Everything Is Illuminated

Schreiber’s first film as writer-director pares Jonathan Safran Foer’s overpraised novel down to its contemporary through-line, which follows Jonathan (Wood, inscrutable behind enormous glasses) through the Ukraine countryside as he searches for the woman who he believes saved his grandfather from the Nazis;he’s aided by a malaprop-spouting guide, Alex (Gogol Bordello frontman Hutz in a winning film debut), and Alex’s own bigoted granddad. Self-consciously droll and stylised in the mode of recent Wes Anderson, the handsome but surface-skimming film italicises its clumsy comic diversions with rote bursts of klezmer before turning uncertainly sombre.