The Bubble.

"Popular gay filmmaker Eytan Fox, whose previous two films, Yossi and Jagger and Walk on Water, enjoyed healthy limited-run success in the US, returns with The Bubble, and again proves that his strengths lie in establishing tender, fraught human relationships within volatile settings," writes Michael Koresky at indieWIRE. "Yet in shuttling these fragile souls through stock tragic frameworks, he sometimes undermines them, both personally and politically; though The Bubble makes for a mostly impassioned liberal plea, Fox's need to spin its central gay romance into a star-crossed present-day West Bank Story leads him to fall into some unnecessary stereotyping. Which is unfortunate since there's so much loveliness in The Bubble."

Updated through 9/10.

"The Bubble is a kissing cousin of the British version of Queer as Folk, wittily dramatizing what it's like for gay men to live and love in Tel Aviv while demonstrating a rare desire to rouse social and racial awareness," writes Ed Gonzalez at Slant.

"[I]n Fox, an openly gay, American-born Jew who moved to Israel as a child, Israeli youth has found an enthusiastic killer of sacred cows whose movies happen to play like strung-together episodes of Friends," writes Ella Taylor in the Voice. "His is the voice of the new Israel - hedonistic, narcissistic, yet also more innovative and accepting than the generation of ideologues who founded the state."

"Fox combines a sitcom premise with authentic peril," writes Eric Kohn in the New York Press. "Young Tel Aviv residents lead normal lives, finding time for parties and rock music in between governmental responsibilities like security detail - specifically, in the leading man's case, stopping Palestinians in transit to ensure that they don't blow themselves up."

"Actually, Fox does better in his serious dramatic mode than he does with light comedy, at least to my taste," offers Andrew O'Hehir in Salon.

Lisa Rosen profiles Fox for the Los Angeles Times.

Update: Online viewing tip. The Man I Love.

Updates, 9/10: "Eytan Fox directs with compassion but also with impatience for his characters' self-centered naïveté, veering somewhat uneasily between these tones and relying on the competence of his actors to smooth the transitions," writes Jeannette Catsoulis in the New York Times. "And though his ending is more poetic than just, it effectively diverts partisan sympathies toward a more general condemnation of violence."

"It's only when The Bubble takes a swift turn into domino-tipping tragedy in the final act that a tender, fraught love story feels casually discarded in favor of something psychologically pat and ham-fistedly earth-shattering," writes Robert Abele in the Los Angeles Times. "Ironically, for an otherwise engaging look at where politics and the personal confusedly intersect for a generation of youth trying their best to keep the grimmer realities of their world at bay, it's the only real false note."

Posted by dwhudson at September 6, 2007 9:37 AM