Movie Reviews: Kabluey, Journey to the Center of the Earth, Meet Dave

GO  MY FATHER, MY LORD Like Amos Gitai’s 1999 Kadosh, Israeli writer-director David Volach’s first feature has scores to settle with Ultra-Orthodox Judaism, especially as dominated by literal-minded men. Unlike Gitai’s strident screed, however, My Father, My Lord (unfortunately retitled from the more aptly elliptical Summer Holiday) is a subtly discriminating view from within one family’s agonizing spiritual crisis by a secularized filmmaker who grew up one of 20 children in the separatist Haredi community of Jerusalem. An only child, little Menahem Eidelman (Ilan Griff) soaks up the protectiveness of his gentle mother (Sharon Hacohen-Bar) but pushes back passively against his father (Assi Dayan), a respected but dogmatic rabbi who unwittingly does violence to the boy’s instinctive curiosity with cumulative prohibitions and a moment of neglect that brings tragedy. Lifting equally from the secular religiosity of Krzysztof Kieslowski’s The Decalogue and the aesthetics of Jewish ritual, this moving drama draws its power from the dialectic between its silences and its elegiac score. Though Volach over-idealizes nurturing femininity while demonizing heedless masculinity, his deceptively simple plot supports a nuanced voice raised more in sorrow than in anger — a cry of anguish not against Judaism itself but against fundamentalist adherence to the letter rather than the spirit of living well by doing good. (Music Hall; Town Center 5) (Ella Taylor)

PASSING POSTON Bearing the loaded subtitle “An American Story,” directors Joe Fox and James Nubile’s earnest, TV-style, talking-heads documentary revisits the 1940s forced “relocation” of Japanese-American citizens through the prism of the Poston, Arizona, internment camp that, for maximum ironic value, was constructed on the grounds of a Native American reservation: hence, one relocated community right on top of another. Comprised of jingoist Office of War Information newsreel footage and testimonials from surviving internees, Passing Poston makes its affecting if not especially memorable way through a catalog of familiar camp-life hardships and scattered moments of grace. In the considerably more involving second half, the focus shifts to the various ways in which camp survivors have — or haven’t — managed to move on with their lives and contend with the lingering stigma of being dark-skinned in America. Curiously, for all Fox and Nubile’s efforts to draw a through line from the persecution of Poston’s Native American residents to that of their Japanese neighbors, the most obvious contemporary analogue, Guantanamo Bay, goes entirely unmentioned. (ImaginAsian Center) (Scott Foundas)

Death Defying Acts

The Weinstein Company

My Father, My Lord

Related Content

• Rich Kids and Wizards: Readers Weigh in on Steve Aoki and James Franco
  March 21, 2013
• Doing the Best With the Least: 5 Great Aspects of Disappointing 2012 Movies
  January 2, 2013
• Nothing to Hide
  December 20, 2012
• Five Artsy Things to Do This Week, Including a Terrorist in the Museum
  October 24, 2012
• Sundance 2013: Sex with James Franco, Sultry Scarlett Johansson, Daniel Radcliffe's Jew-Fro, and a Great Film From Jordan
  January 19, 2013

More About

• Harry Houdini
• Gillian Armstrong
• Seventy- Elsa
• Scott Foundas
• Passing Poston

THE STONE ANGEL A stubbornly affecting drama that’s strongest in its quieter moments, writer-director Kari Skogland’s adaptation of the late Canadian novelist Margaret Laurence’s 1964 novel would have benefited from a tougher, steely-eyed approach. On the eve of being shipped to a nursing home, irascible, ailing octogenarian Hagar Shipley (Ellen Burstyn) runs out on her adult son (Dylan Baker) and escapes into her past, seen through flashbacks as her younger self (Christine Horne) experiences love, betrayal, heartbreak, and every other emotion one could expect to encounter in the Cliffs Notes version of adulthood. The Stone Angel makes no bones about its intentions: This is a soppy film about the tangled feelings that come from our bonds with parents, then lovers, then children, and how the first relationship impacts the next, and so on. Admittedly, this isn’t profound stuff, so it’s a shame Skogland emphasizes the melodramatic, tear-jerking extremes of Hagar’s life, until every incident feels burdened with meaning. But despite its cutesy comic-relief digressions and overdone solemnity, The Stone Angel finds its way past tonal inconsistencies to a moving conclusion that doesn’t romanticize death but rather judges it to be one more marker on the road to figuring ourselves out. (The Landmark; Playhouse 7; Town Center 5)(Tim Grierson)