If you’d like to celebrate Israeli women, Netflix has two major movies about women in the military. Talya Lavie’s Zero Motivation (2014) is a classic comedy about two female soldiers, Daffi (Nelly Tagar) and Zohar (Dana Ivgy), who are miserable serving coffee and shredding documents in an IDF base in the Negev.
Daffi, the more histrionic of the two, has a magnificent obsession with getting transferred to military headquarters in Tel Aviv, where she will be able to drink iced lattes from a coffee bar.
Lavie took the setting of an office where everyone is bored out of their minds and brilliantly turned it into a setting for comically epic struggles.
Real life heroines on screen
Avi Nesher’s Image of Victory (2021) is a genuine epic that celebrates a real-life female heroine, Mira Ben-Ari (Joy Rieger), a young woman who fought in the Battle of Nitzanim near the Egyptian border in the War of Independence.
The movie veers back and forth between two storylines. One follows an Egyptian photojournalist (Amir Khoury) embedded with troops to make a newsreel depicting only military triumph, no matter what the real outcome of the fighting.
The other focuses on Mira and her friends, a group of refugees and survivors from Europe and Latin America living in Kibbutz Nitzanim.
They chose not to abandon the kibbutz, even as the Egyptians advanced.
Rieger and Khoury give wonderfully evocative performances, and the movie features many other well-known actors, including Meshi Kleinstein, Eliana Tidhar, Ala Dakka, Neta Roth, Elisha Banai, Tom Avni, and Yadin Gellman, a Special Forces fighter turned actor who fought and was wounded at Kibbutz Be’eri on October 7.
To Take a Wife, the first movie in a powerful trilogy by the late Ronit Elkabetz and her brother Shlomi Elkabetz, tells the story of an unhappy Moroccan-born wife in Israel, based on the lives of their own parents.
The wife is played by Ronit, in one of her best performances, who married as a teenager and dreams of leaving her withdrawn husband.
It’s a vivid depiction of a certain kind of unhappy household that focuses on the issue of women not being allowed to divorce without their husbands’ permission, a problem when Elkabetz’s mother was young that is still just as much of an issue today.
It will be leaving Netflix on March 25, so now is the time if you want to see it.
Tamar Rabinyan (Niv Sultan), the daring, cyber-genius Mossad operative on the series Tehran, is another formidable heroine you may especially enjoy watching right now as she tries to dismantle the Iranian nuclear program.
All three seasons of the series are available on Netflix (with English titles) and KAN 11 (kan.org.il).
The leader who founded Hadassah
Labors of Love: The Life and Legacy of Henrietta Szold is a documentary about the American-born Zionist leader who founded Hadassah, and it will be shown on March 8 on Yes Docu and Yes VOD.
One of the pioneers behind the Israeli healthcare system, which she developed in the British Mandate period, Szold also helped organize Youth Aliyah and managed to rescue thousands of Jewish children from Germany and Nazi-occupied Europe during the 1930s and bring them to Israel.
The film is by Abby Ginzberg, a Peabody Award winner, and Tovah Feldshuh voices Szold.
Piecing dreams together
The Lady, a new true-crime series on Yes VOD, Yes Binge, and Yes London, looks at the strange life of Jane Andrews (Mia McKenna-Bruce).
A young woman from a working-class British family, Andrews fulfilled her dream of becoming a dresser for the Duchess of York (Natalie Dormer) in the late 1980s and began to run with a wealthy crowd, only to end up in prison for murder.
The series is an odd mixture of a girl-power rags-to-riches story, filled with pulsating 1980s and 1990s pop tunes and fun fashion, and a portrait of a self-centered woman who turned to murder when she was fed up with her relationship.
It’s much more enjoyable when she’s on the way up, but those who followed her trial in the early 2000s will definitely be glued to the full four episodes.
Taking charge
I always enjoy seeing Michelle Pfeiffer in whatever role she plays, even when she’s wildly miscast, as she was as Bernie Madoff’s wife in The Wizard of Lies.
I’m also looking forward to The Madison, which is coming up on Cellcom TV, Yes VOD, Hot Drama, Hot VOD, and Next TV on March 15.
Pfeiffer plays the matriarch of a wealthy New York family that suffers a tragedy, and she takes her daughters and their families to the wilds of Montana to recover.
Her co-stars include Kurt Russell and Matthew Fox. From the trailer, it looks soapy but engaging, and it was created by Taylor Sheridan, who has made such shows as Yellowstone, the popular modern-day Western series starring Kevin Costner.
‘Yellowstone’ prequel
1923, the prequel to Yellowstone, is now available on Hot VOD and Next TV, and it stars the incomparable Helen Mirren and Harrison Ford, who make a great couple as they battle to establish the Dutton clan’s various enterprises during Prohibition and the Great Depression.
‘Rooster’ introduces some strong ‘hens’
Steve Carell plays a rather weak man in the new HBO Max series, Rooster, which begins streaming on March 8, but he is surrounded by some strong female characters.
It was created by Bill Lawrence, whose previous shows include Ted Lasso, and Matt Tarses, and is about a bestselling author, Greg Russo, whose books sound like a combination of Elmore Leonard and Carl Hiaasen, with sex and violence mixed with laughs.
He accepts a speaking engagement at a liberal arts college where his daughter, Katie (Charly Clive), teaches, so he can spend time with her because her husband, Archie (Phil Dunster), a British professor, has just left her for one of his graduate students.
But while he is there, a series of events force him to take the position of writer-in-residence, because the old, ornery college president (John C. McGinley) sees his presence on campus as a victory against wokeness.
It’s partly a chronicle of the current culture wars and also a moving look at a complicated father-daughter bond. Both the writing and Carell and Clive are terrific.
Whenever I thought I knew exactly where it was going, I was pleasantly surprised, and Carell once again proves that he is one of the best actors working today, balancing comedy and drama with great skill.