56 | DECEMBER 19 • 2019 

Arts&Life

celebrity jews

MOVIE NEWS 
Opening Dec. 20 is Star Wars: 
The Rise of Starwalker. Advance 
publicity promises this film will be 
the final part of the nine-episode 
Skywalker saga. I won’
t go into 
plot details. I will simply note that 
this one, like the last three really 
big Star Wars films, was directed 
and co-written by J.J. Abrams, 
53. A sad note: Carrie Fisher, 
who died in 2016, does appear as 
Princess Laia one more time via 
footage from the two Star Wars
films she made just before her 
death. 
Bombshell follows several 
women at Fox News as they set 
out to expose Fox News founder 
Roger Ailes (John Lithgow) as a 
serial sexual harasser. Two well-
known Fox newscasters, Gretchen 
Carlson and Megyn Kelly, were the 
most prominent of Ailes’
 victims 
(played by, respectively, Nicole 
Kidman and Charlize Theron). 
Margot Robbie co-stars as Kayla, 
a composite figure whose story 
combines the harassment stories 
of several other women. Jay 
Roach, 62, directed. His many 
credits include the Austin Powers
and Focker films. He converted to 
Judaism around the time of his 
1993 marriage to Susanna Hoffs, 
60, the lead singer of the Bangles, 
a pop group most popular in the 
’
80s. (Opens Dec. 20; Robbie and 
Theron are 2020 best actress 
Golden Globe nominees). 
Opening on Dec. 25 is Uncut 

Gems, a black comedy crime film 
directed and co-written by brothers 
Josh and Benny Safadie (they 
are 35 and 33, respectively). The 
brothers, raised in New York, are 
of Syrian Jewish background. This 
is their first big-budget studio film, 
having made five well-received 
smaller budget flicks in the last 12 
years. Gems has got great advance 
reviews, with star Adam Sandler, 
53, getting unusually good notic-
es. Sandler plays a jewelry store 
owner who is a compulsive gam-
bler. He must find a way to pay 
his debts before it is too late. The 
supporting cast includes Idina 
Menzel, 48, and Judd Hirsch, 84.

STREAMING CHOICES
The documentary Mel Brooks: 
Unwrapped is now streaming on 
HBO. Filmmaker Alan Yentob, 72, 
has conducted interviews with Mel 
Brooks, now 93, since 1981. The 
documentary deftly combines this 
interview footage with other mate-
rial to give us a wonderful portrait 
of a truly funny man. Yentob, 
former BBC creative director, was 
born in the U.K. to Iraqi Jewish 
parents. 
Buzz is that The Witcher, a 
Netflix action-fantasy series that 
begins Dec. 20, will be something 
of a Game of Thrones replace-
ment. It centers on a solitary 
“monster hunter” (Henry Cavill) 
who lives in a sort-of-medieval 
world. British Jewish actor Adam 
Levy, 49, has a large supporting 
role (Mousesack). His father is an 
Iraqi Jew. His mother is Russian 
Jewish. 

NATE BLOOM
COLUMNIST

HILARY BRONWYN GAYLE SMPSP 

Charlize Theron as 
“Megyn Kelly” and 
John Lithgow as 
“Roger Ailes” in 
Bombshell, opening 
Dec. 25.

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