‘This movie does us a service in bringing this brave woman’s story to the attention of a new generation.  Due justice is done to the awful gravity of the events that prompted her most important work, but it’s a pity that so much time is wasted on awkward melodrama which at times swamps her personal story.

“Like so many children of Holocaust survivors, Lily Brett was haunted by her parent’s suffering, and by the ghosts of the family she would never know – the ones who had perished in the ghettoes or the death camps.   She was consumed by a desire to visit the places her parents had lived and to share and perhaps understand what they had endured.”

Golda was completed and released by August 2023, thus predating the murderous raid by Hamas terrorists on October 7th of that year.  If you are of the view that Israel has no right to exist, you might be unsympathetic on the Big Picture, but you’d have to have a heart of stone not to be moved by this depiction of an old woman having to make terrible decisions in the worst crisis she and her country had ever faced. 

 “My quibble with Bradley Cooper’s work is that Maestro is more a showcase of his ability to do a good Leonard Bernstein impression than it is a serious biopic about this towering figure of 20th century music.”