My Father My Lord.

"Although profoundly compassionate toward its characters, My Father My Lord is an implicit critique of ultra-Orthodox dogma by a filmmaker who grew up in a Hasidic community but abandoned it when he was 25 to study film," writes Stephen Holden in the New York Times. The film "has the glowing simplicity and force of a biblical parable."

"With a dreamlike narrative suffused in a fuzzy childhood-memory glow and dominated by the presence of an overbearing father, the movie, in its best moments, suggests a Haredi version of Terence Davies's 1988 masterpiece, Distant Voices, Still Lives," writes Joshua Land in Time Out.

"A self-confessed devotee of the late Krzysztof Kieslowski, Poland's celebrated secular poet of cinema who dramatized Hebrew Bible morality in his Decalogue films, [David] Volach's picture bears many of the strengths and the weaknesses of Kieslowski's work," writes Bruce Bennett in the New York Sun. "On the plus side, My Father My Lord reconnects with the latent power of religious devotion by reframing the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac in a contemporary, albeit exotically cloistered, milieu. On the minus side, the ethical drawing and quartering that Menachem's father undergoes by the film's end borders on melodrama."

"The question Volach seems to be asking is whether blind faith is enough to make up a life, and it's a question that resonates most when it plays out in the contrast between a society where God is at the center of everything, and the face of one little boy who can't stop thinking about his family's next trip to the beach," writes Noel Murray at the AV Club.

Earlier: Ella Taylor in the Voice.

Posted by dwhudson at May 16, 2008 6:46 AM