The Dinner

In Israel, Keren Peles is a famous figure from the music world, and she figures as a selling point for this movie but it's her first and she isn't tackling a very challenging role. She's in one of a pair of stories that, as an audience, we realize that inevitably we'll find woven together, and the big flaw in the movie is that the collision of the stories is too wild a coincidence.

The story Keren Peles belongs to is the less interesting of the two, featuring a love triangle among the well-to-do. "Rich people's problems," as we say in Hebrew. The other story is more compelling; it has to do with the struggles of a Russian immigrant couple whose life in Israel has not been easy. They encounter challenges to their pride, and they face up to them in a way that wins the audience over. Some of us might have been happier with a story only about the Russian couple. But both stories do hold our attention till the end.