88% Footnote

All Critics (50) | Top Critics (23) | Fresh (44) | Rotten (6)

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.

Footnote is at its best when it gets into the cutthroat dynamics of academic competition, which are both horrifying and amusing.

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.'

Joseph Cedar's Footnote is easily one of the most exciting and creatively executed films about Jewish academics poring over the Torah ever made, excluding perhaps Joel and Ethan Coen's A Serious Man (which really does exist in a world of its own, anyway).

This material could, with just a few edits, be a serious and downbeat drama. But it's Cedar's knowing satire of academic politics (aided greatly by the sprightly and circus-like score by Amit Poznansky) that keeps the proceedings pungently bubbly.

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Source: http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/footnote/

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