Directed by New York filmmaker Nathan Silver, who co-wrote the screenplay with C. Mason Wells, Between the Temples follows Jason Schwartzman as a bereaved cantor at an upstate New York synagogue, who has lost his wife, can’t sing anymore, lives with his two mothers, and has a newfound taste for mudslide cocktails. While he keeps kosher and remains devout, his ennui-addled regression seems all but terminal until his 70-year-old grade school music teacher (the legendary Carol Kane) walks back into his life and becomes his new adult Bat Mitzvah student… and maybe something more. Something like Harold and Maude by way of Mike Leigh, Silver’s ninth feature is perhaps his most accomplished film yet—a portrait of love in a time of loss that is equal parts touching, cringingly hilarious, and effortlessly strange, shot in stunning 16mm by Sean Price Williams and featuring genius-level comedic performances by Schwartzman, Kane, Robert Smigel and Dolly De Leon.

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