Japanese distributors are releasing Alexis Bloom’s muckraking documentary about the House of Netanyahu a year after it was first shown elsewhere. Given the velocity of breaking news these days it would seem to follow that the movie is dated, but, in fact, it feels relevantly up-to-the-minute in the year of Trump 2.0, since the returned U.S. president’s imperious sensibility only highlights the eternal Israeli prime minister’s sense of entitlement, which Bloom shows has not only exacerbated the war in Gaza but extended its brutal outcomes indefinitely. Netanyahu, as the film stresses, is a much more media savvy public personality than Trump is, but given the testimony provided by other witnesses to his perfidy, many of whom are former confidantes and allies, including one who still claims to be Bibi’s “only friend,” the polished bluster and evasion come across as even more cynical than it does on TV. After all, Bloom’s movie is based mainly on leaked videos of police interrogations into the Netanyahu family’s corruption. 

Initially, the charges and police action almost seem over-determined, since they mostly have to do with Netanyahu and his third wife, Sara, accepting and, in many cases, soliciting extravagant gifts like expensive cigars and crates of champagne. In his office, the sitting prime minister bats away investigators’ questions about these gifts by saying they’re trivial and that the police have better things to do. Sara is even harsher in her contempt for the investigation, insulting the officers and insinuating that they are unpatriotic. Reporters who have covered Netanyahu since he was a mere Knesset member and people who used to work with him or around him describe him and his wife as preternaturally haughty, in particular Sara, who is known to abuse servants and treat people who want favors from the family as conduits of luxury goods. “You can’t say no,” says one former assistant to Hollywood magnate and former arms dealer Arnon Milchan after relating how Sara would badger rich friends into feeding her liquor and jewelry addictions. So for a while, the doc feels more like an extended Page Six expose about elites exploiting their positions, but once it gets into Netanyahu’s paranoia about being tried and convicted of fraud, which is a real possibility considering that Israel may be second only to South Korea in terms of its history of prosecuting high-ranking officials, it shows convincingly how he manipulated the system, despite unified public opinion against him, in order to stay in power, first by changing the law regarding how the supreme court can judge and, ultimately, by taking advantage of the Oct. 7 massacre to justify a neverending war against the Palestinians so as to distract the nation in the most terrifying way possible. 

Almost all of this information has been reported by the Israeli and international press, and any resourceful and curious viewer knows it already. What Bloom provides that the daily news doesn’t is the context of a man whose personal ambitions have driven him to hold his own government hostage, going so far as to channel funds clandestinely to Hamas in order to keep the Palestinian authorities internally embattled. He even moved further right to form a new political faction in order to dodge the condemnation of left-wingers and centrists. His son then got into the act by stage managing the press, using his father’s connections to billionaires who controlled the media companies. The excuse in this case is as banal as always, that the press is not balanced, but when you watch the interrogation tapes you see exactly the Trumpian playbook, which Netanyahu could have written: deny, lie, plead ignorance (usually by “forgetting”), and act aggrieved. One witness insists he is better than any movie actor you could possibly name, and he may be, but like most actors he leaves enough space on the edges for you to see the subterfuge behind the performance. He can’t help himself. 

Subterfuge of a distinctly different type animates the drama of the German biopic Bonhoeffer, a real life subject who is as selfless as Bibi is self-serving. Dietrich Bonhoeffer (Jonas Dassler) was a Lutheran pastor whose well-publicized pacifist ideals clashed with the nihilist goals of the Third Reich and thus was executed mere weeks before Hitler’s suicide. The movie expands his brief by suggesting he was also directly involved in a plot to assassinate the chancellor, though some scholars have refuted this intelligence. The movie, a thoroughly German production with some very famous German actors in supporting roles, tips its hand toward commercial relevance by presenting all the dialogue in accented English (except, notably, the Gestapo, who speak in German, thus immediately equating the language with villainy), but the overall production is effective in showing how one’s faith can be the strongest bulwark against oppression.

The director, Todd Komarnicki, pushes this approach mainly by focusing a lot of screen time on Bonhoeffer’s time studying at New York’s Union Theological Seminary in the 30s, where he came in contact with Black church folk in Harlem. Though an impossibly quick read of Dixieland jazz at the piano in a nightclub displays his tolerance for New World innovation, it was Bonhoeffer’s personal confrontation with pure American racism that showed him how his religion could be used to fight the Nazis back home, and there are stirring scenes of the young pastor exhorting his flock from his Bavarian pulpit on the evils of totalitarian thought, which was being exercised by the Nazis through the commandeering of the German church for its own nefarious aims.

The movie’s hackneyed structure of having a framing storyline about Bonhoeffer’s last days in Nazi captivity as the war winds down doesn’t focus the dramatic thrust as much as Komarnicki thinks it does, but as a movie Bonhoeffer makes several good points about standing up to power without getting lost in glittering generalities. In fact, it might have been better if the movie were less cinematically ambitious. The protagonist is admirable without being anywhere near believable.

The Bibi Files, in English and Hebrew, now playing in Tokyo at Theater Image Forum Aoyama (03-5766-0114).

Bonhoeffer: Pastor. Spy. Assassin, in English and German, now playing in Tokyo at Human Trust Cinema Yurakucho (03-6259-8608), Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551), Shinjuku Musashinokan (03-3354-5670).

The Bibi Files home page in Japanese

Bonhoeffer: Pastor. Spy. Assassin home page in Japanese

The Bibi Files photo (c) 2024 BNU Productions LLC

Bonhoeffer: Pastor. Spy. Assassin photo (c) 2024 Crow’s Nest Productions Limited