movie reviews

Foxtrot.   Photo: Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics Samuel Maoz’s alternately acclaimed and reviled Israeli drama  Foxtrot  is thick with grief, confusion, and metaphor, the last of which extends to the title. Foxtrot is the name of an isolated desert checkpoint on a supply road trafficked by Palestinian cars and itinerant camels. But it’s also, of course, a dance, a box step Maoz uses to evoke life in a traumatized, blindly militaristic state where one “always winds up at the same starting point.” Under normal circumstances, I’d poke fun at all the movie’s egregious literary contrivances — the kind that make my Metaphor Horn go  Ah-ooga! Ah-ooga!  But a filmmaker able to speak  wholly  in metaphor is a rare kind of artist: a director-poet. Maoz grips you from his opening scene, in which a woman, Dafna (Sarah Adler), opens the door of her apartment — note the painting behind her, a snarl of black lines — and, after a beat, begins to scream an...