Nozz

At the Ophir Awards (the Israeli Oscars) this film won for supporting actor, supporting actress, and casting. It shows us a classroom of underprivileged girls, and they look as if each deserves her own arc in the plot, but the movie quickly homes in on one of them. The situations she finds herself in don't always form a very elegantly plotted arc, but the movie holds interest at all times. Maybe if it's very successful, someone will turn it into a TV series with more characters focused on and with the plot unfolding by smaller and better prepared-for steps.

A child needs protection because he's witnessed the deed of some dangerous criminals. Nothing original about that premise. But in this case, the child witnessed the deed in his previous incarnation. The story is set among the Druze community, a community in which past-life memories are not necessarily considered nonsense. Unfortunately, the audience gains little insight into the Druze community in general or into the idea of reincarnation; the series is mostly about crime-solving and family tensions. It certainly does well enough with that standard material (and particularly with a dangerously smiling matriarch) but reincarnation here is just a given, not a topic for analysis. The broadcasters, by the way, saw fit to display an announcement disclaiming any negative implication that may be drawn from a crime story involving the Druze.

In this documentary, which comes in under an hour, two waitresses have upped their game to become founder proprietors of a top cafe and have run it for a quarter century, preparing everything on site (nothing bought in). They are inseparable friends, although almost every time we see them together they're in disagreement. As the movie opens, they've decided to close the place down. The reason is too simple or too complex for analysis, but in a word they've had enough. The movie is sparing in its display of regrets on the part of the staff (whom we hardly get to know at all), the customers, and the women themselves, and their characterization is sketchy, but the audience is repeatedly shown how nice the food looks, how much labor goes into it, and how well it's appreciated. At one point one of the women reflects on their decades of work and can only say "I don't remember anything." We can understand that. Their life, like many of our own lives, has been a whirl.