Footnote

Directed by Joseph Cedar

(PG)

***

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This recent foreign-language Oscar nominee pulls off an improbable trick, said Stephanie Zacharek in Movieline.com. Laced with humor, drama, and even action, it’s “a picture about scholarly obsession that really moves.” At its center are an Israeli father and son who are also rival Talmudic scholars. The son, played by Lior Ashkenazi, is a charismatic star of academia, while the father (Shlomo Bar-Aba) is an old-school bookworm who has never been recognized for his work—until he learns he’s just been selected for a coveted prize. Using imaginative montages and sound design, director Joseph Cedar makes even the characters’ textual studies “enormously entertaining,” said Joshua Rothkopf in Time Out New York. And once the son learns that the prize was mistakenly awarded to his father, the film acquires a central moral question: “Is lying to spare someone’s feelings ever justified?” That quandary elevates “a committee-room squabble into something authentically grand”: a “poignant family drama,” and an exploration of honesty’s value, said A.O. Scott in The New York Times. “Really, the stakes could hardly be higher.”