The Last Nazi (2019)

The survivors of four generations of a Jewish family are rocked to their core when the family's 92-year-old matriarch makes a stunning confession.

Director:

Jeff Lipsky

Writer:

Jeff Lipsky

Stars:

Rebecca Schull, Jill Durso, AJ Cedeno

Cast

Cast overview, first billed only:
Rebecca Schull	...	Claire
Jill Durso	...	Olivia
AJ Cedeno	...	Josh (as AJ Cedeño)
Reed Birney	...	Harry
Julie Fain Lawrence	...	Melody
Sami Bray	...	Marin
Jagger Nelson	...	Jonathan
Russell Koplin	...	Jessica
Ariel Eliaz	...	Ben
Cara Yeates	...	Laia
David Gottfried	...	Beachcomer
Madelyn Barkocy	...	Layla
Amir Royale	...	Omar
Brandon Damiano	...	Eran
Jacob Goodhart	...	Kevin

Storyline

The first day of Rosh Hashana; in a park, a close-knit family performs a prayer ritual. Two characters in their early 30s, Josh and Olivia are soon to be married. He is a Modern Orthodox Jew, and she has converted from Catholicism to Judaism. Josh's father, Harry, is a sardonic agnostic. Claire, Josh's great-grandmother, stays mostly silent but is clearly full of affection. After the marriage, Claire meets Josh and Olivia on a beach outing and makes a startling confession. She initiates it indirectly, by showing them photos that she's been holding in a safe deposit box. It's an odd place to keep one's past, but Claire has very good reason to have hidden hers. Not only is the beloved matriarch not a Jew, she was herself a member of the Nazi Party in World War II Germany. Claire, who remains an anti-Semite but nevertheless also continues to insist that she loves her Jewish children, has brain cancer. She wishes to travel out of New York for an assisted suicide. Some of her family ...

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Plot Keywords:

survivor | 

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Taglines:

What would you do

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Genres:

Drama

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User Reviews

Beyond-tedious talkfest

It's pretty sad when the scene on a movie poster is the best and only decent part of a film, but that was my impression with "The Last."

New York's Central Park provides an attractive backdrop to the initial footage in this production, and it gives you some hope that the movie might be heading in an interesting direction. But the film goes seriously downhill from there.

To its credit, "The Last" is one of the few movies in recent memory to star a nonagenarian, the attractive actress Rebecca Schull. I celebrated this fact till I saw that Ms. Schull's screen time was marked by stultifyingly dull and discursive dialogue. Indeed, this movie is numbingly talky, without giving the viewer a reason to care. ("The Last" leaves "My Dinner with Andre" looking like an edge-of-your-seat popcorn thriller.)

Ms. Schull's performance is all right, but I found most of the acting in this film to be uniformly bad, particularly when it came to a younger female character who plays a loud-mouthed and self-satisfied convert to Judaism. I wanted to run away.

I caught this movie at the Jewish Community Center of Manhattan, which usually offers some stellar works that aren't easily located elsewhere. You can bet this is "The Last" time I'll be checking this movie out!

Details

Official Sites:

Official Website

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Release Date:

29 March 2019 (USA)

Also Known As:

The Last

Filming Locations:

New York, USA

Company Credits

Production Co:

Plainview Pictures

Technical Specs

Runtime:

123 min

Color:

Color

Aspect Ratio:

1.85 : 1