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SIFF - Film Review: "Frances Ha" Is a Delightful Treat from the Mumblecore Camp

"Frances Ha"
Directed by Noah Baumbach
Starring Greta Gerwig, Mickey Sumner, Adam Driver, Michael Zegen and Patrick Heusinger
Comedy
86 Mins

Noah Baumbach is at his least caustic with Frances Ha, an idiosyncratic and delightful black-and-white mumblecore film about a New York City girl coming to terms with herself in the haze of her post-collegiate days. Newcomer Greta Gerwig offers up a performance in the vein of Dustin Hoffman's Benjamin from The Graduate as she mumbles and bumbles her way through the purgatory of her mid-twenties. To continue the comparison with The Graduate,Frances Ha is an equally quirky, if less lovable, film that thrives on silly banter and whimsy spirit.

Read more: SIFF - Film Review: "Frances Ha"...

SIFF Review: "Mistaken For Strangers" - Go For the National, Stay For the Humanity

"Mistaken for Stranger"
Directed by Tom Beringer
Starring Tom Beringer, Matt Beringer
Documenary, Comedy, Music
80 min
Not Yet Rated

Mistaken for Strangers is a bizarre rock doc because it's not really a rock doc at all. Tom Beringer, brother to The National's frontman Matt Beringer, has instead made something else entirely - a film that uniquely attempts to transcend the rock doc genre with a hyper-self-aware, avant-garde approach.

Read more: SIFF Review: "Mistaken For...

SIFF Review: 'What Maisie Knew' Jabs Deep

'What Maisie Knew'
Directed by Scott McGehee and David Siegel
Starring Onata Aprile, Julianne Moore, Steve Coogan, Alexander Skarsgård and Joanna Vanderham
Drama
99 Mins
R
 
What Maisie Knew is an emotional powerhouse of a film led by an adorably funny-faced young actress functioning on a purely natural level, allowing the "performance" underneath to disappear entirely. It strikes a particularly meaningful chord for the "divorced generation" and anyone who has been part of a broken home will feel heart-warbling empathy for the fledgling Maisie. Directors Scott McGehee and David Siegel tread carefully through difficult territory and instead of offering a tired, sentimentally-formulated heart-throbber, they have crafted a compelling but tragic familial drama that breaks the mold by being dreadfully honest.

Read more: SIFF Review: 'What Maisie Knew'...

Reviewed: New York Jewish Film Festival 2013

New York Jewish Film Festival 2013The best of the 45 features and shorts from nine countries that showed January 9 - 24, 2013 at the 22nd annual New York Jewish Film Festival, organized by The Jewish Museum and the Film Society of Lincoln Center, presented thoughtful perspectives on Jewish artists from Israel and the Diaspora wrestling with family stories and Zionist pioneer stereotypes. 

Artists:

Graphic artist Art Spiegelman cheerfully admits in Clara Kuperberg and Joëlle Oosterlinck’s documentary The Art of Spiegelman that he gives good interview, and he does. But the visual focus stays on his drawings, going beyond his best-known Maus graphic novel memoirs to encompass his early comic books, a decade of controversial New Yorker covers, his new line of children’s books and his creative response to the shoah of the World Trade Center falling in front of his family. You will feel guilty that these genial, reflective conversations are distracting him from getting even more work done.

Life? or Theatre? expands on Dutch director Frans Weisz’s obsession with the titular gouache series by Charlotte Salomon that she feverishly and caustically captioned and annotated for musical accompaniment, about threatened Jewish romantic and cultural life in interwar Germany. Weisz supplements excerpts from his 1981 bio-pic Charlotte (not available in the U.S.) with reenactments by the same, now older star Birgit Doll (a bit unnerving as Salomon, killed at Auschwitz in 1943 at age 26, who never got to similarly mature).

Read more: Reviewed: New York Jewish Film...

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