The Zone of Interest
Overlooking director Jonathan Glazer’s controversial Oscars speech, when he argued there is an equivalence between the victims of October 7 and the innocents killed in Gaza, there is no Holocaust film more instructive than this portrayal of family life in the home of Rudolph Höss, commandant of Auschwitz.
On one side of the Höss garden wall dahlias bloom (collage, top left). On the other side industrialised murder grinds its way through hundreds of thousands of lives. Meanwhile, the Höss children play a game of gas chambers in the greenhouse.
We learn that it is not anger or revenge that is required to commit genocide, but the kind of calm resolve that pebble-dashes a house.
Wicked
As someone who has actually flown in Glinda’s bubble as a theatre journalist, I can say that I expected little to be gained by the (inevitable) film version of the musical behemoth.
But the first of two instalments, which effectively doubles the stage show’s running time, has given rise to the finest double act of the year – Ariana Grande’s Galinda and Cynthia Erivo’s Elphaba (collage, bottom left). Not even a veteran of the show could resist the birth of friendship born out of mutual animosity.
So beautifully realised is the moment in director Jon M. Chu’s movie version, it makes the heart soar as high as Elphaba’s broom.
Anora
This unflinching take on Manhattan sex club scene has rightly supercharged the already rising career of Mikey Madison. In director Sean Baker’s film the Jewish American actor conveys both the suppressed vulnerability and street savvy smarts of a girl whose job is to arouse deadpan middle-aged men.
The film changes gear when Anora finds herself in the orbit of Vanya (Mark Eidelstein), the hedonistic yet guileless teenage son of a Russian oligarch. A mix of Sweet Charity and They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? the film then changes gears as Vanya’s Russian minders close. What emerges is a comedy of errors begat by human nature and Madison turns in the performance of the year (collage, top right).
A Good Jewish Boy
Noé Bebré’s directorial feature debut is about two of the last Algerian Jews living in a Paris suburb where the majority of residents are now Muslim. The film is a heady mix of social realism and comic whimsy. And leaves you with a powerful sense that whether Sephardi or Ashkenazi, and no matter what country they live in, Jews are the same the world over (collage, bottom right).
Between the Temples
Devoid of the kind of angst caused by antisemitism or conflict, Nathan Silver’s comedy instead has the kind that Jews can generate for themselves all on their own. The hero in this grainy, pleasingly unpolished work is Ben Gottlieb (Jason Schwartzman), who is the living breathing embodiment of nebbishness.
He lives at home with his doting mother and is cantor at the local synagogue, or would be if he hadn’t lost his voice. He is so brimful of self-loathing he attempts suicide by lying in the path of a truck.
When it stops Ben waves it on with the plea “keep going”. Nothing goes right until he meets his former music teacher Carla (Carole Kane) who wants to be bat mitzvahed.
The relationship becomes romantic and is scorned by some, encouraged by others but the film (collage, bottom row, centre) is unwaveringly in favour of living life to the full.
