Nozz

The antecedent action is that first a kibbutz has shunted a woman off to an old-age home on the grounds that the kibbutz can no longer care for her, and then the request to bury her on the kibbutz has been refused on the grounds that she hasn't resided there recently.

Dror Shaul went on to devote a dramatic film, Sweet Mud, to resentful memories of his kibbutz, but this one is a comedy and among a certain generation of Israelis it's a cult film. A lot happens, and there are a lot of characters to watch - whom, to Shaul's credit, it isn't very hard to keep straight - but the gages are more plentiful than funny.

If it weren't such a well liked movie, I wouldn't have watched much of this because the first act is marred by stilted dialogue and by a hard-to-swallow performance on the part of the usually excellent Daniel Craig. As a vain but apparently infallible supersleuth with a genteel vocabulary, Craig imperfectly affects a southern US accent and doesn't seem quite to have a handle on his character. I began to look wistfully at Don Johnson, who appears in a supporting role. He could have played Craig's part more believably with half the effort.

The supersleuth enlists a helper whom, at one point, he jocularly calls Watson. But the thing about Conan Doyle's Watson is that, usually, he's a perfect avatar for the reader. The reader knows only as much as Watson knows and finds it out only when Watson finds it out. "Knives Out" doesn't heed that convention. It shows us flashbacks as convenient, generally from an omniscient point of view that gives the unfolding of the story rather an artificial quality. It is a story that's both intricate and reasonably easy to follow, though.