By Nate Bloom
Contributing Columnist
An Action Film & Two “Big” Shoah Movies
“One Battle or Another” opens in theaters on Sept. 26. Here’s the premise: When their evil enemy resurfaces after 16 years, a group of ex-revolutionaries reunites to rescue one of their daughters.
It’s a big budget action film with “A” list actors: Leonardo DiCaprio, Benicio del Toro and SEAN PENN, 64 (his late father was Jewish; his mother was Catholic. He’s always been secular).
ALANA HAIM, 33, has a supporting role. The film’s director, Paul Thomas Anderson, loves the music Alana and her sisters make (they’re in a group called “HAIM”). He gave Alana her her first film acting role, a star role in 2021’s “Licorice Pizza,” and he’s hired her again.
“Eleanor the Great” opens in theaters on Sept. 26. Here’s the basic premise: A 94-year-old Jewish Floridian woman (JUNE SQUIBB, 95) strikes up an unlikely friendship with Nina, a 19-year-old college student journalist in New York City.
Squibb converted to Judaism in the ‘50s, not long before she married a Jewish man. The marriage lasted for six years. In a 2013 interview she said she was drawn to Judaism and that she continues to identify as a Jew after her divorce. She also still celebrates the Jewish holidays.
Squibb’s breakthrough performance came in 2013 in a large role in “Nebraska,” a comedy-drama. She was nominated for the Oscar for best supporting actress.
“Eleanor” was directed by actress SCARLETT JOHANSSON, 40. This is the first film she’s directed. (Johansson’s mother is Jewish and she identifies as a Jew).
Spoiler alert — more plot: Eleanor moves to NYC to live with her daughter (JESSICA HECHT, 60) after Bessie, her best friend in Florida and a Holocaust survivor, dies suddenly (RITA ZOHAR, 81).
Nina, the college journalist, is the daughter of a black father and a white, Jewish mother. She chances to talk to Eleanor. She mistakenly thinks that Eleanor is a Holocaust survivor and that makes her a good subject for her news stories.
Eleanor didn’t “craft” this mistake, but she really loves Nina’s attention. So, Eleanor tells Bessie’s Holocaust stories to Nina — and Eleanor pretends that Bessie’s stories are her own life stories.
Recently, Johansson talked to “People” magazine. She said many people helped her find real Holocaust survivors to play some roles. The most notable survivor being Rita Zohar, an Israeli actress who was born in a concentration camp in Rumania.
Johansson was on “Finding Your Roots” (2017), the PBS celebrity ancestry program. She teared up as she learned many details about the murder of many of her Polish Jewish relatives in the Holocaust (Watch 5-minute excerpt on the internet. Search “Johansson, Finding Your Roots”).
In an “Eleanor” press release Johansson said, “I dedicated the film to my own grandmother, Dorothy Sloan. She was a very independent, vivacious Jewish woman who was involved in tenant activism, loved the city and enjoyed participating in all the free art programs that New York had to offer.”
Fun sidelight: Talk show host ANDY COHEN was on ‘Roots’ in 2023, and he found out that he’s distantly related to Johansson. In 2024, “Roots” guest MICHAEL DOUGLAS learned that Johansson was distantly related to him (his paternal Jewish line and her maternal Jewish line). Both guys were clearly delighted to be related to Ms. Johansson.
Reliable sources said that “Bau: Artist at War,” would open in movie theaters on January, 2025. I guess it got a very limited release because now the “big release” is set for Sept. 26. I wrote about this film last January. It’s an important film, so I will repeat most of what I wrote:
JOSEPH BAU (Emile Hirsch) was a Polish Jew who was imprisoned in the Plaskow concentration camp near Krakow, Poland. This is the concentration camp depicted in “Schindler’s List.” Two real-life characters in “Schindler,” Oskar Schindler and ITZHAK STERN, are characters in “Bau.” Schindler saved the lives of Bau and REBECCA, a woman whom Bau met and married in the concentration camp.
Bau used his artistic talents to stay alive, and he used those talents to create phony identity documents that allowed many Jews to escape the camp and survive — all of this is in the film — it also shows Bau and his wife moving to Israel in 1950 and his return, to Europe, to testify against the Nazi officer who tortured and killed his father.
Hirsch’s paternal grandfather was Jewish. The rest of his “grands” weren’t Jewish. Rebecca is played by INBAR LAVI, 38, a well-known Israeli actress.
