J. Hoberman's Top 10 Jewish Films of 2018
Why struggle to reframe a suitably Talmudic answer to the eternal question—what makes a Jewish film Jewish? Here is the simplest, most arbitrary formulation. A Jewish movie is a movie that strikes me as being of at least potential interest to the Tablet readership. Herewith a top 10 of such films seen over the past year in not quite arbitrary order:
1. Les Quatre Sœurs Claude Lanzmann’s last film, which opened in France the day before his death, age 93, last July and has been released in the United States as Shoah: Four Sisters, presents lengthy, hitherto unseen interviews with four Holocaust survivors, all of them women. Drawn from Shoah’s “outtakes,” the movie is less rigorous than Lanzmann’s masterpiece—it occasionally uses period photographs and the filmmaker is often present on camera, a gruff, chain-smoking interlocutor—but, once the women start talking, it similarly plays out in the mind’s eye.
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