It’s charitable to call the chilly reaction to “Screams Before Silence” a fluke.
The 2024 documentary recalled the rape and torture behind Hamas’ Oct. 7 terrorist attack on Israel. Sheryl Sandberg’s documentary featured first-person accounts of the savagery perpetrated against female victims.
We also saw some of the footage Hamas terrorists recorded during the invasion. It’s a tough but necessary watch.
The film was roughly an hour long and was immediately made available for free on YouTube last April. Film critics still ignored it. You can count the number of online “Screams Before Silence” reviews on two hands, with only one needed for mainstream outlets like The Wrap.
Near silence. And it just happened again.
A similar film exposing antisemitism hit theaters over the weekend, and most movie critics didn’t give it a look. That “fluke” defense is crumbling.
To be fair, “October 8” has received more attention from the film critic community.
Slightly more.
Pro-Israel celebrities like Debra Messing and Michael Rapaport join scholars in denouncing the antisemitic wave that crashed over Western culture over the last year-plus. Human rights groups stood down as Jewish students were attacked on college campuses and pro-Hamas rallies flooded major cities.
College campuses coddled pro-Palestinian extremists. Ivy League presidents refused to defend Jewish students against protracted attacks against them.
The media, in turn, too often trumpeted Hamas talking points rather than commit honest journalism. It’s a blistering film everyone should see, and it mostly succeeds in avoiding the political blame game.
Calling out religious bigotry should be a bipartisan affair.
RELATED: WHY CELEBRITIES WON’T TALK ABOUT ANTISEMITISM
The documentary, released nationwide on March 14, boasts just 8 reviews at RottenTomatoes.com. That’s not enough to produce an official “Tomatometer” rating. The Hollywood Reporter weighed in on the feature, as did The Washington Post.
The other reviews hail from smaller, independent sources.
What about The New York Times? The Wrap? Deadline? Variety? Indiewire? USA Today? CNN?
Nothing.
Now, compare that to the reception “No Other Land” received. The unabashedly pro-Palestinian film earned Best Documentary honors at this month’s Oscars ceremony.
The film boasts a perfect 100 percent score from 94 professional critics at RottenTomatoes.com.
Another pro-Palestinian film, “From Ground Zero,” also generated sizable support from the film critic community. That one boasts a 98 percent “fresh” rating from the 48 critics who weighed in on the film.
“October 8” director Wendy Sachs told this reporter most Hollywood stars are afraid to publicly defend Jews against antisemitism. Doing so might harm their careers, Sachs suggested.
That’s a sorry state of affairs.
What excuse do critics have for ignoring films that expose antisemitism?
The post AGAIN: Critics Avoid Antisemitism Documentary ‘October 8’ appeared first on Hollywood in Toto.