New Israeli documentaries debut on October 7 massacre, Iran, Hezbollah

Kan 11 is opening a new season of its documentary series, Enemies, on December 12, with six new episodes that will run on Tuesdays after the news and which become available after they air on Kan.org.il/ 

The first episode is about Iranian leader Ali Khamenei, who, in the view of most analysts, was the real power behind the October 7 Hamas attack. “He is the one who decides when to push the button, and how,” says one of the show’s commentators. The show details his modest early life and how he rose to the top by being inoffensive and not making enemies but also makes the point that he can maneuver when necessary, like all successful politicians. The next episodes tell the stories of Hanan Nasrallah of Hezbollah; Syrian President Bashar Assad; George Habash, the founder of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP); Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) founder Fathi Abd al-Aziz al-Shikaki; and Marwan Barghouti, who directed terror attacks for Fatah.  

#NOVA, the documentary about the part of the October 7 massacre that took place at the Nova music festival in Re’im, is now available on Yes VOD and Sting TV. It’s comprised of cellphone videos, texts, footage from first responders, and a small amount of video shot by the terrorists themselves. It’s a well-produced and obviously extremely disturbing film to watch about October 7, the first of many.  

Escapist shows and movies to watch amid Israel-Hamas war

For escapism, the best choice for many this week will be the final episodes of The Crown, which will be released on December 14. The Diana era ended with the first half of season six, which was released in November. The final six episodes move into the Prince William and Kate Middleton romance. I hope the series finds some original way to cover these characters, whose lives have been widely discussed in the gossip columns for years.

I RECOMMEND watching the new big Netflix movie, Leave the World Behind, but only under the right circumstances. You need to find the person (or people) in your life you most enjoy making snide remarks with, and if these people are old enough to drink alcohol, add a little of that. Then let the snark flow as you watch this movie where an upper-class Brooklyn family – the parents are played by Julia Roberts and Ethan Hawke, and who cares what the characters’ names are – who live a seemingly perfect life with their two kids but are brimming with discontent. When Julia decides to surprise Ethan and the kids with a weekend at a surprisingly affordable Long Island house near the beach, you know what is coming if you’ve seen any recent movies about urban folks going on country getaways, such as Knock at the Cabin or Save Yourselves! – the apocalypse.

It follows the general blueprint of all such movies: first, they ignore some weird signs (like an oil tanker running aground at the beach), then the Internet goes down, and next all kinds of scary stuff (or stuff meant to be scary) starts happening. This movie takes a page from the Jordan Peele playback – he made the movie Get Out, a genuinely funny look at race relations in the guise of a horror movie that also takes place in the country – when the owner of the rented house, played by Mahershala Ali, and his 20-something daughter (Myaha’la), show up in the middle of the night in evening clothes. They were at a concert in Manhattan, but suddenly they just decided to go to their house. There is some drama about whether to let them stay, and whether Julia is being racist, but since Mahershala won two Oscars and is always a charming presence in any movie, they decide to let him in. Then more weird stuff happens, like a huge herd of deer surrounding the house briefly, but the scariest image the movie can come up with is a bunch of driverless white Teslas crashing on a highway. At one point, it seems that a survivalist contractor played by Kevin Bacon may be able to help them, and he says, “We made a lot of enemies around the world. Maybe all this means is a few of them teamed up,” which is the closest the movie gets to any real explanation of what is happening. 

You know you’re in trouble when your only hope of salvation is a grizzled Kevin Bacon, but the movie saves the best for last, and its dopey, one-joke finale with no closure has united much of social media in outrage. Again, this movie’s only valuable function is to provide people with something to joke about, and in that it’s a great success. It also works as real-estate porn – the house is lovely and it has a pool – and it shows that rich people who seem to have everything are miserable deep down so we can feel superior to them because (most of us, probably) feel we have better values. Roberts has a monologue about how she has stopped enjoying life because she works in sales and that has shown her how awful people are – I’m really not making this up. The movie was directed by Sam Esmail, best known as the showrunner of the infinitely superior Mr. Robot, and was based on a novel by Rumaan Alam. Interestingly, Barack and Michelle Obama, who have a big Netflix deal, were among the movie’s executive producers, and they should probably stick to political and nature documentaries.

FOR A FAR more interesting experience, try the series Little Bird, which begins running on Hot VOD and Next TV on December 17 and on Hot 3 on Sundays at 8:30 p.m. starting on December 24. It tells a fact-based story of Esther aka Little Bird (Darla Contois), who was born into an indigenous Canadian family but was taken away from her parents by social services as a young child in 1968 and adopted by a Jewish family. It alternates between her life as a child who is forced to leave her loving but poor parents behind, and a crisis she experiences 18 years later as a young woman who is doing well in law school and who gets engaged to a Jewish man who loves her. As their engagement is announced, she begins to question her mother, Golda (Lise Edelstein of House and The Good Wife), about her adoption and she seeks to find her birth family. While this show isn’t at all subtle, it’s engrossing and it examines a phenomenon that affected thousands of children in Canada starting in the 1960s.