Philadelphia Jewish Film and Media Festival presents Lost Cause, All God’s Children, and Fantasy Life

There have also been talks, shorts programs, master classes, and much more. The festival continues through November 23, at the Weitzman Museum and other local film venues, and here are reviews of three notable selections.

Lost Cause

Adam Kritzer’s Lost Cause, which had its East Coast premiere at the festival, has some ideas at its center that are worthy of examination, such as why is top Trump adviser Stephen Miller the way he is? What does his mother think of him, and what does Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement, feel like for him?

Described as “a meta-narrative art-pop musical,” Kritzer’s film buries that under a lot of other stuff, which is varying degrees of successful.

The narrative takes the form of a Yom Kippur service that’s attended by Miller, his mother, his ex-girlfriend, a conservative congregant, and the rabbi. Beneath that, the Yom Kippur service is the subject of a play, which Kritzer is workshopping. The story is also occasionally interrupted for musical numbers, which Kritzer performs himself.

“Is Yom Kippur really the time for ritual self-examination?” someone asks; the joke is that yes, that’s exactly what Yom Kippur is for.

There are some very good ideas here, starting with the attempted psychoanalysis of Miller, a man who almost certainly doesn’t believe he has anything to atone for. I liked the songs, which are of the rock-musical variety. Rent’s Jonathan Larson, who is name-checked, seems to be a songwriting influence.

All that said, the multiple levels of reality give it a level of distance that doesn’t quite work. And if one were going to make a movie about Stephen Miller centered around a Jewish holiday, it might have made more sense to go with Purim, since Miller is like a real-life Haman.

Lost Cause is showing again at 3pm on Friday, November 21, at the Weitzman Museum. Kritzer is expected to attend.

All God’s Children

This documentary has a fantastic hook: in the years after the killing of George Floyd and the 2020 racial reckoning, a mostly white synagogue and an all-Black church, located in adjoining neighborhoods in Brooklyn, engage in dialogue with one another, with cameras rolling.

The synagogue is led by Rabbi Rachel Timoner, and the church by Reverend Robert Waterman. The two groups have a great deal of values in common—most of them, I’d imagine, vote similarly—but there are real and undeniable tensions, which the film, to its credit, doesn’t sugarcoat at all.

We see the rabbis sit uncomfortably in church during a Passion Play, while the reverend resists the idea that the two groups take walking tours of each other’s neighborhoods, since when he brings a group of white people around, it’s seen as a gentrification push.

The October 7 attacks happened during the filming, and while I had expected that this would exacerbate tensions between the communities featured in the film, that didn’t happen at all.

The Jewish world is quite small, and while I don’t know Rabbi Timoner, I do know lots of rabbis, and when I looked up how many mutual Facebook friends we have, I saw more than 20. The other rabbi, Stephanie Kolin, was my college classmate. Filmmaker Ondi Timoner is even closer to the material: she’s the rabbi’s sister. Timoner’s previous film, Last Flight Home, was even more personal, telling the story of the death of her father.

Fantasy Life

With Fantasy Life, Matthew Shear has done something that Woody Allen used to do, for decades and decades: he’s written and directed a movie in which he’s cast himself as the romantic lead, in the form of a neurotic Jewish guy. But he’s also done something that Woody wasn’t known for: casting himself as a man in love with a woman older than he is.

Shear, whose resemblance to How I Met Your Mother star Josh Radnor is uncanny, plays Sam, a laid-off paralegal who becomes the male nanny for the granddaughters of his psychiatrist (Judd Hirsch). The parents are a dysfunctional couple played by Alessandro Nivola and Amanda Peet. Sam soon finds herself infatuated with the mother of his charges.

A rare film selected for both the Philadelphia Film Festival and the Jewish Film Festival in the same year, Fantasy Life has an extremely overqualified cast, including Hirsch, Bob Balaban, Andrea Martin, and Holland Taylor. But this exacerbates a problem: Shear’s protagonist is, by far, the least interesting character in the movie. I was much more interested in the arc of Peet’s character, and sort of wish the movie had been about her instead.

Fantasy Life has been acquired by Greenwich Entertainment for distribution, but there’s no word on a release date.