Film Review: Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, reviewed by critic Jean OppenheimerFilm Review: Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, reviewed by critic Jean Oppenheimer

An air of poetry hangs over Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, a film that echoes both Days of Heavens and Bonnie and Clyde in its elegiac visual beauty and its mythological feel for rural America. Although set in the early 1970s — in Texas, like the other two pictures (though all three were shot predominantly in other locations) — the film has the same Depression-era look and atmosphere as its predecessors — and the same eye for plain-spoken, inchoate characters whose restless spirits push them to…

Film Review: The Attack, reviewed by critic Jean Oppenheimer

The long-running Israeli-Palestinian conflict serves as the backdrop for the potent Lebanese drama The Attack, which charts the personal journey of a prominent Arab surgeon in the wake of a devastating suicide bombing. Born in the West Bank town of Nablus, Dr. Amin Jaafari (Ali Suliman) has lived and worked in Tel Aviv for years. A self-described “secular Muslim,” he is respected by his Jewish colleagues and has a solid and happy marriage to Siham (Reymonde Amsellem), a Palestinian Christian. As the film opens, Jaafari…

Film Review: Hannah Arendt, reviewed by film critic Jean Oppenheimer

Hannah Arendt was one of the 20th Century’s great intellectuals. A refugee from Nazi Germany, the political theorist (a description she preferred over “philosopher”) is perhaps best known for coining the phrase “the banality of evil” to describe Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi functionary responsible for implementing Hitler’s meticulously planned “Final Solution” of the Jews. Covering Eichmann’s 1961 trial in Jerusalem for The New Yorker (she was there just for the opening few weeks), Arendt was confounded by how completely ordinary the defendant appeared to be.…