83
Metascore
27 reviews · Provided by Metacritic.com
- 100Entertainment WeeklyLisa SchwarzbaumEntertainment WeeklyLisa SchwarzbaumFootnote is itself a perfect little piece of Talmud, full of text, commentary, and colorful argument.
- Joseph Cedar's Footnote is a wry, wise little film that revels in the cataclysmic import of a life's most ostensibly trivial details.
- 80Time OutJoshua RothkopfTime OutJoshua RothkopfCedar's idiosyncratically brilliant script also has a moral question at its heart: Is lying to spare someone's feelings ever justified? Surely the Talmud has a thing or two to say about that.
- 75The Globe and Mail (Toronto)Liam LaceyThe Globe and Mail (Toronto)Liam LaceyA father-son academic rivalry provides fodder for this caustic comedy set in the Talmud Department of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
- 75MovielineStephanie ZacharekMovielineStephanie ZacharekWhat Cedar captures here is the way a father and son can be bound so tightly they almost choke the air out of one another. You can't exactly call it affection; it's that far more complicated thing we call kinship.
- The love, jealousy, and stubborn pride of the relationship between Ashkenazi and Bar-Aba is the heart of the film, and that makes the deliberately uncertain note of the ending particularly frustrating.
- 70Village VoiceVillage VoiceSomething between a comedy of everyday absurdity and a family tragedy pushed into the realm of the hyper-real, Footnote uses its characters' differing relationships to authenticity as the basis for an enigmatic riff on representation.
- 60The Hollywood ReporterTodd McCarthyThe Hollywood ReporterTodd McCarthyJewish and academically inclined audiences worldwide will respond to numerous aspects of this unusual drama, although it is paradoxically both too broad and too esoteric for the general art house public.
- 50Slant MagazineAndrew SchenkerSlant MagazineAndrew SchenkerJoseph Cedar's Footnote is a sour, rather unpleasant affair that hinges on acts of Jews behaving badly.