Emil Stern

Jan 14, 2025 | jewishreviewofbooks.com | Emil Stern |Akiva Schick |Maud Kozodoy

Theodor Adorno said there could be no poetry after Auschwitz, but he didn’t say anything about buddy movies, which, I guess, is an argument in favor of A Real Pain. The film follows two cousins, anxious, fussy David (Jesse Eisenberg, who wrote and directed the film) and the appealing but erratic Benji (Kieran Culkin in a lucid, sincere performance), who go on a heritage tour of Jewish Poland after the death of their grandmother, a Holocaust survivor.

Sep 30, 2024 | jewishreviewofbooks.com | Emil Stern |Akiva Schick |Yoel Finkelman

When the $488 million Academy Museum of Motion Pictures opened in Los Angeles in September 2021 after what The New York Times called an “almost comical series of setbacks,” its organizers must have felt they could finally rest and roll credits. After all, they had given a lavish glow up to the 1939 Streamline Moderne May Company Building on the corner of Fairfax and Wilshire next to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the La Brea Tar Pits and Museum.

Sep 26, 2023 | jewishreviewofbooks.com | Emil Stern |Sarah Rindner |Akiva Schick |Shai Secunda

directed by Rotem Shamir and Cecilia Verheyden NetflixNetflix After surviving the war, part of my family ended up in Antwerp, some of them venturing into the city’s famous diamond trade. I’d always wished my grandfather had stayed in touch with them, but after watching Rough Diamonds (streaming on Netflix), I’m not so sure. The Wolfsons are a wealthy, prominent Hasidic family who run a famous but ailing diamond concern.

Jul 2, 2023 | tabletmag.com | Emil Stern

Summer in LA: wildfires, earthquakes, prickling unease, and memories from only a couple of years ago of the National Guard driving down Robertson Boulevard. Still, none of these things bums Angelenos out like June Gloom. June Gloom is the annual local weather phenomenon during which the sky gets gray, the temperature drops, and seasonal depression rates climb. Giving the ambient murk a cutesy name (along with May Gray before it) is supposed to make it more palatable, but it doesn’t.

May 15, 2023 | tabletmag.com | Emil Stern

Los Angeles, as befits a city in the desert, is a metropolis of signs. You can find poetry, if not exactly logic, falling like wisteria blooms from personal injury lawyers’ ads: “Jacob—a lawyer—your lawyer.” You can consider actors’ For Your Consideration campaigns for a good two or three years after the awards for the show or movie in question have been given out.