Kedma

Set in May 1948, this deals with the first hours in Palestine of a platoon of Holocaust survivors fighting to estabish the Zionist state of Israel. Coming, however, after the triumphs of Gitai's Kadosh and Kippur, it proves disappointingly uneven. There are fine scenes, of course, blessed with the director's trademark long takes (here shot with typical elegance by Angelopoulos regular Yorgos Arvanitis), but too often the precise details of the narrative remain unclear, while the over-explicit final mad rant (following a very fine scene in which the protagonist is an Arab) merely undermines much of what has gone before. And, incidentally, the characterisation of the British troops ('you guys!') is way off.