Ella Taylor

Marking the 60th anniversary of the State of Israel, this omnibus edition of Meir Fenigstein’s annual festival boasts almost 60 movies, of which, with a couple of exceptions, the newest are the weakest. On the whole, it’s true that the current Israeli cinema is on a roll — if you......

Behold Adam Sandler, in a passable Israeli accent and outsize codpiece, as Zohan the Mossad superheavy: catching barbecued fish in his butt crack on a Tel Aviv beach, repelling bullets with his nostril, sculpting hand grenades into toy poodles for delighted Palestinian children while making mincemeat of an Arab terrorist......

Nothing snaps a child’s head around quite like a dying parent, especially when the parent is a cantankerous old sod like Arthur Morrison (Jim Broadbent), whose nominally adult son Blake (Colin Firth) still clings to childhood grievances. Directed by Anand Tucker with the same quiet tact he brought to Hilary......

Halfway through Surfwise, a mesmerizingly ambivalent documentary about an itinerant family of Jewish surfer-dude health nuts, we meet the 84-year-old patriarch, “Doc” Paskowitz, at Los Angeles’ Museum of Tolerance, showing director Doug Pray a blown-up photo of a Nazi preparing to shoot a Jewish mother and child at close range......

“Things never happen the same way twice.” Thus boometh Aslan the lion (Liam Neeson), alias the Son of God, popping his computer-generated shaggy head briefly into The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian to pep-talk a bunch of discouraged Brits into fighting the good fight again. Murray Close (Click to enlarge)......

GO  A MAN AND A WOMAN Claude Lelouch’s A Man and a Woman may be one of the silliest love songs in the canon of French fluff, but 42 years on, it gets a beguiling makeover in this new soufflé from the director, who seizes the day both to trade......