A recreation of a daring Israeli raid

7 Days in Entebbe isn't a bad movie, but it doesn't dig deep enough to be memorable.

In 1976, Israel launched Operation Thunderbolt, a daring raid in which a small group of IDF soldiers rescued 102 Israelis who had been passengers on an Air France plane that was hijacked by two Germans and two Palestinians.

7 Days in Entebbe, a movie about the hijacking and subsequent Israeli action, arrives nearly 42 years after an event that riveted world attention. Daniel Bruhl and Rosamund Pike headline the cast as German radicals who initially thought they were leading the charge but who quickly were surpassed by Palestinians from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

The Palestinians took charge once the plane arrived in Uganda, after a refueling stop in Benghazi, Libya. Once in Entebbe, hostages were housed in a decaying airport terminal that was no longer in use.

Movies such as 7 Days raise an obvious but unavoidable question. Why are we being asked to look at an event that since has been eclipsed by so many other events involving terrorist actions that put innocent civilians in harm's way? In part, the question can be answered with one sentence: Such events are inherently exciting and suspenseful.

But for a movie to succeed, it must get beyond that surface and dig deeper? As directed by Jose Padilha, 7 Days fails to function as more than a cinematic outline, offering quick looks into the motivation of the story's various players.

No stranger to tough, action-oriented movies, Padilha directed the Netflix series Narcos and made Bus 174, a documentary about hostages trapped on a bus in Rio. He also directed Elite Squad, a compelling Brazilian police drama. In 2014, Padilha tried his hand at a Hollywood reboot, a much-derided version of RoboCop .

7 Days emphasizes the importance of the moment at which the hijackers separated Jews from the non-Jews, evoking memories of Holocaust selections in the minds of the Jewish passengers and among the Israeli public.

The highest levels of the Israeli government also took note of the separate treatment of Jews as issues pertaining to saving the hostages were debated. Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin (Lior Ashkenazi) and Defense Minister Shimon Peres (Eddie Marsan) took different sides.

Rabin knew he had to do something but wasn’t entirely sure that he should dismiss the possibility of negotiating with the Palestinians, something that went against Israeli policy forbidding talks with terrorists. Perez favored military action.

At one point, Uganda's Idi Amin (nicely played by Nonso Anozie) gets involved. He’s able to persuade the Palestinians to release the French hostages.

Padilha’s strangest decision involves the use of the Batsheva Dance Company which does a jarring musical version of Echad Mi Yodea (Who Knows One), a song usually sung at Passover seders. Staged by Israeli choreographer Ohad Naharin, the dance -- seen in rehearsals and eventually in a performance -- proves compelling but because it opens the movie, it tends to upstage the rest of the story and it's never entirely clear why Padihla includes it.

To justify the dance sequence, the screenplay must introduce a superfluous tangent, a relationship between a dancer and one of the Israeli soldiers on the Entebbe raid.

Whatever Padihla was attempting to accomplish, he winds up looking a bit ridiculous when he alternates between a performance of the dance and the movie's climactic end-of-picture rescue.

There’s not much by way of character development among the crew and passengers, aside from a crew member (Denis Menochet) who tries to reason with Bruhl’s character, a publisher of radical books who already has his doubts about the role he’s chosen for himself as a German who may be called upon to kill Jews. The screenplay assigns Bruhl's character a role in saving the lives of the Jewish passengers.

Even Pike’s character, a Baader-Meinhof veteran and the more hardened of the two Germans, eventually admits she might have made a wrong choice.

Padilha knows how to give a realistic pulse to action, and the movie offers an important footnote at the end. Yonatan Netanyahu (Angel Bonanni), the only Israeli soldier to die in the raid, was the brother of Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s current prime minister.

Eventually, the movie tells us that if peace ever is to be achieved, Israel must swallow hard and negotiate. 7 Days in Entebbe does little to make that conclusion feel like more than a faint hope, an afterthought rather than a genuine expression of conviction.

Poles who helped save Jews

Jessica Chastain starts in The Zookeeper's Wife, the latest big-screen drama to deal with the Holocaust.

Israel has awarded the title "Righteous Among the Nations" to more than 26,000 Gentiles, brave souls who helped save Jews during the Holocaust. To date, more Poles -- 6,620 in all -- have received this honor than individuals from any other nation, a statistic partly explained by the fact that Poland became the epicenter of Nazi efforts to annihilate Europe's Jews. Beyond that, Poland had the largest pre-war Jewish population of any country in Europe, numbering 3.5 million.

Among those honored by Israel are the characters in The Zookeeper's Wife, a movie based on a true story that was recounted in a best-selling book by author Diane Ackerman. There's an inherent pitfall in such heroic Holocaust stories, the most notable being that they can be seen as having defining power concerning a historical crime that never should be seen through a life-affirming lens. That's why overall context is so important when it comes to Holocaust dramas.

Having said that, it's also true that stories about those who risked their lives to save Jews deserve to be told, and few are more intriguing than those recounted in The Zookeeper's Wife.

Prior to the war, Warsaw's zoo was run by Antonina and Jan Zabinski. During the war, the Zabinskis managed to hide 300 Polish Jews at the zoo, using the zoo's facilities to conceal them from the Germans.

As a cover for their efforts, the Zabinskis turned the zoo into a pig farm. They convinced the Nazis that they could raise pigs to feed German soldiers. They would nourish the pigs with scraps collected from the Warsaw Ghetto. Jan made trips to the ghetto, where he covered Jews in garbage and smuggled them to safety.

On screen, Jessica Chastain plays Antonina Zabinski, a woman with a special affinity for animals. Johan Heldenbergh portrays her husband, Jan.

For reasons that may have more to do with international marketing than with historical authenticity, everyone in Zookeeper's Wife speaks English, employing a variety of accents with Eastern European flavor, an approach that already compromises the material.

It should also be noted that Chastain is a wonderful actress, but there are many fine Polish actresses who easily could have tackled this material.

Director Niki Caro (Whale Rider) opens the movie with an idyllic passage in which we learn that the zoo functions as Antonina's Edenic paradise. She makes her morning rounds on a bicycle while a baby camel trots happily behind her. A couple of more clicks in the direction of cuteness and we'd be talking Dr. Dolittle.

It doesn't take long for the Germans to begin bombing the zoo as part of its invasion of Warsaw. Animals die, and Antonina, Jan and their young son (Timothy Radford) are terrorized.

Daniel Bruhl plays a Nazi zoologist who arranges for some of the zoo's best animals to be shipped to Germany for genetic experimentation. German soldiers shoot the rest.

Bruhl's character flirts with Antonina, who tries to keep his interest alive while warding off his most flagrant advances; she knows that this zoologist -- sort of an animal-oriented Mengele -- must think of her as an ally if she's going to continue her life-saving efforts.

Caro's treatment of ghetto life and of the Polish home army remains sketchy and not entirely satisfying.

The script has been tailored to showcase Chastain, who gives a credible performance. Portraying the character who does most of the heavy lifting when it comes to saving Jews, Heldenbergh mostly is asked to look grave. Bruhl's SS zoologist manages a neat trick: He's bland and menacing at the same time.

The Jews in the story become little more than props used to support Antonina's gentle heroism, although the story of a Jewish girl who's raped by German soldiers proves harrowing.

In all, The Zookeeper's Wife is a medium-grade drama that has been given the look and feel of a prestige offering.

If you want to see a remarkably shaded and far more agonizing story about the interaction between Poles and Jews during the war, try Agnieszka Holland's In Darkness, a movie that offers nuances and hard-core realities that Caro's effort doesn't begin to approach.

'Captain America' takes sides

Opposing groups of Avengers square off in the latest movie from the Marvel Comics storehouse -- and it's all pretty entertaining.

I'm not sure what it means, but one of the best scenes in Captain America: Civil War doesn't involve Captain America. It occurs when Robert Downey Jr -- in Tony Stark mode -- visits Peter Parker (a.k.a. Spider Man) in the young man's Queens, NY apartment.

Downey and Tom Holland (the new Spider Man) play a comic duet in which the older more experienced Stark -- or Iron Man -- asks for help from a skittish teen-ager who'd rather finish his homework than join a major battle.

That's not to say that Captain America: Civil War shortchanges action, including a pitched battle at the Berlin airport between opposing Avenger factions -- the civil war of the title.

But even when its fighting, the movie often makes room for one-liners that serve as wry commentary on the preposterously swollen nature of what we're watching.

Following an Avengers movie isn't always an easy task for those who remain uninitiated in the mysteries of Marvel Comics.

Every character has a given name -- as in Natasha Romanoff -- and a superhero name. Romanoff, for example, is Black Widow. And then there's the task of remembering which actor is playing which Avenger. For the record, Scarlett Johansson portrays Black Widow.

Directors Anthony Russo and Joe Russo seem to assume we know all these characters, so he barrels ahead with a movie that mimics some of the concerns raised in the recent -- but much less enjoyable -- Batman v Superman.
As in that movie, we find superheroes struggling with consciences that have been piqued by growing awareness of the collateral damage they've wrought. Taking out bad guys creates much debris, some of it lethal to bystanders.

At one point, an increasingly tormented Iron Man is confronted by a mother (Alfre Woodard) who lost her son during one of Iron Man's escapades. Iron Man feels really bad, and Woodard -- in small appearance -- unloads on him with startling conviction.

The suggestion that people actually die and that others are left to grieve is welcome, but unlike the insistently dismal Batman v. Superman, a touch of seriousness doesn't undermine Civil War's comic-book instincts. Captain America takes a grim turn or two, but it's still fun.

Here's the gist: Upset by all the damage that the Avengers have caused, the US Secretary of State (William Hurt) decides to rein them in. The Avengers are asked to submit to the rule of a UN panel. Exactly why anyone thinks this will work remains a mystery.

Some Avengers agree to the new rules; others rebel against what they view as crippling restraints.

Among those who refuse to accept the new reality are Captain America (Chris Evans) and Falcon (Anthony Mackie). They want to remain independent fighters for ... well ... whatever it is they fight for.

Wanda (Elizabeth Olsen) reluctantly goes along with the new order, as does Iron Man.

Meanwhile, the villainous Zemo (Daniel Bruhl) wreaks havoc, and Winter Soldier (Sebastian Stans) tries to renounce violence.

The Russos move the story with reasonable alacrity, and try to add emotional kick by straining old friendships and dredging up a haunting incident from Iron Man's past.

You've probably noticed that I haven't said much about Evans; maybe that's because there's not a whole lot to say about this straightforward guy who plies his trade with all-American efficiency. The movie is named for Captain America, but it belongs to the other Avengers, as well.

If you want to be cynical, you could say that the introduction of Spider Man and Chadwick Boseman's Black Panther are commercial ploys intended to revivify or expand Marvel's big-screen universe, but Civil War, finally, stands as its own entertainment.

Besides, fans may greet each introduction of a character from the Avengers' roster with satisfying smiles of recognition. Yes, that's War Machine (Don Cheadle). And look, it's Jeremy Renner's Hawkeye. Paul Rudd's Ant-Man? Yes, he's there, too.

It's hardly surprising that the Avengers civil war drags on too long or that it assaults us with noisy action and nerve-rattling clangor. But for all that, the big winner in this civil war may be the audience.

Captain America isn't exactly mindless, but it doesn't let a thought or two stand in the way of anyone's fun.

Lame drama, but food looks great

Burnt features Bradley Cooper as a narcissistic chef.

Someone needs to explain to me why I should want to spend time with an obnoxiously narcissistic chef who's trying to make a comeback in London after having undermined a skyrocketing career in Paris.

But wait, maybe the answer has something to do with the fact that said chef is the main character in a movie called Burnt, and he's played by a fashionably bestubbled Bradley Cooper.

Burnt, the plot of which I've just described, can't rise above its many problems even with Cooper portraying a culinary hotshot who thinks he's better than everyone else -- and probably would be if it weren't for the drug and alcohol problems that derailed his rise.

Turns out the best thing about this John Wells directed movie, set in the upper echelons of London's foodie culture, is the food, photographed with glossy slickness by cinematographer Adrinao Goldman.

When the camera focuses on the meals that Cooper's Adam Jones prepares, the movie has the allure of a beautifully photographed gourmet magazine, and it affords us a glimpse into the kitchens of the kind of gastronomically praised establishments that serve up minuscule portions for astronomical prices.

Is there an unwritten rule that all highly praised food must never touch the edge of any plate?

Wells supplies the kitchen scenes with the heat and bustle you'd expect, and I'd have been content if food preparation -- complete with tension, yelling and the occasional dress-down -- had completely wiped out the plot.

The screenplay by Steven Knight (Locke, Redemption) doesn't have much to offer once it convinces us that Jones' character is a jerk.

Because he's a talented jerk, others -- Sienna Miller as a saucier with a big future and Daniel Bruhl as a gay Maitre-D -- tolerate Jones and try to help him, even when they're frustrated by him.

Additional support comes from Omar Sy (The Untouchables), as a sous chef whose business in Paris was ruined by the then drunken Jones, and Matthew Rhys , as a rival restaurateur who also dislikes Jones intensely.

Subplots involving Jones' indebtedness to drug dealers and the late-picture introduction of one of his former lovers (Alicia Vikander) add little to an undernourished script.

Functioning as a kind of garnish, Emma Thompson appears as a doctor hired by Jones' employer to monitor his blood-alcohol level, and, occasionally, to offer sage advice.

Celebrity chefs Marcus Wareing and Mario Batali are credited with having served as consultants on the movie, so the kitchen environment presumably has some authenticity.

Truth be told, I'd rather watch the two of them work than be force fed another helping of Burnt.

If you're hungry for a more appetizing food movie, and haven't seen Chef, well ... there's always Netflix.

'Woman in Gold' fails to mine rich ore

Helen Mirren headlines a story about the quest to recover art looted by the Nazis.

The story of how a persistent woman and her inexperienced young attorney manage to reclaim five Nazi-looted paintings by artist Gustav Klimt suggests a powerful drama dealing with the continuing reverberations of the Holocaust.

Woman in Gold builds its story around one of those paintings, Klimt's 1907 painting Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer. But if Klimt's gold-leafed portrait deserves masterpiece status, the movie about efforts to restore it to its rightful feels like by-the-numbers, Middlebrow fare.

Helen Mirren brings the expected amount of wit and bite to the role of Maria Altmann, one of the few surviving members of a wealthy, cultured Viennese Jewish family.

After the Anschluss, Maria and her husband escaped to the U.S. Most of the rest of Maria's family was killed by the Nazis, who also looted the Altmann art collection, including the portrait of Maria's aunt, Adele Bloch-Bauer.

Years later, the Austrians have come to regard the Bloch-Bauer portrait as a national treasure. Referred to as "Austria's Mona Lisa," the painting carries a price tag of more than $100 million.

Early on, Maria -- already in her 80s and living in Los Angeles -- hires attorney Randy Schoenberg (Ryan Reynolds) to help her retrieve the art, perhaps as a way of keeping her family heritage alive.

The grandson of composer Arnold Schoenberg, Randy predictably resists -- at least initially. Just as predictably, he becomes absorbed by the case, which slowly takes over his life.

Bland to the point of blankness, Reynolds adds little to the proceedings. In another performance that hardly registers, Katie Holmes plays the attorney's wife.

Working from a screenplay by Alexi Kaye Campbell, director Simon Curtis (My Week With Marilyn) adopts an overly familiar structure, juxtaposing action in the present with war-time flashbacks in which Nazis move toward annihilating Vienna's Jewish population.

The best of these flashbacks show the lavish pre-war lives of a well-assimilated Jewish family that sees itself as a part of the city's fabric.

Max Irons portrays Maria's husband, an opera singer, and Allan Corduner appears as Maria's father, a man who can't quite believe that his secure position in Vienna could crumble so quickly.

As Aunt Adele, Antje Traue brings vibrant sophistication to the role of the woman whose portrait is at the movie's heart, and as a young Maria, Tatiana Maslany embodies the tension and fear that's being inflicted upon Jewish families.

Though well-shot, the movie's flashbacks tend to be overused and telegraphed.

An example: To pursue the case, Maria reluctantly agrees to return to Austria. After a meeting with Austrian officials, she tells Schoenberg she wants to walk back to her hotel alone. It almost seems as if she's excusing herself so that she can have another flashback.

Curtis does a reasonably good job of guiding us through the legal tangles surrounding attempts at restitution, battles that involve Austrian committees and art bureaucrats, as well as a 2004 appearance before the U.S. Supreme Court. An Austrian arbitration panel finally brought the case to its conclusion in 2006.

In Vienna, an Austrian journalist (Daniel Bruhl) helps Maria and Randy in their battle, but this character also could have used more fleshing out.

The issues involved in Altmann's story are rich enough: Maria's understandable resistance to setting foot on Austrian soil and unresolved questions about how much Holocaust awareness depends on a vanishing generation of survivors.

Rather than allowing these issues to open up for us, Curtis keeps them encased in a drama in which they don't fully resonate.

Woman in Gold isn't a bad movie, and its story is interesting enough to keep us engaged, but it needed more than dogged competence to give startling new life to the horror and injustice that are so much a part of this tale.

Fragmented 'Fifth Estate' lacks focus

Cumberbatch excels as Julian Assange, but movie about him falters.

Going into The Fifth Estate, a hyperbolic but hollow account of the work of Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, I wondered whether I'd learn anything new. We've already had a daunting stream of newspaper accounts about Assange and WikiLeak's landmark 2010 publication of U.S. State Department cables, as well as director Alex Gibney's documentary, We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks).
Could anything be left in a story that already has dribbled much of its juice down a graying, over-exposed chin.

Let's begin at the center -- or, rather, at what should have been the center of a movie that's more confusing than illuminating.

British actor Benedict Cumnberbatch not only dyes his hair white, but captures much of the elusive charisma that allowed Assange to focus his efforts on lifting heretofore impenetrable veils of government and personal secrecy.

Cumberbatch makes for a near-ghostly presence in the film, a man on a mission who regards just about everything else in the known universe as too trivial for his keen attention.

Cumberbatch's performance could have been the centerpiece of a compelling story about an avid crusader who tried to use technology to bring protest into the 21st century, but who was not without egotistical pitfalls.

Unfortunately, Cumberbatch's work is largely wasted by director Bill Condon (Gods and Monsters, Kinsey, Dreamgirls and a couple of Twilight movies). Condon tries to spice up a badly fragmented narrative with graphics that presumably are intended to bring the digital age to life. The tricks include a semi-surreal depiction of Assange's workspace, one of many quasi-outre touches in a movie that badly needed to plant its feet on firmer ground.

It's possible that the best part of The Fifth Estate arrives in the form of opening credits that offer an incisive summary of how media has evolved from the industrially rooted print model to the digitally driven world of the Internet.

Not content with this fine overture, Condon keeps piling on the visual gimmickry. Witness the frenzied editing or the overlays of printed messages that show us what characters are typing on their laptops.

Any screenwriter tackling this kind of complex material faces a major problem: how to give a human center to a story built around ethical and political issues, as well as tech savvy. Screenwriter Josh Singer addresses the issue by focusing on the relationship between Assange and his Berlin-based cohort Daniel Domscheit-Berg (Daniel Bruhl).

Currently on view as Formula One driver Niki Lauda in director Ron Howard's Rush, Bruhl's intensity holds us at arm's length, and you needn't know much about the real story to guess that Berg's devotion to Assange eventually will sour.

Besides, Assange is by far the more interesting character.

Condon doesn't do much with the movie's supporting cast, most of whom seem like cast-offs from a different movie. Laura Linney and Stanley Tucci appear as State Department workers. David Thewlis and Peter Capaldi play editors at The Guardian, one of the newspapers that published WikiLeaks massive 2010 revelations.

I left the movie without being forced to rethink anything about Assange. And for all the movie's fancy visual footwork, I had no better handle on issues raised by hacking, whistle-blowing and governmental secrecy.

Mostly, I was tired of sorting through the barrage of narrative bric-a-brac that The Fifth Estate keeps throwing at the screen -- perhaps because it doesn't quite know what it wants to say about Assange or about the practical and ethical issues his activities raised.

Adrenalin and rivalry mix in 'Rush'

Director Ron Howard opts for excitement over subtlety in his Formula One movie. Why not?

Going to Ron Howard's Rush for subtlety is about the same as heading to a Formula One pit stop in search of contemplative silence. Working from a screenplay by Peter Morgan, Howard takes a no-nonsense approach to race-car competition, focusing on the two things Formula One drivers might emphasize themselves: intoxicating applications of speed and big-time expressions of attitude.

Howard builds his story around the rivalry between real-life drivers James Hunt (Chris Hemsworth) and Niki Lauda (Daniel Bruhl), top competitors who made a major impact on their sport during the landmark 1976 season.

Hunt liked to defy death, party hard and take risks. Although he was hardly risk averse, Lauda was the more calculating of the two. Decidely less handsome than his counterpart, Lauda was known as "Rat" because his overbite supposedly made him look rat-faced.

For both Hunt and Lauda, driving seems less a sport than an obsession, an activity they had to pursue -- even if it meant, in Lauda's case, paying his way into the sport, something that earned the scorn of other drivers, at least at the beginning of his career. As played by Bruhl, Lauda isn't an easy man to like, but the views of others don't much faze him: He doesn't seem to care what people think about him.

When the story shifts away from the world of racing, it's mostly to focus on relationships between Hunt and Lauda and their wives, played respectively by Olivia Wilde and Alesandra Maria Lara. But Howard's less interested in personal relationships than in fulfilling racing-genre demands.

Cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle joins with Howard in an application of technique designed to put us in the driver's seat, to allow us to experience -- in vicarious safety, of course -- the thrill of high-speed driving.

There's some talk of the methodical way Lauda went about preparing his cars and a harrowing look at the accident that put Lauda in the hospital, perhaps because Hunt insisted on racing on a wet track at Nürburgring, the German Grand Prix.

Lauda had lobbied for the race's cancellation because of weather. Hunt, who was chasing Lauda in the standings for the Formula One championship, took the opposite view. According to the movie, Hunt blamed himself for the accident that almost killed Lauda and left him disfigured.

If you're schooled in the differences between Ferraris and McClarens, you'll probably get even more out of Rush, but be assured: Howard hasn't made a movie only for racing aficionados or wannabes. He's made a general-audience slice of entertainment that seldom spills the oil of complexity on its sleek, mobile surfaces.