[France]
A very good film with everything -drama, romance, and comedy- about a nonpracticing Muslim and a nonpracticing Jew in love. Trouble starts when they have to introduce their significant other to the their more traditional parents. It not entirely upbeat, though it's upbeat enough for an American audience. If one removes the final scene, one would have a more traditional foreign film ending (and perhaps a better movie?).
[Israel]
A short flick in which drastically mismatched people are put in pairs on a couch and asked to kiss. (Or so it seems -- the setup is not clear.) Funny due to everyone's awkwardness. That's it -- there's no deeper themes about love or intimacy or religion because there's no time to deal with them.
[German]
A good comedy ridiculing Hitler. Some jokes are physical (e.g., barking like a dog); others are psychological (e.g., bed wetting); still others are situational (e.g., piles of bureaucratic forms, a great opening scene with many heil hitlers). It's laugh-at-loud funny at times, making it a good movie to see with a large crowd (as I did).
The plot, a Jewish acting professor is assigned to help a depressed Hitler get back his charisma, is merely an excuse for the jokes. The film makers attempt, in a minor way, to use the setting for a morality tale but this isn't explored in any real depth. Also, the ending doesn't match the plot or the feel of the rest of the movie.
With the credits played clips of people on the street being asked who Hitler was. Many young people didn't know! Many older people didn't want to talk about him. Some responses were funny. It's interesting how people's reactions depended on the decade in which they were born.
The movie felt like it was a little longer than it could have been. There were a few extraneous sub-plots.
This is apparently the first German movie criticizing Hitler with humor. As such, it's a watershed. I'm told even a decade ago the culture wouldn't have been ready for it.
A neat personal narrative of a twenty-something Iranian-American Jew looking for love while navigating both cultures. Shows the pressures from her family regarding arranged marriages and the desire for grandchildren and in general the difficulties of maintaining culture post-diaspora. She asks hard questions of her family and gets surprisingly open answers. My main complaint is that neither she nor, in retrospect, the movie seem very deep; no answers seem to be explored to their core and her behavior never really changes / she never seems to actually learn something.
An interesting documentary about the shrinking Jewish community in Iran. Shows how Iranians have discriminated against Jews with examples such as having Muslims as the administrators of Hebrew schools and forcing all Jewish musical merchants (but one) out of business. Also shows how the Jewish community has, to some extent, held together by, for example, consolidating synagogues and rotating which one gets used each time.
