Free Zone

In this fractious film from thorny filmmaker Amos Gitai (Kadosh, Kippur, Kedma), Natalie Portman demonstrates tour de force weeping in the back of a taxi as an American searching for her roots in Israel. Comedian Hanna Laslo plays the Israeli driver (and won the top acting prize last year at Cannes), en route to collect a debt in the economic free zone of Jordan. And Hiam Abbass (Munich) chimes in as a Palestinian who argues with the Israeli in ways meant to suggest that problems of the Middle East could be eased through the talk of women.