Fables and Lies

On the Nose · Jan 26, 2023 · 43m

Last month saw the release of two autobiographical films, now both Oscar nominees, about young artists growing up in complicated, 20th-century American Jewish families. In The Fabelmans, Steven Spielberg follows a precocious child filmmaker, Sammy Fabelman, as he turns his camera on his fracturing family. In Armageddon Time, James Gray meditates on Queens in 1980, where the intersections of school, family, and the police destroy a friendship between two boys, one Black and one Jewish. Do these movies have something new to say about the drama of upwardly mobile Jewish family life, or are they…