February 5th, 2010 | 7:43 pm | Bruce Eder

Ajami -- jointly directed by Scandar Copti, an Israeli-Arab filmmaker, writer, and actor, and Yaron Shani, a Jewish-Israeli filmmaker -- is a movie that pulls no punches and takes no sides while delineating in a somber (but cinematically engrossing) manner the layers of conflict and bitterness that afflict Israeli and Palestinian societies. It does so through a series of interlocking tragedies involving Arab, Christian, and Jewish families, where all three groups and their extended social relations come up against each other, mostly in Jaffa, a tough Arab community near Tel Aviv, and in Tel Aviv itself.
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January 8th, 2010 | 2:41 pm | Bruce Eder

Pioneering French filmmaker Eric Rohmer died recently, at the age of 89. He was a novelist and academic whose work was steeped in the literary, at a time when younger contemporaries such as Godard and Truffaut were shifting the focus of filmmaking to purely visual storytelling; and his storytelling was just that, without the direct personal overtones that came to characterize the New Wave, as defined by Truffaut, Godard, Agnes Varda, and Jacques Demy.
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