The New York Jewish Film Festival starts tomorrow

Just a reminder the New York Jewish Film Festival starts tomorrow at the Lincoln Center.

Don’t let the name turn you off the festival is more than just films about Jewishness, it’s got a whole lot of just plain good films in the lineup.

I’m wading into the festival with five films on my dance card including a rare big screening of Edgar Ulmer’s Black Cat with Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi. This is one of the great all time horror films from the 1930’s and if you’ve never seen it you should, more so since J Hoberman will be doing a talk before the film.

The other films I’ll be seeing are documentaries on various subjects.

The festival is also showing several films I’ve seen over the last 18 months.

Policeman played the New York Film festival and didn’t impress me at all. It concerns a team of Israeli cops and a bunch of anarchists, or so I’m told. I walked out an hour in after the film just seemed to be a cop giving his wife backrubs. Here’s my NYFF non review.

All In I saw at Tribeca last April. This is a romantic comedy about a middle aged guy trying to find love and get his favorite band back together. It’s not perfect but it did make me smile, and continues to do so now (There is something about the band that makes me grin from ear to ear almost a year later). My Tribeca review can be found here...but understand I like it more now then I did then.

Joe Papp a Life in Five Acts played Tribeca, where I saw it and been on or is scheduled to run on PBS. It’s a fantastic look back at the man and the theater he built. I saw it at the tail end of Tribeca and really liked it. However since I saw it at the end of the festival I could only write up a little piece on it. Here’s the piece.

For details on the full festival check the Film Society website which can be found here.

For reports from the road check back here