Shoplifters
Father and children are a team making ends meet through theft. Oscar-nominated for Best Foreign Language Film, Shoplifters is about a crime family—but not the sort usually featured in movies. In Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda’s appealing story, the family is a multi-generational clan whose members support themselves by shoplifting. But they also have hearts of gold—taking in an abused homeless 6-year-old girl whom they find shivering in the streets on a cold night.
Washington Square
The tree-lined streets and tightly curtained drawing rooms of old Manhattan are the setting for Washington Square. Director Agnieszka Holland’s 1997 adaptation of the Henry James’ novel is an elegantly appointed period piece handled with a light touch. Awkward heiress Catherine (Jennifer Jason Leigh) and handsome beau Morris (Ben Chaplin) must navigate the shoals of her disapproving father (Albert Finney) and social codes that will remind viewers of Jane Austen. Maggie Smith is also part of the A-list cast.
The Wandering Muse
Music travels across all boundaries—and so have Jews. In his documentary The Wandering Muse, Tamas Wormser crosses borders easily, flitting from continent to continent and experience to experience. Wormser looks and listens to a Brooklyn singer who builds contemporary music from her Orthodox roots and others who have rediscovered the Yiddish-American songbook or the Near Eastern modes of the Sephardim. Yes, there is klezmer—along with driving rock mutated under the influence of ancient melodies.
Kotch
Walter Matthau built a career playing grouchy middle-aged men. In Kotch (1971), he stepped up to play a lovably irascible old man grappling with the realization that life had left him behind. He’s long on memories that no one wants to hear and lives uncomfortably with his son and a daughter-in-law who wants him out. Next step, Sunnydale Retirement Village? Jack Lemmon directed this endearing comedy about an age group still routinely ignored by Hollywood.
