Daniel Witkin
By Daniel Witkin
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Culture When Joan Micklin Silver foresaw the future of media
Editor’s note: Joan Micklin Silver, the director of “Between the Lines,” died Dec. 31 at the age of 85. As a tribute to her trailblazing career, we’re reviving this February 2019 reappraisal of her 1977 ensemble film, which helped launch young talents Jeff Goldblum, John Heard and Marilu Henner while offering a prescient commentary on…
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Culture In Nadav Lapid’s New Film, ‘Synonyms’ For Jewish Self-Hatred
It makes a certain sense that Yoav, the protagonist of Nadav Lapid’s film “Synonyms,” is more or less introduced to us with his penis out. Yoav has arrived in France to escape his Israeli identity, and his various attempts to capture “Frenchness” give the film its episodic shape. Backpack in tow, he arrives to an…
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Culture A Young Argentine-Jewish Filmmaker Takes On His Country’s Authoritarian Past
Benjamín Naishtat’s “Rojo” begins with what seems like a wish-fulfillment fantasy of a very specific sort. Claudio (Argentine actor Dario Grandinetti, of such films as Almodóvar’s “Talk to Her”), a lawyer in a provincial Argentine town in the mid-1970s, is waiting for his wife at a nice, if modest, local restaurant. He’s approached by an…
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Film & TV When New Journalism And The New Hollywood Both Died In Darkness
If you watch a lot of films, you might get the sense that journalism is a very dramatic business — there’s a reason why the Washington Post’s Trump-era slogan, “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” reads like something you might find on a movie poster. Joan Micklin Silver’s 1977 comedy “Between the Lines,” opening on Friday for…
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Culture The Jewish Films You Might Have Missed In 2018
There’s something about the movie release calendar and its accompanying wheel of promotion that can produce a feeling of monotony, one that has an obvious dulling effect on people’s receptivity to the medium at large. Summer is when the big tentpole releases come out and springtime and fall are to be spent, respectively, waiting for…
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Film & TV Chronicles Of John Garfield’s Death Foretold In His Final Film
As in his earlier hit “Body and Soul” (1948), John Garfield’s final film “He Ran All the Way” (1951) begins with the actor waking up from an apparently very unpleasant dream. While the return from a nightmare is not an uncommon twist in those older Hollywood movies that veer into darker territory — the familiar…
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Culture At The Met, A Kleptomaniac To Dye For
Competing versions of the same story can draw one’s attention to the moments of divergence, like to a distinguishing mark or tic. In this way, it seems notable that the eponymous protagonist of Nico Muhly’s new opera “Marnie,” adapted from the 1961 Winston Graham novel that also inspired Alfred Hitchcock’s 1964 film of the same…
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Culture Could Jerry Lewis Have Become The Jewish Andy Warhol?
Jerry Lewis tasted celluloid on at least one occasion. Not metaphorically, or at least not entirely so. In his slender opus, “The Total Filmmaker,” Lewis writes, “I have a confession. Crazy. I have perched in a cutting room and licked emulsion. Maybe I thought more of me would get on to that film. I don’t…
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