Culture
‘FOOTNOTE’
The theme of father-son conflict has figured richly in movies, often bearing a conspicuously manly aspect. Consider the generational face-offs in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The Godfather, Road to Perdition—replete with guns, booze, fast cars, fights over money, fights over women. The Israeli film Footnote abjures such lurid and obvious topics to focus instead on the fraught acrimonies of...Talmudic scholarship?
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Ralph Fiennes updates the Bard's sublime numbskull; and Meryl Streep gives Margaret Thatcher Shakespearean size
If you find it all too easy to sneer at Protestant fundamentalist sects whose members display an enthusiasm during worship that resembles hysteria, you have to be grateful for such films as Tender Mercies, The Apostle, and now Vera Farmiga’s directorial debut, Higher Ground.
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It might seem odd to apply the term “understated” to a documentary that features gritty combat footage. But a quiet, poignant restraint is a key note of Hidden Battles, a graceful study of how the act of killing affects soldiers’ mental health.
