Kevin Lally on Film

Each fall’s New York Film Festival is always a big highlight of the year, but Film at Lincoln Center’s other annual events are also a welcome opportunity to experience new international films. Coming up later this year are “New Directors/New Films,” “Rendez-Vous with French Cinema” and “Open Roads: New Italian Cinema.” And every January brings the New York Jewish Film Festival, this year highlighting 21 features and six shorts.

Leïla Bekhti in Once Upon My Mother

The opening-night attraction on January 14, 2026, is writer-director Ken Scott’s Once Upon My Mother, adapted from the autobiographical novel by French writer and radio personality Roland Perez. Roland was born with a club foot, and his single-minded, devoted Moroccan-Jewish mother was determined not to subject him to conventional medical procedures. The French music icon Sylvie Vartan, who appears as herself, plays a big role in overcoming Roland’s disability. Algerian-French actress Leïla Bekhti is a force of nature in the title role.

Peter Sichel

A major highlight of the festival is Katharina Otto-Bernstein’s documentary The Last Spy, which chronicles the fascinating life of Peter Sichel, whose wine-making Jewish family managed to flee Europe for America in 1941 and who subsequently became an invaluable operative in the Office of Strategic Services and the Central Intelligence Agency. His memory fully intact at age 100 (he died last year at 102), Sichel is extremely outspoken about America’s Cold War obsessions and its plots against the legitimate governments of Iran and Guatemala in the 1950s, actions that led him to leave the CIA and return to the family wine business.

I’m embargoed from offering full reviews of the above films, but I can talk at greater length about another festival highlight, Charles Grodin: Rebel with a Cause. Grodin, who died in 2021 at age 86, had a multi-faceted career. His two most prominent film roles were as an accountant wanted by the Chicago mob in the hilarious Midnight Run, opposite Robert De Niro as his frazzled bounty hunter; and as a newlywed who leaves his new wife for “shiksa goddess” Cybill Shepherd in Elaine May’s hard-to-see classic, The Heartbreak Kid. Many also know Grodin as the lead in the Beethoven films, playing opposite a huge Saint Bernard. He also had key supporting roles in Rosemary’s Baby, Catch-22, and Heaven Can Wait. People of a certain age will fondly remember Grodin as a frequent “anti-guest” on the Johnny Carson-era “Tonight Show” and “Late Night with David Letterman,” being confrontational with those hosts in a years-long piece of live performance art.

What I didn’t know is that Grodin directed a 1969 CBS special, “Simon and Garfunkel: Songs of America,” which incorporated footage of the Poor People’s March on Washington, Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers, and references to the assassinations of JFK, RFK, and MLK, much to the chagrin of its original sponsor, the Bell Telephone Company, which contended that the show’s “humanistic approach” would rile up Southern affiliates. (Sponsorship was taken over by Alberto-Culver, who added a cautionary introduction by actor Robert Ryan.) I forgot that Grodin also hosted a talk show on CNBC in the 1990s, which was cancelled after four years because he kept focusing on social issues more than show-biz figures.

Another revelation is how much of a social activist Grodin was, hence the title of James L. Freedman’s film. In the last two decades of his life, he took up the cause of several women, first-time offenders, who had been sentenced to lengthy prison terms under New York State’s draconian Rockefeller Drug Laws. Grodin’s relentless campaign was key to overturning those laws in 2009.

Grodin was never nominated for an Oscar, Emmy, or Tony, but a sign of how highly regarded he was is the array of A-listers in the film, all heaping praise on his comic and dramatic skills—among them, Robert De Niro, Elaine May, Steve Martin, Martin Short, Carol Burnett, Alan Arkin, Simon and Garfunkel, and his Same Time, Next Year Broadway co-star, Ellen Burstyn.

The fest is also screening documentaries on Shoah director Claude Lanzmann, Hadassah founder Henrietta Szold, photographer Fred Stein, and transgender Israeli activist Efrat Tilma. The closing-night film (which I haven’t seen) is writer-director-actor Matthew Shear’s comic drama Fantasy Life, with an impressive cast including Amanda Peet, Alessandro Nivola, Judd Hirsch, Andrea Martin, Bob Balaban, Jessica Harper, and Zosia Mamet. The Jewish Film Festival runs through January 28.

Pictured at top: Charles Grodin with Miss Piggy. Photos courtesy of Film at Lincoln Center.