Curator Watchlist
A lush, unusually self-aware musical about gender disguise, religious learning, and desire, carried by Barbra Streisand’s bold, highly personal direction and performance. It’s emotionally sincere, formally idiosyncratic, and often more interesting than polished, which is part of its appeal.
Where to watch: Buy
Fri · 2h 12m
Director: Barbra Streisand
Starring: Barbra Streisand, Mandy Patinkin, Amy Irving
In a time when girls were forbidden to study religious scriptures, a Jewish girl masquerades as a boy to enter religious training and unexpectedly finds love along the way.
Barbra Streisand
Barbra Streisand, Mandy Patinkin, Amy Irving
A lush, unusually self-aware musical about gender disguise, religious learning, and desire, carried by Barbra Streisand’s bold, highly personal direction and performance. It’s emotionally sincere, formally idiosyncratic, and often more interesting than polished, which is part of its appeal.
Yentl is a singular studio-era passion project: part romance, part religious coming-of-age story, part self-portrait of an artist insisting on the right to speak. Its premise is simple, but the film keeps widening into questions about education, performance, longing, and the cost of passing as someone else. Streisand treats the material with real seriousness, and the result feels both old-fashioned and defiantly personal.
What makes it memorable is the tension between restraint and excess. The songs function like private thoughts, which gives the film a confessional quality even when the plot turns melodramatic. That inwardness, combined with the period setting and the gender disguise conceit, creates a strange and compelling mood: tender, yearning, and a little unhinged in the best way.
It is not a perfectly balanced film, but it is an unmistakable one. The emotional sincerity, the visual polish, and the sheer audacity of its perspective make it easy to admire even when it overreaches. For viewers who like their classics with a strong authorial stamp, this is very much worth the time.
Lagrangian54 (4★) · 1554 likes
Mulan for Jews
kevintporter (4★) · 1483 likes
This movie is so unwell. Barbara is 40 year old woman playing a small girl playing a small boy in an internal-thought musical in which no one is allowed to sing but her, including famously bad singers Amy Irving and Mandy Patinkin at apex hotness. All the songs are interior monologues from Yentl where something happens and she'll recap it in her thoughts immediately. Here's how they all start: [Yentl realizes something] YENTL: 🎶I just realized somethiiiiiiing🎶 Incredible stuff, just peak hubris from from an out control icon. I absolutely loved it, four stars!
Angel Goldstein (4★) · 1160 likes
What if... we kissed in the Yeshiva... while reading the Talmud and wearing our prayer shawls? Ha ha, jk... Unless?
Olivier Lemay (3.5★) · 879 likes
intellectual she’s the man
Nico (4★) · 849 likes
1983 mandy patinkin is the FINEST man i have ever seen in my entire life
A playful, self-aware musical about identity and performance that shares Yentl’s interest in reinvention and romantic complication.
Another sharp gender-performance comedy-musical, balancing disguise, desire, and social masquerade with wit.
A passionate period drama about female agency, desire, and the struggle to be heard in a restrictive world.
Uses disguise and gendered expectations to explore ambition, intimacy, and the freedom of stepping outside prescribed roles.
A road movie built around performance, self-fashioning, and the emotional power of chosen identity.
A literary, gender-fluid period fantasy that similarly treats identity as something fluid, theatrical, and historical.
A sweeping story of female survival and self-realization under patriarchy, with strong emotional and spiritual resonance.
For viewers drawn to big, emotionally direct melodrama with a strong sense of personal memory and wounded longing.
A foundational Jewish musical about tradition, family, and changing social roles, with comparable cultural texture.
A serious period drama about hidden lives, performance, and the tension between public role and private feeling.
A sung-through romance whose emotional directness and stylized form echo Yentl’s interior musicality.
A musical where performance masks deeper social and emotional anxieties, with a similarly uneasy glamour.
gender disguise, female education, Jewish identity, religious study, romantic longing, self-invention, forbidden desire, coming of age
musical drama, period romance, gender identity, feminist, Jewish culture, forbidden love, coming-of-age, melodrama, 1980s cinema, auteur filmmaking