February brings the arrival of one of the city’s premier film events, the Mayerson JCC Jewish & Israeli Film Festival, starting this weekend and running throughout the month. There are a total of 13 screenings; nine are in-person presentations at various locales, and four are being offered virtually. You can find detailed information, watch trailers, and buy tickets here.
The opening night film (7:30 p.m. February 3 at Memorial Hall) is Matchmaking, a Hebrew romantic comedy described as a “sweet, forbidden romance” that becomes a “joyous tale about tolerance and love” in which the Orthodox Jewish student Moti Bernstein falls for a girl, Nechama, who would seem to be off-limits. According to Eowyn Garfinkle Plymesser, the JCC’s manager of arts & culture, Matchmaking’s comedy turns on the two coming from different family backgrounds. “They’re both a part of the ultra-Orthodox world, so the film has been described as a Haredi (a kind of Orthodox Judaism) take on Romeo and Juliet,” says Plymesser. “It’s a Hebrew rom-com based in Israel that gives a look into the shidduch (Jewish matchmaking) process in this community.” Tickets to this show include the opening night reception.
The closing night film (7 p.m. February 29 at Union Terminal) is The Story of Annette Zelman, a French drama based on the story of a Jewish art student, Annette, in Paris in the early 1940s who falls in love with a Catholic classmate. His parents oppose this relationship and report her to the Gestapo in occupied Paris. According to the film’s distributor, the film is based on a true story told in the book Dénoncer les Juifs sous l’Occupation’ (Informing on Jews During the Occupation) by Laurent Joly. Tickets include a closing reception.
Going through the rest of the festival schedule, I found at least four that sounded interesting enough for me to have bought tickets already and thus avoid later sell-outs.
The Catskills (7 p.m. February 13 at the Schiff Center at The Seven Hills School) is a documentary that draws on lost-and-found archival footage plus interviews to recall the legendary bungalow-colony communities, boarding houses, luxury hotels and especially entertainment offerings that made the Catskill Mountains a storied summer vacation region for New York Jews in the 20th Century.
Remembering Gene Wilder (3 p.m. February 18 at Mayerson JCC) is told partly through the voice of the late Jewish actor, bringing to life his outstanding career in films as well as his personal story. It also features such friends and colleagues as Mel Brooks, Alan Alda, Carol Kane, Ben Mankiewicz, and many more.
Vishniac (7 p.m. February 22 at Cincinnati Skirball Museum on the campus of Hebrew Union College) explores Roman Vishniac, a photographer who documented Jewish life in pre-Nazi Weimar Germany and Eastern Europe and then had to escape the Holocaust himself. The film is narrated by his daughter, Mara.
GIADO, offered via video for a 48-hour viewing window starting at 7 p.m. February 19, is a documentary based on a long-hidden secret diary telling the struggle for survival endured by Libyan Jewish inmates of a concentration camp hidden in that Fascist-occupied nation’s desert during World War II. The film is in Hebrew and Italian.
Buy your tickets now for Elvis Mitchell, who will present his documentary Is That Black Enough for You?!? at the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center’s Harriet Tubman Theater at 6:30 p.m. February 2. The screening will be followed by a roundtable discussion featuring Mitchell and tt stern-enzi, artistic director for the Over-the-Rhine International Film Festival—a co-sponsor of the event.
The film looks at Black representation in the movies, with a special focus on the Blaxploitation films of 1970s. Mitchell, a former New York Times film critic with an impressive grasp of and deep love for the movies, starts the film with a great premise: Black films from 1968-1978 constituted a Hollywood breakthrough for the Black talent they featured and for reaching a huge Black audience. So why did they go away then, he asks? Watch the trailer and read my Cincinnati Magazine interview with Mitchell here.
Also happening in February is the cinematic equivalent of horseracing’s Running of the Roses, as the artier new movies with major Academy Award nominations take center stage at our art/specialty film houses. Theater managers hope the films draw crowds from now until the actual awards are presented on March 10.
The Zone of Interest
[Watch the trailer. Opens February 1 at the Esquire Theatre.]
This film was originally supposed to arrive here in January and now comes with several major nominations: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Sound, and Best International Feature (it’s a German-language British film).
As I wrote in my January preview column, British director Jonathan Glazer (Sexy Beast, Under the Skin) adapts Martin Amis’ novel of the same name. It’s a Holocaust movie that aims to be different by focusing on the “ordinary” life of Auschwitz concentration camp commandant Rudolph Höss (Christian Friedel), who quietly tends with his wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller) to their home and children without seeming to care about or even notice the horrors occurring just over their walls.
This is a highly praised film, rated a “must see” by Metacritic’s aggregation of major critics. But it does have some dissenters, notably The New York Times’ Manohla Dargis. When opinions by critics differ on a serious art movie, the result should be to make people want to see it to decide for themselves.
The Teachers’ Lounge
[Watch the trailer. Opens February 9 at the Mariemont Theatre.]
Another Oscar nominee that I’ve heard great things about (Dean Otto, curator of the Louisville Speed Museum’s cinematheque, raves about it) is this German film that’s been nominated for a Best International Feature Film Oscar. Director/co-writer Ilker Çatak’s movie involves a well-meaning teacher (Leonie Benesch) curious why one of her sixth-grade students is suspected of theft. But as her investigation becomes hellishly Kafkaesque, it has far broader implications. “Taking on the uneasy complexity of a progressive modern society and the friction produced when pluralism and an insistence on order and obedience collide is a bold move, and The Teachers’ Lounge pulls it off with a sense of tension that makes the whole thing play like a thriller,” writes The New York Times’ Alissa Wilkinson.
Bob Marley: One Love
[Watch the trailer. Opens February 14 at the Kenwood Theatre.]
The biopic, which will also play at multiplexes, features British actor Kingsley Ben-Adir (Malcolm X in One Night in Miami) as the prophetic Reggae superstar who died from melanoma in 1981 at age 36. While Marley had a sizeable following during his life—a major figure in his native Jamaica, certainly—neither he nor Reggae caught on in the U.S. the way they should have. But have they ever now! The film was produced by the Marley family with Reinaldo Marcus Green directing and features Lashana Lynch as Rita Marley, Bob’s wife, and James Norton as the Island Records tycoon Chris Blackwell, who carefully planed Marley’s career.
Drive-Away Dolls
[Watch the trailer. Opens February 23 at the Kenwood Theatre.]
This movie marks the first solo narrative film from Ethan Coen, usually part of the Coen brothers’ filmmaking scene. Brother Joel first went solo in 2021 with The Tragedy of MacBeth, and Ethan followed the next year with his documentary Jerry Lee Lewis: Trouble in Mind. Described as a “lesbian road-trip project” and originally titled “Drive-Away Dykes,” Ethan directed Dolls and wrote the screenplay with wife Tricia Cooke; it’s a comedy in which two young women’s fun trip to Tallahassee gets complicated by a group of inept criminals. Think Raising Arizona crossed with Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers … maybe. The cast includes Margaret Qualley (daughter of Andie MacDowell), Geraldine Viswanathan (Blockers), Beanie Feldstein (Fanny Brice in the 2022 Broadway revival of Funny Girl), Colman Domingo (currently nominated for a Best Actor Oscar for Rustin), and more.
Cincinnati World Cinema continues its always-popular tradition of presenting the short films nominated for Oscars at downtown’s Garfield Theatre. The 2024 nominees will be screened on four consecutive weekends between February 16 and March 9 in programs devoted to the three separate categories of nominees: Documentary, Animation, and Live Action. Watch the trailer and find information about individual nominated films and screening times and buy tickets here.
The Sweet East
[Watch the trailer. Screens at 7:30 February 12 at the Woodward Theater.]
Nick Pinkerton is a Cincinnatian who thinks the late Larry Thomas—creator of the deeply lamented The Movies downtown art/repertory house—did as much for film culture in southwest Ohio as anyone he’s known. Since moving to Brooklyn, Pinkerton has written about “moving image-based art” for such publications and websites as Sight & Sound, Artforum, The Guardian, Harper’s, and Village Voice. He’s also editor-at-large of Metrograph Journal and maintains a Substack publication, Employee Picks.
His screenplay for The Sweet East was turned into a film by director Sean Price Williams and premiered at the 2023 Directors’ Fortnight sidebar program of the Cannes Film Festival. It also won the Rainer Werner Fassbinder Award for screenwriting at Germany’s International Film Festival Mannheim-Heidelberg, Germany. The Directors’ Fortnight website had this to say about The Sweet East: “High school student Lillian runs away while on a school trip and, through a series of encounters, traverses the spectrum of contemporary radicalism and madness, from white supremacists to Islamic radicals, from neo-punks to woke avant-gardists. At every leg of her journey, she comes into contact with hermetic worlds, whose citizens rant and rave to each other, blissfully ignorant of their neighbors. A story at the crossroads of a traditional fairytale, a picaresque narrative and 1970s New Hollywood.”
gOD-Talk
[Screens at 7 p.m. February 17 at the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center.]
This free film event (registration required) presents a documentary from the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History & Culture in association with the Pew Research Center. Director Kim Moir and the creator/producer Teddy Reeves will join for a post-film conversation. According to the museum’s website, gOD-Talk “explores the intersection of religion and culture in African American history, providing a deeper understanding of the role of faith in shaping the African American experience and its impact on our world today.”
The raved-about British film All of Us Strangers (see my January film column for a preview) has a striking scene set to a classic hit of the New Wave 1980s, Pet Shop Boys’ dance version of “You Were Always on My Mind.” Maybe it’s just coincidental, but February 4 brings a 3 p.m. screening of the concert film Pet Shop Boys Dreamworld: The Greatest Hits Live at the Royal Arena Copenhagen. The duo of Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe, backed by a full band, a 14-camera shoot and a visual-imaging backdrop, perform their hits, including “West End Girls,” “Rent,” “What Have I Done to Deserve This,” “Always on My Mind,” and more. It plays at AMC Newport, Cinemark Oakley, Showcase Springdale, AMC West Chester, and Regal Deerfield. Watch the trailer.
The excellent Cincinnati artist and Art Academy of Cincinnati professor Emily Hanako Momohara will present her film NAMBA: A Japanese American’s Incarceration and Life of Resilience at 7 p.m. February 19 at the Esquire Theatre. It tells the story of May Namba, who as a young Seattle woman was placed in a prison camp with her family during World War II because the U.S. government ordered its own citizens of Japanese descent to be confined after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. Namba went on to be a community activist, mentoring young people and organizing socially purposeful events. Watch the trailer.
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