Critics reviews

The fond tone and gentle ironies have a generic similarity to Bernard Malamud.

If it all sounds terribly mushy, the director, Daniel Burman, rarely lays the schmaltz on too thick; he gives the movie a tight pace and trusts viewers to find their bearings in situations entered in medias res. Even the grayish, televisual camerawork helps to lend the movie a documentary feel.

As films about dopey dudes finding love go, The Tenth Man is too modest for its own good, and lacks a critical examination of Once's community that could delve beneath the surface of its characters' anxieties.

Easily the strongest and most pleasurable [fiction] film I saw was Daniel Burman's The Tenth Man... Set in Buenos Aires' dilapidated but resourceful Jewish quarter El Once, it is a father-son story suffused with mysticism and humor worthy of Isaac Bashevis Singer, hybridized with Latin American magic realism. I'm not kidding, the film is that good.

Although "The Tenth Man" is not a documentary, Burman and his cinematographer Daniel Ortega give it a hand-held thrust-into-the-center aesthetic that makes the events onscreen seem caught, rather than rehearsed or manipulated. For the most part, it's pure chaos and cacophony, an accurate reflection of the community.

A valentine to the bustling Once district, the old Jewish neighborhood of Buenos Aires, and to Usher, themacher behind a Jewish welfare foundation located there, this low-key romantic comedy marks a return to one of Burman's oft-repeated themes — a son coming to grips with his relationship with his father — and to the setting of one of his most successful features, "Lost Embrace.

The smartest touch of Burman's bouncy, unobtrusively informative screenplay is to make Usher such a dominant offscreen presence before he finally shows up in the closing minutes. Indeed, for the bulk of the running time we're led to believe Usher is the "tenth man" of the English language title — which refers to the quorum of men required for a Jewish funeral — before a last-reel development concludes the bittersweet proceedings on a productively circular note.

The film's implicitly conservative thrust – the idea that, eventually, you have to go home again – is conveyed with wit and energy, not least through Sabbagh's characterful playing. Daniel Ortega's photography gives the film a bustling energy, notably in hand-held shots of the district's chaotic streets.