Beaufort.

"This was a particularly exceptional year for Israeli cinema," writes Nick Dawson. "Beaufort, Joseph Cedar's third film as writer-director, won the Silver Bear (for Best Director) at Berlin, and then The Band's Visit, Eran Kolirin's feature debut, won the hearts of critics at Cannes and came away with a distribution deal with Sony Pictures Classics." And for Filmmaker, he talks with both directors.

"Based on the popular novel by author Ron Leshem, which was inspired by real events, Beaufort is a tense drama about a young Israeli commander and his troops guarding a mountaintop outpost in the waning days of Israel's 18-year occupation of Lebanon," writes Robert W Welkos, introducing his interview with Cedar in the Los Angeles Times. "In 1982, Israel's army invaded Lebanon, capturing the mountain and routing its Palestine Liberation Organization defenders; the mountain contains a magnificent 12th century Crusader fortress."

Updated through 1/20.

"Cedar's understated humanism - passionate but never glib or easy - renders all the more painful the unstated coda that, six years after Israel's retreat from Lebanon, the wounds opened all over again," writes Ella Taylor in the Voice.

"[E]ven if it does not entirely rise above cliché, Beaufort has an earnest, sober intelligence that makes it hard to shake," writes AO Scott in the New York Times. "It suggests that, for those who fight, the futility of war is inseparable from its nobility."

"In the larger scheme of things, the film seems to reflect and respect the feelings of mothers, lovers, sons and daughters - Israelis and those from other nations - who are tired of war, who abhor war, who think war is futile, who question the ultimate value of heroism expended in war efforts and under war-incurred circumstances," writes Jennifer Merin in the New York Press. "That said, Israel is known - and shown in this film - to be, of necessity, a nation of warriors."

For Bruce Bennett, writing in the New York Sun, "Beaufort coolly traces the conviction, loyalty, and consciousness-distorting contours of wartime with a forthright and supple narrative dexterity unseen in the war movie genre since Russian Elem Klimov's mid-1980s World War II masterpiece Come and See."

"Mostly, Beaufort is a deliberate, reserved dramatization of how an army stands down," writes Noel Murray at the AV Club. "The movie could use some 'why' to go with that 'how'... There's also a little bit in Beaufort about how a long-term occupation loses track of its original purpose."

Earlier: David D'Arcy and Michael Guillén.

"Beaufort remains a powerful vision of war and its bedrock futility, but only in the widest terms; on a human level, the mountain itself is a stronger character than any of the people portrayed here," writes Chris Barsanti in Film Journal International.

Update, 1/19: Lee Thomas reviews the novel for the San Francisco Chronicle.

Update, 1/20: Isabel Kershner talks with Cedar for the New York Times.

Posted by dwhudson at January 18, 2008 9:29 AM