Moving on to the more disquieting, writer/director Oren Rudavsky’s devastating, necessary documentary, Elie Wiesel: Soul on Fire, concerns being a witness to history and then disseminating the horrors that the world means to forget or maybe worse . . . distort and make light of.

“I’m sure that many people went to their death not even believing afterwards that they were dead,” Wiesel wrote of the Holocaust.

Utilizing archival footage, interviews both new and old, salvaged photographs, and the blistering…

Starting the New York Jewish Film Festival on a highly cheery note was Joe Stephenson’s wry biopic of the man who discovered the Beatles, transforming them from a scraggly quartet playing in a Liverpudlian club for naught into the world’s most consequential band. Yes, Brian Epstein. He rose like a firework into the heavens for five years and then took permanent residence up there at age 32. Why?

John Lennon might have been recalling Brian when he put forth: “The…

Does “Schindler’s List” Meet “Pink Flamingos” in “Solvent? Not Exactly.
As the end credits roll by for Solvent, an awe-inspiring pseudo-documentary, you’ll be relieved to learn that “no mice, dicks, or feelings were hurt in the making of this film.” I was indeed worried about the rodent.
The credits also note that “some pipe shots were taken in the plumbing system of Castle Leopoldskron in Salzberg, the film location of The Sound of Music.” One can hear the Trapp Family…

If Roger Corman (e.g. Attack of the Fifty Foot Cheerleader (2012) had produced a film about the complexities of coming out or if Bruce La Bruce (e.g. Hustler White (1996)) had directed a seemingly straightforward narrative about small-town homophobia, Ganymede might have been the result.
Yes, this often-heartfelt exploration of a young wrestler from an EXTREMELY religious household, one who’s seeking his first same-sex kiss, is in the end a hoot and a half. Coming to that realization, though, might…