Movie · 1983 · Music, Drama, Romance · 2h 12m · PG · English
Curator score: 5.2/10 (42.8K ratings)
In a time when the world of study belonged only to men, there lived a girl who dared to ask..."why?"
Overview
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.
Ratings
Curator score: 5.2/10
IMDb: 6.6/10
Letterboxd: 3.61/5
Rotten Tomatoes: 69%
Metacritic: 68
TMDB: 6.7/10
Director
Barbra Streisand
Production
Ladbroke, United Artists, Barwood Films
Cast
Barbra Streisand, Mandy Patinkin, Amy Irving, Nehemiah Persoff, Steven Hill, Allan Corduner, Ruth Goring, David de Keyser, Bernard Spear, Doreen Mantle, Lynda Baron, Jack Lynn, Anna Tzelniker, Miriam Margolyes, Mary Henry, Robbie Barnett, Ian Sears, Frank Baker, Anthony Dean Rubeš, Renata Buser
Where to watch
Amazon Prime Video, Amazon Prime Video with Ads
Curator Review
Verdict
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.
Best for
Viewers who like prestige melodrama with a feminist edge
Fans of gender-disguise stories and identity dramas
People who enjoy emotionally interior musicals
Audiences interested in Jewish history, ritual, and scholarship
Viewers open to ambitious, slightly unwieldy auteur filmmaking
Skip if
You want a light, conventional romance
You dislike musicals built around internal monologue rather than big ensemble numbers
You prefer tidy pacing and understated direction
You’re looking for a strictly modern, contemporary-feeling treatment of gender politics
Overview
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.
Worth noting
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.
Bottom line
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.
Top Letterboxd reviews
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