man from a wealthy Christian family. Their relationship is presented as life-altering, but with no backstory and minimal character development, it’s hard to care. Feh! (JLH: 2.5/5) ************************* […]
From Tzivi’s August ’12 Spotlight: In March 2009, I received a screener from the coordinator of our annual Chicago Latino Film Festival for a new Argentinian feature called La Cámara Oscura. I was entranced by this film, and wrote very positive things about it in my April ’09 column. Soon after, I began receiving calls […]
From April ’09 Spotlight: Cadillac Records is a musical history of Chicago Blues starring Adrien Brody as Leonard Chess, Beyoncé Knowles as Etta James, and Jeffrey Wright as Muddy Waters. It’s tremendously entertaining, has great resonance, and was one of my favorite films of 2008. Last December, just before Barack Obama named Rahm Emanuel White […]