NYILY has its premiere next week and will open on a limited number of screens on October 16th. So we’re due to be getting a lot of reviews on the film and that’s what this update is about. Its a brief review that isn’t too thrilled with the film, except for…

Thankfully, the brief segment starring Natalie Portman as a Hasidic diamond broker—and bride-to-be—who has a brief romantic fantasy about the Jain diamond merchant she deals with in Midtown is one of the few that made sense, and that reflected something real about the city. (It makes a difference that the director, Mira Nair, actually lives in New York.) Plus, Portman dresses up both as a Satmar bride, and a Bollywood one—though we’ve seen that trick before. She may wind up looking roughly like she always does on-screen—that is to say, gorgeous—but paired with Slumdog Millionaire star Irrfan Khan, she manages to open a little window into the awkwardness of reconciling the cloistered insularity of the Hasidic world with the cosmopolitan noise of the New York we love.