REVIEW: Israeli Comedy-Drama Footnote Makes Talmudic Scholarship Seem Almost Dynamic

Sometimes a movie demands attention more for its “How” than its “What,” and writer-director Joseph Cedar’s Footnote falls squarely in that category. A movie about feuding father-and-son Talmudic scholars isn’t a surefire way to pack ’em in at the box office. But Cedar approaches his subject with so much wit and verve that he almost – almost – makes you forget you’re watching a movie about a very small, cloistered subset of academic obsessives whose life’s work is about as visually undynamic as you can imagine. How do you get action and drama out of pages and pages filled with Hebrew lettering?
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