'Foxtrot' is a powerful anti-war film from Israel (review)

CLEVELAND, Ohio -- "Foxtrot" is an extraordinary Israeli film that is at once illuminating and gut-wrenching.

If you can create three riveting, impeccable, emotionally impassioned movies, you’ve had a directing career worth celebrating. In “Foxtrot,” Israeli filmmaker Samuel Maoz has made his trifecta all at once and spliced them together into a magnificent, poetically fractured tryptic.

Israel director Samuel Maoz’s last feature was the tensely claustrophobic “Lebanon” which took place inside an Israeli tank during the 1982 Lebanon War. “Foxtrot,” his first narrative film in eight years, is not set within the confines of a such a tight, enclosed space but nevertheless often feels similarly emotionally suffocating. A despairing work that’s not quite as gripping as its predecessor, “Foxtrot” still manages to make a powerful statement about the unintended side effects of living in a constant state of war.