YNOT at the Movies

Boaz spends the first half of writer-director Moshe Rosenthal's sophomore feature "Tell Me Everything" (עצמאות | Israel/France/UK 2026 | in Hebrew | 109 min.) learning a secret, and the second half learning what to do with it. Rosenthal treats those as two different movies, one about discovery and one about repair, and the film is stronger for keeping them separate rather than rushing Boaz toward some tidy understanding.

It's 1987 in Tel Aviv, and Boaz (Yair Mazor) is a scrawny kid a few months out from his bar mitzvah, a coming of age ritual in Judaism. He is closer to his mother Bella (Keren Tzur), a beautician, than to his father Meir (Assi Cohen), a cab driver who also runs a furniture store. Boaz shares a room with his two older sisters, and the whole apartment hums with 80s hits off a boombox, the era's big hair, and shoulder pads. The film spends time letting that household feel warm before it takes the warmth apart. When Boaz stumbles onto the truth about his father, with AIDS already a distant but terrifying headline on the evening news, he tells his family what he saw, and the fallout pushes Meir out of his life entirely.

The back half jumps to 1996, when Boaz (Ido Tako) is twenty-one. He's been admitted to university in Jerusalem but is still sleeping in his mother's living room, working at a gas station that isn't enough to get him out. He carries longing, resentment, guilt, and regret for the father he hasn't seen since his bar mitzvah, all of it tangled together. It's heartbreaking to watch him try to sort through it without much help from anyone around him.

Rosenthal and his production and costume teams recreate the family's world in fine detail, the apartment, the clothes, even the sidewalks outside, the texture of a working-class Tel Aviv household in the late '80s. The move to '90s is handled with the same care, tracking how both Boaz's own feelings and the culture's attitude toward gay people have shifted with the years.

Mazor is the film's real discovery. Before the truth about his father comes out, this Boaz plainly admires the man, and it's in the boy's inquisitive stares, watching, working things out, that the film locates a child's mind still catching up to what's in front of it. Tako, picking up the role as the character enters his twenties, plays that tangle of longing, resentment, guilt, and regret without ever resolving it into something simpler than it is.

A few too many of the second half's turns depend on Boaz being in exactly the right place at exactly the right moment, and the coincidences start to show through the emotional groundwork Rosenthal has otherwise laid so carefully. It doesn't undo the film, but it does mean the raw feeling on screen is doing more of the persuading than the story is.

"Tell Me Everything" marks Rosenthal's second time opening the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival (SFJFF), following "Karaoke" (2022) at SFJFF42. This year's edition of SFJFF, the 46th, is the festival's largest yet, with 65 films from 17 countries and a record eight world premieres. The festival closes Saturday, August 1, at the Piedmont Theatre with the documentary "We Met at Grossinger's" (2025) and the next day it screens this year's winners for the San Francisco Bay Area Film Critics Circle Award, Best First Feature Award, and Audience Awards for documentary and narrative.

"Tell Me Everything" opens the 46th San Francisco Jewish Film Festival on July 16, at the Herbst Theatre, with a second Bay Area screening July 29 at the Piedmont Theatre in Oakland.