The Band’s Visit: What We Share

Katrina Lenk and Tony Shalhoub in The Band's Visit. (Photo: Ahron R. Foster)

Affably modest and utterly joyous, The Band’s Visit is the perfect ninety-minute musical – and the best new musical I’ve seen since 2012’s Dogfight, which was also a small-scale off-Broadway show. Dogfight played its limited run at Second Stage; The Band’s Visit will be at the Atlantic Theater Company in Chelsea only until the end of the first week in January. (It’s been extended twice.) The source material is a film from 2007, written and directed by Eran Kolirin, a sweet morsel from Israel that attracted little notice; no one I’ve mentioned the musical to had heard of the film, let alone seen it. In it, a police band from Alexandria with a date to perform at the Arab Cultural Center in a tiny Israeli city finds itself stranded in another Israeli city, Bet Hatikva, with almost the same name. (They’re one consonant apart.) Dina, the café owner who informs them that they’re in the wrong place – and that no buses are expected until the next morning – feeds them and offers to put some a couple of them up at home and more at her restaurant, volunteering her unemployed pal Itzik to take in the remaining two musicians.

More on the Broadway Musical Season: Dead Outlaw, Buena Vista Social Club and Just in Time

Andrew Durand (left) and Company in Dead Outlaw. (Photo: Matthew Murphy.)

The general complaint about Broadway musicals in the twenty-first century is that too many of them recycle the plots of old movies. But ever since the advent of the sophisticated book musical with Show Boat in 1927, composers and librettists have looked to other media for source material, though during the golden age of American musicals they more often began as straight plays or novels. Did critics and aficionados bemoan the fact that My Fair Lady adapted Pygmalion, Guys and Dolls was derived from a pair of Damon Runyon stories and Kiss Me, Kate was based on The Taming of the Shrew? The proof, as always, is in the pudding. The recent history of the musical would be significantly poorer without Hairspray, The Band’s Visit and, God knows, The Light in the Piazza. Anyway, the evidence suggests that musicals are becoming more imaginative, not less so. This season’s crop included a Korean import about two robots in love, a nineteenth-century whaling tale that ended in shipwreck and cannibalism, and, weirdest of all, the new Dead Outlaw, a rock musical conceived by David Yazbek, who also penned the music and lyrics along with Erik Della Penna.  

Forgotten Foreign Language Gems (Part One)

It became apparent from a recent film course that I taught, Key Filmmakers of Our Time, that outside of North America, excepting, perhaps for France, too many important foreign language films were not readily available on DVD in Canada. This included films from major directors, such as Italy’s Francesco Rosi (Illustrious Corpses, Three Brothers) and the late Taiwanese filmmaker Edward Yang (A Brighter Summer Day). (Key Canadian films, such as Rejeanne Padovani, Joshua Then and Now and 32 Short Films About Glenn Gould were also either never put out on DVD or are now out of print but that’s a story for another blog.) And of those foreign films that did get put out on disc, a lot of them fell through the cracks or were ignored because most DVD reviewers were more interested in promoting the big Hollywood blockbusters. In that light of rectifying a wrong, here are some foreign language films that are well worth searching out at your local quality video store.

Idealism and Identity: Camelot and Out of Character

Dakin Matthews as Pellinore and Ken Wulf Clark as King Arthur in Camelot. (Photo: Daniel Rader.)

Over the years I’ve grown wary of revivals of Lerner and Loewe’s musical Camelot, but that’s not because, over the six and a half decades since it opened on Broadway, it’s acquired a reputation for having unsolvable book problems. For last season’s production at Lincoln Center, Aaron Sorkin overhauled Lerner’s book – whether in an effort to rescue it or to make it more appealing to a twenty-first-century audience wasn’t clear, but Sorkin’s rewrite was disastrous. It was also unnecessary. I’ve known Camelot all my life and I think it has a script of remarkable depth and substance. As a little boy in love with theatre, I saw it on Broadway with the original cast and I’ve never forgotten the experience. Based on T.H. White’s The Once and Future King and set in a magical version of medieval England, the musical is about the birth of idealism and the struggle to keep it alive in a world that defaults so easily to the embrace of human vices. It’s a hunk of a show, all right, but that’s because, like Fiddler on the Roof and Hamilton, it presents a layered, complex narrative with resonant themes embedded in it. And so it makes demands on directors, designers and actors that are perilously difficult to fulfill.

The Visitor: Bland Stand

Ahmad Maksoud, David Hyde Pierce and ensemble in The Visitor. (Photo: Joan Marcus)

Tom McCarthy’s 2007 film The Visitor is focused on Walter, a middle-aged economics professor (played memorably by Richard Jenkins), who has withdrawn dramatically since the death of his wife. He teaches material by rote to students whose lack of engagement doesn’t concern him, and his rare personal interactions with them are cold and unsympathetic. (He’s so unengaged in the one course he’s currently teaching that, in mid-semester, he still hasn’t distributed a syllabus.) He secured a course reduction so he can work on a book but the truth is that he’s not writing either. When the chair of his department requires him to deliver a paper at a conference in New York, where he and his wife had a pied-à-terre that he hasn’t used since her passing, he discovers that a seedy agent has rented the space to a young couple, a Syrian drummer named Tarek and a Senegalese craft artist named Zainab. Unexpectedly stirred by their situation and reluctant to send them into the streets, he invites them to stay. Tarek befriends him and teaches him how to play the djembe. When the young man is picked up in the subway on a bogus charge, he’s identified as undocumented and sent to a facility where only Walter can visit him. (Zainab is also an illegal immigrant so her freedom would be endangered if she tried to see him.)

Inhospitable: Marianne Elliott’s Revival of Stephen Sondheim’s Company

Patti LuPone and Katrina Lenk in Company. (Photo: Matthew Murphy)

There’s something undeniably poignant about seeing a Sondheim musical about New York in New York weeks after his death and mere months after theaters have opened up again. In the new revival of the 1970 Company, the fact the book (originally by George Furth) has been updated (by director Marianne Elliott, working in collaboration with Sondheim) and many of the roles have been gender-swapped raises no alarms with me, mainly because I think the material, despite its acclaim and legendary status, has never worked, so why not mix things up? What are Company’s faults? First, Bobby, the main character, is largely a cipher. He doesn’t even have a profession – all he does is have dinner with friends. Second, the central mystery of Bobby to his friends – why he isn’t married – is no mystery at all. If his friends are examples of what marriage is, it’s an unmitigated disaster that no one in his right mind would undertake. And third, the big moment when one of those friends, the uber-sophisticate Joanne, suggests that he needs someone to take care of him, leading him to ask, “But who will I take care of?,” feels less like an epiphany than a writerly conceit. It also doesn’t seem like the result would be to convince him he’s ready for marriage, especially when there’s no spousal candidate in sight. 

Art vs. Propaganda: Bethlehem and Omar

Tsahi Halevi and Shadi Mar’i in Bethlehem

It’s always been highly illuminating to compare Israeli and Palestinian films about their intractable conflict. While I’ve never seen an Israeli film – from Cup Final (1991) to The Bubble (2006), The Syrian Bride (2004) to The Band's Visit (2007) – that has failed to humanize the Palestinians, Israel’s Arab neighbours or its own Arab citizens (and I’ve seen many Israeli films, as a film critic and chief programmer for the Toronto Jewish Film Festival), the Palestinian record is much spottier in that regard. Rashid Masharawi’s Palestinian film Ticket to Jerusalem (2002), a documentary-fictional hybrid, presented a fair, even sympathetic view of young Israeli soldiers, as did Michel Khleifi’s acclaimed Wedding in Galilee (1987), at least until its 360-degree turn into a strident vilification of the same. (It’s as if someone told the filmmaker that he was being too kind to his Israeli characters and needed to adjust the picture.) But otherwise, the norm is more along the lines of Hany Abu-Assad’s Palestinian film Paradise Now (2005), about a pair of would-be suicide bombers setting out to wreak havoc in Tel Aviv. At best, Abu-Assad could only bring himself to condemn suicide bombings as counterproductive and harmful to the Palestinian cause and not as the moral failings or criminal acts they actually are, and he showed not the slightest interest in the possible Israeli victims of the film’s planned terror attack. (The most notable exception to this traditionally myopic view of Israel is Ziad Doueiri’s The Attack (2012) wherein an Arab-Israeli surgeon discovers that his wife committed a suicide bombing and must come to terms with the truely heinous actions of his spouse. Startlingly, Doueiri, a Lebanese filmmaker, spent almost a year living in Israel in order to better understand his country’s “enemy”.) Abu-Assad’s latest film, the 2013 Oscar-nominated Omar, about a young man coerced into becoming an informant for Israel’s security services, is likewise spun out of that one note. Fortunately, we also have Yuval Adler’s similarly-themed Israeli cinematic counterpart Bethlehem (2013) as a provocative point of comparison. It’s a superior film in every way: nuanced, complex and empathic to both sides of the political and human equation in a way Omar doesn’t even attempt to be.

Elvis Costello’s Cultural Boycott of Israel: Rank Hypocrisy and Naiveté

Elvis Costello’s recent decision to cancel his two upcoming shows in Israel because of his concerns about the plight of the Palestinians, and Israeli government policy towards them, is problematic and offensive on so many levels; I scarcely know where to begin. But let’s hear from the man himself, who just recently told The Jerusalem Post, "I know from the experience of a friend who is from Israel and from people who have worked there that there is a difference of opinion there among Israelis regarding their government's policies. It seems to me that dialogue is essential....The people who call for a boycott of Israel own the narrow view that performing there must be about profit and endorsing the hawkish policy of the government. It's like never appearing in the U.S. because you didn't like Bush's policies or boycotting England because of Margaret Thatcher."

Fleetwood Mac’s Frozen Love: Ryan Reed’s Chronicle

Fleetwood Mac (from left, Lindsey Buckingham, Stevie Nicks, Christine McVie, Mick Fleetwood, and John McVie, pose with their awards at the 1978 Grammys after winning Album of the Year for Rumors. (AP Photo)

“The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past” – William Faulkner

“Don’t stop thinking about tomorrow.”  – Christine McVie

This is a good opportunity to re-examine the long strange trip of a truly phenomenal pop band. Fleetwood Mac was originally formed in 1967 by blues genius Peter Green, long before they morphed into one of the most successful rock outfits in music history. And they refused to break their chain.

Each segment of this band’s incredible saga has been focused on a brilliant guitarist: first Peter Green, then Bob Welch and finally Lindsay Buckingham, all so different and yet all possessed of the necessary ingredient to serve as a pivot for fine vocalists and the superior rhythm section of Mick Fleetwood and John McVie. In the interest of what I guess people call full disclosure, it’s hard for me to believe that it’s already been twelve years since I published my own book on the weird evolutionary leaps of this band from gritty British blues to shiny Californian pop and yet, incredibly, it’s true. Back then, in 2007, it was merely the band’s 40th anniversary, hence my title 40 Years of Creative Chaos, but now suddenly I’m delighted to report that Ryan Reed has updated their insanely twisted saga to mark a shocking full 52 years of survival as rock and pop behemoths.

Tootsie: In Name Only

 Julie Halston, James Moye, Santino Fontana, Lilli Cooper, John Behlmann in Tootsie. (Photo: Matthew Murphy)

The new musical of Tootsie, with a book by Robert Horn and music and lyrics by David Yazbek, has “smash hit” written all over it. It’s slick and rapid-fire. The veteran director, Scott Ellis (who’s also represented on Broadway this season by the revival of Kiss Me, Kate at Studio 54), and his expert cast build the farce perfectly, so that the more complications that are piled on top of the premise – actor Michael Dorsey (Santino Fontana), whose temperament has made it impossible for his agent (Michael McGrath) to land him jobs, finally gets one by presenting himself as a woman, Dorothy Michaels – the funnier it is. Rather than set the story in the period in which the movie was made, the early eighties, Horn has contemporized it. There are #MeToo jokes – Michael’s wry aspiring-playwright roommate Jeff Slater (Andy Grotelueschen) quips that in an era when women are literally seizing power from between the legs of men, Michael is risking infuriating everyone by pretending to be female. There are jokes about sexual fluidity – when Michael, forgetting momentarily that he’s in drag, kisses his co-star, Julie Nichols (Lilli Cooper), whom he’s fallen for, instead of scaring her off since she’s not gay, she likes him so much that she decides to try to be gay. It’s all very up to the minute, and the audience at the Saturday matinee I attended screamed with laughter. I would be dishonest if I said that I didn’t have a pretty good time, too. But I haven’t the slightest idea what the hell this Tootsie is about.

Of Culture, High and Low – Footnote and Sholem Aleichem: Laughing in the Darkness

Lior Ashkenazi and Shlomo Bar Aba in Footnote

It may seem like an unusual subject for a movie, but it’s apt that Joseph Cedar’s Israeli film Footnote – a provocative story of a father and son who are both scholars – deals with the specifics of academia and the vagaries of scholarship, since Israel is one country that values higher education, so much so that it punches above its weight when it comes to winning Nobel Prizes and the like. Footnote is also one of the more welcome Israeli features since it offers up a nuanced view of a country that is the sum of more than the divisive politics and tensions that seem to solely define it in most mainstream media coverage of the region.

Footnote, which swept Israel's top film awards (The Ophirs), garnered an Oscar nomination for best Foreign-language film, and won Best Screenplay at Cannes, also marks a maturation of Cedar’s talents. It is his most compelling, original and best-made movie yet, albeit one that falls short of the finest recent Israeli cinema. An Orthodox Jew, a rarity among the mostly secular filmmakers in Israel, Cedar began his career delving into the religious underpinnings of Israeli society. His debut movie Time of Favor (2000) was a slick but interesting thriller about a religious Jewish plot to blow up The Temple Mount, one of Islam’s holiest shrines, and the charismatic rabbi (Assi Dayan) whose sermons inadvertently inspired some of his more diligent students to interpret his words as a literal call to arms. Campfire (2004), based on Cedar’s time living in a religious settlement, was a choppy but fascinating look at the unique Jews who populate such places, seen through the eyes of a widow and her two young daughters who join a West Bank settlement. Beaufort (2007) was a powerful though admittedly familiar tale of an Israel Defense Forces unit about to vacate the high ground of a hard-won battle to capture a Crusader castle, a symbol of Israel’s ultimately futile invasion of Lebanon. Footnote (2011) goes further afield; it’s a drama that, though it deals with Talmudic discourse, is neither concerned with religion nor conflict, except through the passive aggressive one playing out between father and son.

Newfangled, Old-Fashioned: Hamilton and Funny Girl, Streaming

Lin-Manuel Miranda and Philippa Sooi n Hamilton.

Like at least half of my friends, I bought a subscription to Disney+ so I could watch Hamilton. Thomas Kail, who staged it on Broadway (and, in its earlier incarnation, downtown at the Public Theatre), filmed it in 2016, and the original plan was to release it to theatres. When Covid put paid to those plans, Disney picked it up, and though one misses the effect of the big screen – and though the handful of fucks are muted – it seems like a reasonable trade-off. I caught Hamilton with the London cast two years ago, and they were admirable. But, captured just before they dispersed, the original ensemble, headed by book writer-composer-lyricist Lin-Manuel Miranda as Alexander Hamilton and Leslie Odom, Jr. as Aaron Burr, is so electric that I actually found the show even more exciting and affecting on my home screen.

New Broadway Musicals: SpongeBob SquarePants & Mean Girls

Lilli Cooper, Ethan Slater, and Danny Skinner in SpongeBob SquarePants on Broadway. (Photo: Youtube)

The output of musicals in the current Broadway season seems leaner than it is coming after the unusually hefty 2016-17 roster. The reason last season was so heavy was that many companies had elected to delay for a year to avoid coming up against Hamilton in the 2016 Tony Awards race. And even with more shows to choose from, I would hardly call 2016-2017 a banner year for musicals: I loved Bandstand and Come from Away, and there were several reasons to see Dear Evan Hansen if you could ignore the nonsensical book, but that was about all. This season brought the transfer of The Band’s Visit, one of the best new musical shows of recent years, from its downtown venue at the Atlantic Stage Company to a Broadway house. Having opted to skip the two new jukebox musicals, Jimmy Buffett’s Escape to Margaritaville and Summer (a bio of Donna Summer), I checked out the only other offerings, SpongeBob SquarePants and Mean Girls, shortly after their official openings.

Fleetwood Mac, the Time Ghost: Rumours Turns 40

Fleetwood Mac (circa 1968): John McVie, Danny Kirwan, Mick Fleetwood, Peter Green Jeremy Spencer.

“The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past.” – William Faulkner

“Don’t stop thinking about tomorrow.” – Christine McVie

The recent release of a new duo album by Lindsey Buckingham and Christine McVie is a good opportunity to re-examine the long strange trip of the phenomenal pop band they belong to. Fleetwood Mac was originally formed in 1967 by Peter Green, but Christine Perfect-McVie had already been on the scene in her own remarkable British blues band, Chicken Shack, even before her talented husband became the stellar bass player for one of the most successful rock outfits in music history. 

It’s hard to believe that it’s already been ten years since I published my book on the weird evolutionary leaps of Fleetwood Mac from gritty British blues to shiny Californian pop and yet, incredibly, it’s true. Back then, in 2007, it was the band’s 40th anniversary, hence my title 40 Years of Creative Chaos, and now suddenly I’m having to try and convince my publisher that they definitely deserve a 50th-anniversary update to their twisted saga. I suspect my editor can barely believe that they’re still together, despite the fact that Stevie Nicks has made one of her frequent departures to pursue her solo muse (herself) and Lindsey Buckingham has released an eponymous duet with the other sultry blonde in the group, my far-more-favourite British blues chick turned pop-diva, Christine McVie.

Even more incredibly, or at least ironically, Fleetwood Mac is being given a special award next year which cements their acclaim in even more glowing terms: the Recording Academy’s 2018 MusiCares Person of the Year, an honour that will be extended to the veteran rockers in conjunction with the 60th Grammy Awards. Amazingly, the Grammys themselves are only ten years older than this stalwart but grizzled crew of pop wizards. The award singles out musicians both for their artistry and for their frequent philanthropic contributions, with previous recipients including Dylan, McCartney and Stevie Wonder.

Covered Up: Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah"

Steven Page at Jack Layton's state funeral

While listening to Steven Page sing Leonard Cohen's now iconic "Hallelujah," during the largely moving televised funeral last weekend for NDP leader Jack Layton, I began to recognize just how much this song has lost its meaning and much of its sting. Sung now with a solemn reverence, as Bob Dylan's "I Shall Be Released" often is, "Hallelujah" is about as misunderstood as Randy Newman's "Sail Away." Written in 1984, Cohen conceived the song as one that combined invective with elegiac and religious meditation. "You're not on the stand when you're praying," he told me in an interview months before the song was released. "You can't come with any excuses. You don't have a deep belief in your opinion any longer, or your own construction of how things are. That's why you pray because you haven't got a prayer." You don't hear in these famous cover versions by Jeff Buckley, Rufus Wainwright, kd lang, or in Steven Page's recent rendition, any of that sense of doubt, the struggle between the profane and sacred, or even the naked fear of the singer being aware that despite being armed with prayer the world still remains the same.

Memories Are Made of This – Big Star: Nothing Can Hurt Me and A Band Called Death

The original members of Big Star: (from left) Alex Chilton, Jody Stephens, Chris Bell and Andy Hummel

Two imperfect but interesting current documentaries, Drew DeNicola and Olivia Mori’s Big Star: Nothing Can Hurt Me and Mark Christopher Covino and Jeff Howlett’s A Band Called Death, both available on Video On Demand, offer a chance to savor some of the complications and ironies of the rock music culture of the 1970s. That was the first full decade when bands were being formed by people who had grown up in the shadow of Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry, and had come of age thinking of rock not as a get-rich-quick scheme or the next logical step in the evolution of rhythm and blues and country music and pop in general, but as a form of self-expression that had its own history and tradition and pantheon. It was also the age of the first generation of rock critics – college-educated working journalists like Robert Christgau, academics like Greil Marcus, unclassifiable mavericks like Lester Bangs – who thought that rock was a subject worthy of interest in itself, to be written about without condescension, and – a legacy of having been rock fans during the late ‘60s – that it might be both an art form and a trigger for social revolution. 

Huffing and Puffing: Big Bad Wolves

Menashe Noy & Lior Ashkenazi in Big Bad Wolves

When it comes to genres, including movies, not all countries are created equal. Israeli cinema has received much deserved acclaim in recent years but the country’s best movies, or at least the ones that play commercially in North America, are usually dramas, with the odd lighter exception like The Band’s Visit. The few Israeli genre flicks I've seen haven’t impressed me all that much. Saint Clara (1996) was a Carrie-like horror movie about a telekinetic Russian girl newly immigrated to Israel which was chiefly interesting for its scathing portrait of juvenile delinquency in Israel and the fact that it was co-directed by Ari Folman, who would go on to make the brilliant animated anti-war movie Waltz with Bashir. (2008). Total Love (2000) was a fantastical cult film (in Israel) about the invention of the ultimate love drug that quickly devolved into incoherence if not outright silliness. Clean Sweep aka Mars Turkey (2001) was a profane and overly violent cops and crooks movie that wore out its welcome early on. A few years back, directors Aharon Keshales and Navot Papushado concocted Rabies (2010), Israel’s’ first zombie film, which I didn't see but which garnered quite the reputation at home. Now the directing duo are back with Big Bad Wolves, a thriller that owes equal amounts to American classics like Joe (1970) and more recent torture porn movies like the Saw series, though it’s not nearly as exploitative as those films. It’s also, despite rave reviews from director Quentin Tarantino, who called it the best film of 2013,  and some other critics who put it on their ten best lists in the year end Film Comment issue, not nearly the revolutionary genre buster they’re calling it.

All Those Years Ago - Mark Lewisohn's Tune In The Beatles: All These Years (Vol. 1)

Reading Philip Norman’s Shout! The Beatles in Their Generation in 1982, I was slightly disoriented, yet nonetheless taken, by its references to a British youth and Beatles fan named Mark Lewisohn—disoriented because I, like most Americans, hadn’t heard of him. First glimpsed as an eight-year-old in the summer of 1967, dancing in the back yard to Sgt. Pepper “while trying not to dislodge the cardboard mustache clenched under his nose,” he was last seen as “a serious young man of twenty-two who holds the title ‘Beatle Brain of Britain,’ so labyrinthine is his knowledge of their music and history.”

But within a decade of Norman’s book, the “serious young man” had achieved broad renown as the acknowledged world authority on All Things Beatle. Today, the mustache beneath Mark Lewisohn’s nose is all his own. Among his works of Fab Four scholarship—all venerated for their precision, depth, and integrity—are The Beatles Live! (1986); The Beatles Recording Sessions (1988); The Complete Beatles Chronicle (1992); and, with Piet Schreuders and Adam Smith, The Beatles’ London (1994). He’s written liner notes for numerous Beatles reissues, and was intimately involved in the 1994-95 Anthology project. His work on the Recording Sessions book alone—for which he listened to every piece of Beatles tape in their record company’s vault—gives him a depth of archival insight undreamt of by other fans or historians.

And his magnum opus is finally upon us. Close to a decade in preparation, its publication twice delayed, Tune In (Crown Archetype; 932 pp.) is the first installment of a three-volume Beatles biography with the corporate title All These Years. The book both looks and weighs important, and the hefty mass-market version is dwarfed by the “Extended Special Edition”—two equally thick volumes in a box, with nearly twice the page count and many more photographs, incorporating quantities of ancillary research that must have been removed from the mass version with a shovel. Lewisohn tells us the project has not been authorized or in any way controlled by the surviving Beatles, the deceased Beatles’ estates, or the group’s joint company, Apple Corps. Unauthorized Tune In may be, but clearly Lewisohn earned the trust of at least three of his subjects (he never met John Lennon) over his decades of research into the Beatles’ daily lives and guarded archives; and it’s largely because Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr deign not to obstruct his work that we have this book, and the three-part whole it heralds.

Recent Cinema – Wild Tales, Leviathan, Félix et Meira and Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem

A scene from Damián Szifron’s Wild Tales.

Non-American films might not show up as often on Toronto movie screens as I would like. but when they do, they usually offer an adult, different point of view, whether the subjects they raise are unique to their country or share affinities with my own. Here are four recent examples; none of them masterpieces but all well worth your time.

Israeli Cinema: Anything But Propaganda

The recent Oscar nomination for the Israeli drama Ajami marks the third year in a row that a movie from Israel has been nominated for the Best Foreign Language Film award. (Beaufort and Waltz with Bashir were the other recent nominees.) That’s pretty impressive for such a small country, a testament to the quality and vitality of recent Israeli cinema.

In truth, Israeli films have been nominated for Oscars before; six of them, including good movies like Sallah, The House on Chelouche Street and Operation Thunderbolt, received nods between 1964 and 1985. Those nominations, however, came about at a time when far fewer foreign language films were submitted to the Academy – sixty five such movies were entered this year – and, I suspect, were also the result of a favourable bias towards Israel,  which used to be viewed a lot more sympathetically around the world than it is now. The current crop of nominations for Israeli films is more a recognition of just how good Israeli cinema has become of late.