Flight flights, hot hit men, and beautiful Belgravia

For those who love watching warplanes and aerial battles, Masters of the Air on Apple TV+ is the show for you. The series, which just started running and which will release a new episode each week until mid-March, has some stellar producers, among them Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg, who also made Band of Brothers and The Pacific.

The aerial photography is truly spectacular in this series that tells the story of how the US Eighth Air Force deployed its unwieldy B-17s against the Germans during World War II. The Eighth Air Force was nicknamed the Bloody Hundredth because it was perceived as being prone to foul-ups.

Masters of the Air focuses on four airmen, and unfortunately the development of these characters doesn’t match up to the level of the excitingly filmed dogfights. The star power on the series comes from Austin Butler, who played the title role in the movie Elvis, which gives you an idea of the charisma he projects as the straitlaced Maj. Gale “Buck” Cleven. There’s a lot of comedy over the fact that one of his comrades is nicknamed “Bucky” (Callum Turner); and as is usually the case in these buddy dramas, Bucky is as rebellious and sloppy as Buck is dutiful. Navigator Harry Crosby (Anthony Boyle) is the clown of the bunch, and eventually they are joined by Robert “Rosie” Rosenthal (Nate Mann), who obviously has something to prove to the Nazis he is fighting.

While you may long for the heroes to get back into their planes during the scenes when they are at the base, the series is well done. Don’t google the characters if you want to find out who made it through the war; the suspense will definitely improve your experience of watching this series.

Hot hit men, Belgravia, and more

PEOPLE SEEM to enjoy movies and series about funny hit men, or rather hit people, because they keep making them. Following Barry, which had the clever idea of portraying a hit man who longs to be an actor and takes an acting class, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, a reboot of the 2005 movie of the same name starring Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt, is being released as a series on Amazon Prime on February 2.

That 2005 movie is best remembered because Jolie and Pitt met on the set, and they played a pair of perfect-looking, crack assassins. But in the new series, the lead characters, played by Donald Glover (best known for the series Atlanta) and Maya Erskine, are more flawed and meant to be more relatable.

I’ve never found anything remotely funny about contract killers, but Glover and Erskine do a surprisingly good job trying to make their characters interesting and believable. Still, I kept wishing the series was about a struggling couple who were not killers.

A much funnier movie that features a super-agent couple is Keeping Up with the Joneses, currently available on Netflix. This dopey but fairly entertaining 2016 movie stars Gal Gadot and Jon Hamm, both comedians at heart, as superspies who move in next door to an average suburban couple, Karen (Isla Fisher) and Jeff (Zach Galifianakis).

The ordinary couple are just realizing how blah their lives are after their kids go off to sleepaway camp. Jeff is an HR guy at a corporation, and he and Karen find their lives become more exciting when they begin to suspect their new neighbors are not the travel writer and cooking blogger they claim to be.

Fisher, who happens to be Mrs. Sacha Baron Cohen in real life, and who converted to Judaism before they married, is, of course, too gorgeous to be a typical soccer mom, but nothing in this movie is meant to be at all realistic, and that’s part of the fun. One of the highlights is a scene where Gadot has a spat with Hamm in which she speaks Hebrew with him, although he replies in English. It won’t surprise too many people that she is Israeli and not Greek, as she pretends to be at first.

Gadot also has a tiny role in the movie Date Night, which is available on Disney+ and which has a similar plot about a bored couple (Tina Fey and Steve Carell) who suddenly find excitement after they are mistaken for criminals. Gadot plays Netanya, the girlfriend of a security expert (Mark Wahlberg) they turn to for help, and she delivers the funniest line in the movie, in Hebrew (which is subtitled into English). I won’t reveal it here, because you really need to hear her say it. Fey gets to utter another good line, when she tells her husband, as they are on the run, “Everything you’re doing, I’m doing in heels,” which says more about feminism than the entire 114 preachy minutes of Barbie.

BELGRAVIA: THE Next Chapter, now available in Israel on Hot and Yes, was created by Julian Fellowes, who made Downton Abbey, and is strictly for die-hard costume drama fans. It picks up 25 years after the first season and continues the saga of the troubled Trenchard clan, who are wealthy but who often fall victim to various misfortunes.

Benjamin Wainwright and Harriet Slater are incredibly gorgeous as Frederick Trenchard and his bride, Clara, who struggle through their marriage because of a dark secret from his past. But, like Fellowes’s recent American series The Gilded Age, the characters are bland and the situations feel generic. Unlike Downton, this won’t keep you on the edge of your seat.

NOW THAT The Boy and the Heron, the latest movie by the Japanese animation master Hayao Miyazaki, is opening in theaters, you might want to take a look at his earlier films, almost all of which are available on Netflix.

If you enjoy his style, these are films that the whole family can watch together. His two most celebrated films are Princess Mononoke, which is the story of a young boy on a hero’s quest through an imaginary world, like many of Miyazaki’s films, and Spirited Away, this time with a young girl. Younger children may enjoy Kiki’s Delivery Service, about a child witch who has trouble making friends.

His last film before The Boy and the Heron, which he had said was his final film, The Wind Rises, is a strangely lyrical story of the life of a man who designed fighter planes during World War II. Several of his films are also available on Apple TV+.

ANOTHER CHOICE, if you are looking for movies to watch with your tweens, is Exceptional, an Israeli series that has just been released on Netflix (in Hebrew, it’s called Meyuhedet). Israel has a lot of excellent series for children and teens, which are generally short episodes shown every day of the week, and Exceptional is in this format. The episodes are short and well plotted.

It’s about a popular girl (Bar Miniely) who makes clips for YouTube and social media with her group of friends, but her life is complicated by having to help her parents care for her relatively high-functioning autistic sister (Ella Malachi).

It is told from the points of view of both sisters, and you feel for each of them. Their dramas are more interesting than the more soapy plotlines concerning the popular sister’s friends, although those may be the ones that your kids enjoy.