LUCCA
If the weather ever permits again, there’s ample seating on Lucca’s outdoor patio where lively South Craig Street must provide great accompanying spectacle. The atmosphere inside — while referencing the outdoors with its dusky blue twilight walls and indoor-arbor iron trellises strung with artificial vines and yellow fairy lights — is more sophisticated. The lighting…
BRINGING DOWN THE HOUSE
First impulse: Swat Bringing Down the House for taking potshots at prejudice while ultimately buying into black/white polarity. Second impulse: Praise Bringing Down the House for its clever dissection of prejudice, and for the courage to turn the klieg light of comedy on a black/white divide lots of people don’t want to admit exists, let…
UNFAIR COMPETITION
When Pietro goes with his Grandpa to meet the Count Treuberg, a jaunty old clockmaker whose serviceable place of business is literally a hole in the wall, Grandpa says that his old friend once had a grand shop in his homeland before he moved to Rome. The boy wants to know who destroyed that wonderful…
ON THE FRONT LINE
You don’t need much of an imagination to understand the trauma that the 1995 assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli prime minister and Nobel Peace Prize winner, triggered in his precarious nation, which has been at war, sometimes against four or five nations at once, since its creation in 1948. But Chanoch Zeevi’s documentary On…
CITY OF GOD
There’s probably an argument for taking a subject like Brazilian slum life and making a movie about it like City of God — aside, of course, from earning money. The rationale might be that if you want your movie to reach beyond arthouse cloisters, you need to frame it as populist entertainment. Young Goodfellas Go…
PITTSBURGH JEWISH ISRAELI FILM FEST
Pittsburgh Jewish Israeli Film FestivalThe 10th annual Pittsburgh Jewish Israeli Film Festival runs through March 16. Tickets are $7.50, $6.50 for seniors and students; group rates and multi-film discounts are available. Films screen at the Loews Waterfront, in Homestead, and the Regent Square Theater, in Edgewood. Call 412-992-5203 for ticket info, or see www.pjiff.net. Following…
