Amos Gitai

"Ushpizin" is one of those films that has a direct line to the Almighty. When a character says "we need a miracle," it's only a matter of time until not one but several take place. But what's especially noteworthy about this popular Israeli film is that...

Friday March 17, 2000      Amos Gitai's somber, elegiac "Kadosh," which means "sacred" in Yiddish, takesus into the sequestered world of Mea Shearim, the Orthodox Jewish quarter of Jerusalem, where its devout citizens are committed to preserving an...

Friday December 1, 2000      Amos Gitai's "Kippur" is a classic war film, at once elegiac and immediate, that takes you smack into the chaos of combat yet is marked by a detached perspective.      Already acclaimed at major festivals, the film is...

In the eyes of many, movies haven't really changed since Sept. 11-- or, if they have, it's been with typical glacial slowness and skittishness. That's hardly surprising. Everything happens slowly in the movies, the art form where millions of dollars...

Not long after 9/11, a French producer named Alain Brigand asked 11 very different directors from across the world to make short films about the catastrophe. Some of Brigand's choices were real head-scratchers: No matter how great Sean Penn can be as an...

"Alila," the title of the new film by Israeli director Amos Gitai, translates from the Hebrew simply as "plot." But the story and even the characters turn out to be less interesting than the overview it gives us of the way Israelis live now, its...

Countries in crisis often produce their most involving films. As it was with Eastern bloc nations like Poland and Czechoslovakia during the Soviet occupation, so it is today with the state of Israel. As that nation wrestles with its agonizing...

The 58th Festival de Cannes struck a mighty blow for socially conscious yet highly dramatic cinema Saturday when it awarded the Palme d'Or to Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne's quietly devastating "The Child." It was the second Palme for the Belgian...