The 38th San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, showcasing over 65 films from more than twenty countries, opens this Thursday, July 19th, and runs for two and a half weeks, concluding on Sunday, Aug. 5th. Films will be shown at venues in San Francisco, Palo Alto, Albany, Oakland, and San Rafael, so there is plenty of time and opportunity to see a lot of quality films. Below we spotlight five Festival movies that you may want to check out. Complete schedule, tickets, and more information are available here. And be sure and follow Spinning Platters for more coverage during the Festival!
1.) Budapest Noir
(Hungary 2017, 95 min. In Hungarian with English subtitles)
“I believe in headlines,” declares hard-boiled reporter Zsigmond Gordon (Krisztián Kolovratnik) in Hungarian director Éva Gárdos’s throwback noir picture. Charming and of course exceptionally handsome, Gordon, a creation of Hungarian screenwriters Vilmos Kondor and András Szekeér, is cut from the same cloth as Philip Marlowe, and Gardos’s film will remind you of the golden age of Hollywood film noir. Working in 1936 Budapest in a world about to explode, Gordon only cares about a juicy scoop, but when his investigation of a murdered prostitute leads him into government intrigue, he finds himself immersed in rapidly encroaching danger. Sexy and pulpy and beautifully photographed, Budapest Noir has a Chinatown feel (“There’s nothing to be afraid of – it’s Budapest,” a character says) that’s sure to please even the most discerning film noir fan.
Screenings (tickets available here):
– Saturday, July 21, 6:00pm, Castro Theatre, SF
– Sunday, July 22, 6:15pm, CineArts Theatre, Palo Alto
– Saturday, July 28, 8:45pm, Albany Twin, Albany
– Saturday, August 4, 8:40pm, Smith Rafael Film Center, San Rafael
2.) Memoir of War
(Switzerland, France, Belgium 2017, 127 min. In French with English subtitles)
French writer Marguerite Duras’s 1985 autobiographical novel La Douleur (War: A Memoir) is brought to life in this adaptation by esteemed French writer/director Emmanuel Finkiel, with mixed results. The story of Duras (Mélanie Thierry) waiting to hear news of her husband, the writer Robert Antelme (Emmanuel Bourdieu), who was taken prisoner during WWII, takes on a slow, ethereal quality in Finkiel’s hands, and the languid tone frustrates at points. The film’s tension arises from Duras’s involvement with a Vichy officer who promises to take care of Antelme in return for Duras’s affections, but that dramatic edge is too often muted by the dazed and surrealistic mood that saturates the picture. An overreliance on poetic, whispery voiceovers doesn’t do the film any favors, either. What Antelme, Duras, and their resistance fighter colleagues and friends went through was horrendous, but this picture proves too hazy and dreamlike to do their story justice.
Screenings (tickets available here):
– Friday, July 20, 8:55pm, Castro Theatre, SF
– Thursday, Aug 2, 8:15pm, Albany Twin, Albany
– Friday, August 3, 1:20pm, Smith Rafael Film Center, San Rafael
3.) Murer–Anatomy of a Trial
(Luxembourg, Austria 2018, 137 min. In German, Yiddish, Hebrew, and English with English subtitles)
The 1963 war crimes trial in Graz, Austria of notorious SS officer Franz Murer, AKA The Butcher from Vilnius, gets a successful John Grishman-esque courtroom drama treatment in this intense and chilling picture from Austrian writer/director Christian Frosch. Frosch gives us a fly on the wall look at the prosecution, defense, jurors, witnesses, and others involved with the trial. In one particularly effective technique, Frosch alternates among lunch break scenes between the different players, and the results are illuminating. Austrian actors Alexander E. Fennon, who has the unenviable task of playing Bock, Murer’s defense attorney, and Roland Jaeger, as lead prosecutor Schuhmann, are outstanding as opposing counsel who are more alike than they may realize. Even if you’re familiar with the Murer trial and know its outcome, the backstory here will utterly engross you, and you’re bound to be surprised by some of the twists that make this picture a superlative legal thriller, even as it considers larger issues of guilt and complicity that, depressingly, remain relevant today, over 50 years later.
Screenings (tickets available here):
– Monday, July 23, 8:25pm, Castro Theatre, SF
– Wednesday, July 25, 12:15pm, CineArts Theatre, Palo Alto
– Friday, August 3, 8:10pm, Piedmont Theatre, Oakland
4.) The Interpreter
(Slovakia 2018, 113 min. In German with English subtitles)
The mismatched buddy road trip movie takes on a deeper and more poignant meaning in Slovak director Martin Sulík’s film about Ali (Jirí Menzel), a Slovak translator whose parents died at the hands of the Nazis, and Georg (Peter Simonischek), the son of the Nazi officer responsible. The two embark on a quest across the Slovakia countryside, as Ali hopes Georg can shed light on the places his parents were taken during the War. The resulting journey is by turns harrowing and healing for both men, as Georg wrestles with carrying the weight of the proverbial sins of the father, and Ali struggles to find forgiveness and understanding. Austrian actor Simonischek, who was wonderful in 2016’s German hit Toni Erdmann, is slimmed down here, and his performance may remind some of the best work of the American actor Sam Elliott. As the two alternatively bond and clash, Sulík reminds us that grace and compassion are sometimes the only way to find our way out of the darkness of unspeakable tragedy. The film’s unexpected and powerful ending only adds to the picture’s impact, and will leave you thinking about Ali and Georg and their intertwined lives for days to come.
Screenings (tickets available here):
– Friday, July 20, 6:30pm, Castro Theatre, SF
– Monday, July 23, 5:50pm, CineArts Theatre, Palo Alto
– Wednesday, August 1, 6:05pm, Albany Twin, Albany
– Sunday, August 5, 11:45am, Smith Rafael Film Center, San Rafael
5.) Promise at Dawn
(France 2017, 131 min. In French with English subtitles)
A mother-son relationship only slightly more healthy than the one Norman Bates had with his mother is portrayed in French writer/director Eric Barbier’s loose biopic of the celebrated French-Lithuanian author Romain Gary. Though a bit overwrought, Barbier’s film manages to paint an unsettling and absorbing portrait of a narcissistic, unhinged, and obsessive mother (Charlotte Gainsbourg) and the insecure son (Pierre Niney, Pawel Puchalski and Némo Schiffman at different ages) who never stopped striving for her approval. We follow young Gary through his poor upbringing in Poland to his stint in the French military during the War, to his bittersweet success as an author, all overshadowed by the personal toll his mother Nina’s unrealistic goals and smothering love took on him. Gainsbourg, as always, is terrific as a sort of European version of Amanda Wingfield, whose hopes for a better life are unfairly and unrealistically dumped on her son from an early age. And Niney, as the adult Gary, lets us see Gary’s conflicted feelings of guilt, love, and devotion, as he constantly tries to please his overbearing mother. A tragicomedy more tragic than comedic, Barbier’s picture captures the complexity of a fraught mother-son relationship with enormous empathy, even as it displays the emotional devastation such an intense bond can leave in its wake.
Screenings (tickets available here):
– Monday, July 23, 8:20pm, CineArts Theatre, Palo Alto
– Friday, July 27, 6:00pm, Albany Twin, Albany
– Saturday, July 28, 8:55pm, Castro Theatre, SF
– Saturday, August 4, 1:20pm, Smith Rafael Film Center, San Rafael
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