![]() ![]() “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs,” Joel and Ethan Coen “First Man,” Damian Chazelle (Also in competition) The competition jury will be led by last year’s winner for the Golden Lion and eventually the Oscar for Best Picture and Best Director, Guillermo del Toro (“ The Shape Of Water“).Ĭlick below to see which films will be coming to the festival this year. ![]() There are a few world premieres and a few classics being restored as well. He probably should have stuck with the gorgeous vistas.The official lineup for the 75th Venice Film Festival has been announced. Instead, Ferguson’s careful, painfully banal script keeps sidling up to the neverending conflict that splits this lovely city in two, then backing away into conciliatory but meaningless bromides about intercultural understanding. #Hocus focus films in jerusalem movieInstead, at the end the movie crosses their paths virtually at the shuk, in a sentimental but empty gesture that may be as close as this film gets to edging up to the central story of one of the most conflicted cities in the world. A face-to-face encounter might have helped, or at least some sense of East and West Jerusalem as two bustling cities. “We don’t know much about each other,” says one of the pleasant young women, who in fact seem not to have met at all. With them we plod ceremonially through weddings and bar mitzvot, watch muezzins calling the Muslim faithful to prayer, and visit ornate church interiors you can find anywhere online - and, of course, the Western Wall. Their melting-pot backgrounds are interesting, but mostly they’re our highly scripted guides through the usual tourist spots. Director Daniel Ferguson plucked three dark-eyed young beauties from local schools to represent the modern faces of the three great religions. ![]() Otherwise, “Jerusalem” is a garden-variety travelogue with a generous helping of cheese. A computerized reconstruction of the much-destroyed Temple is a special thrill. The most compelling sequences by far are those in which a local archaeologist guides us through the detritus of an ancient, invisible past beneath her feet, where the the marks of multiple civilizations and barbaric intrusions are being pieced together in an ongoing effort to map the city through time. ![]() Those invasions racked up a ton of human and architectural carnage as well as beautiful buildings. No need for the corny swelling strings: The landscape pops off the screen, with terrific aerial shots of nearby Masada, the Dome of the Rock, and other well-known vistas of a city that looks medieval by day and bathed in deceptively tranquil light by night.Ĭumberbatch cruises us through the story of the staggering 40 times Jerusalem has been conquered. In venues like the California Science Center, where the film accompanies an exhibit of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the film bowls along nicely through this ancient city’s history above and below ground. Those looking for a portrait of Jerusalem as the modern, politically polarized city it is today are mostly out of luck.Īt 40 minutes long, “Jerusalem,” which is currently playing on giant screens around the United States, feels as though it’s hanging off the edge of some other, bigger project. With one eye surely fixed on the spiritual tourism market, the movie’s focus is firmly on Jerusalem as the “gateway to God” for Islam, Judaism and Christianity. The richly plummy vowels of His Royal Cumberness are mostly window dressing on this magnificently scenic but fatally bland National Geographic docu-history of one of the world’s most beautiful, bloodily contested cities. Jerusalem in Imax 3D with a topping of Benedict Cumberbatch - that’s a pretty big dessert of branding. ![]()
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