The Matchmaker
The Matchmaker Image
Metascore
69 out of 100

Generally favorable reviews - based on 9 Critics What's this?

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  • Summary: Arik, a teenage boy growing up in Haifa in 1968, gets a job working for Yankele Bride, a matchmaker. Yankele, a mysterious Holocaust survivor, has an office in back of a movie theater that shows only love stories, run by a family of seven Romanian dwarves in the seedy area by the port. Yankele introduces Arik to a new world, built on the ruins of an old one. As Arik begins to learn the mysteries of the human heart through his work with Yankele, he falls in love with Tamara, his friend Beni's cousin. Tamara has just returned from America and is full of talk of women's rights, free love and rock and roll. The disparate parts of Arik's life collide in unexpected, often funny and very moving ways as he lives through a summer that changes him forever. Avi Nesher's latest film mixes comedy with drama as it tells a coming-of-age story unlike any you've ever seen before. (Menemsha Films)… Expand

Critic Reviews

Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 7 out of 9
  2. Mixed: 2 out of 9
  3. Negative: 0 out of 9
  1. The Playlist
    Reviewed by: Mark Zhuravsy
    Aug 18, 2012
    83
    The Matchmaker is at heart an unexpectedly complex film about love, but also an examination of Israel in flux, a country with one foot in the past and another in the future – a weight that may never fully vacate Israeli shoulders.
  2. Los Angeles Times
    Reviewed by: Kenneth Turan
    Aug 13, 2012
    80
    It sounds like a throwback to an earlier, more traditional style of Israeli filmmaking but it instead provides a view of that country that's as satisfyingly eccentric and unexpected as anything we've seen.
  3. Village Voice
    Reviewed by: Michelle Orange
    Aug 14, 2012
    80
    An old-fashioned Mediterranean coming-of-age story set in the young heart of the Levant, The Matchmaker combines the tender tone of a film like "Cinema Paradiso" with a clear-eyed, street-level vantage on Israel's summer of the Six-Day War.
  4. Slant Magazine
    Reviewed by: Glenn Heath Jr.
    Aug 13, 2012
    50
    The film ultimately fails to treat history as anything but a string of melodramatic reference points for moody characters haplessly trying to find love.

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