89% Footnote

All Critics (54) | Top Critics (24) | Fresh (48) | Rotten (6)

It speaks to anyone who's been on either end of a grudge or family antagonism. And it saves its best for those who have witnessed clusters of the best and brightest descend to the level of grade school kids on the playground.

It's not easy to make Eliezer a sympathetic character, yet Bar-Aba's demonstration of fleeting vulnerability awakens inevitable, if equally brief, compassion.

Its energy and eccentricity assert themselves in funky graphics, imaginative camerawork and everyday moments of awkwardness and absurdity.

The film was a nominee for this year's foreign-language Oscar, and Cedar has a real grasp of how to create conflict and generate tension.

Writer/director Joseph Cedar is wise to the comedy of frustration and alert to the tragedy of hubris.

Writer and director Cedar does a great job of ratcheting up the tension by filtering the story through a simmering family rivalry.

A first half frivolous enough that it's not as ghastly sentimental as it seems like it could be, and with a second half brittle enough that it's not as frivolous as it was when it started out.

While the premise delves into an alien landscape for most viewers not immersed in Talmudic study in Jerusalem, the universal feeling of familial irritation and begrudging respect shines right through.

"Footnote" gets sly, subtle comedy from the similarities between the two men, particularly since Uriel is unaware how much like his dad he is.

To many viewers the picture might seem as forbidding as a dense scholarly tome. But give it a chance, and you might find it as pleasurable as a good novella.

Largely concerned with the prickliness and delicacy around legacy, and the attendant patrilineal complications...But it's as much about the egotism and dysfunction of academia, reflected in the complex personalities of Eliezer and Uriel.

Footnote finally gets back on track as Eliezer puts his philological skills to use, but it's too little, too late.

[A]cademic research has never been shown with such visual verve. . . [E]ach professor's personality and expertise [is put] in sharp relief both comic and poignant.

Eliezer's facial expressions consist of 'constipated' and 'slightly less constipated.'

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