Between the Temples

Between the Temples is often funny, sometimes uncomfortable to watch, and, despite its flaws, quite moving.

Singing in its own key, there might not be a more authentic and purely entertaining film this year.

Director Nathan Silver’s hopeful film demonstrates the adaptability of tradition, and the possibility of reconciliation and continuity across the generations.

There is something about watching people having a really really hard time which can be very very funny, and there's also a real sweetness at the center of its story.

The complexity and the layers of partially healed emotional scars that underpin [Carol Kane's] sunny, goofy performance in Between the Temples make this a career-best contender for the 72-year-old actor.

Silver’s ninth feature revels in capturing the alchemical, off-kilter chaos of oddballs in proximity&#59; what makes it special has as much to do with the strange, spontaneous energies that fill the air between his characters as what it is they’re saying.

“Between the Temples” is a rare treat, a simply extraordinary dramedy with exceptional writing and performances telling a compelling and unusual story.

Not much in the material stimulates, and the film, sloppily rendered and off-punttingly screwy, doesn’t leave an impression.

Between the Temples is both off-kilter and perfectly logical in its own illogical way. Nathan Silver’s film is a balm for the heart.

Silver, who has a knack for acerbic wit and tortured metafictions, retains a sense of his idiosyncratic chaos and an aesthetic scuzziness.