Golda's Balcony

Golda Meir was an Israeli founding mother and Egypt-stomping prime minister—so she should be ripe pickings for a drama. In fact, William Gibson wrote a respectable one-woman play about her that became a 2003 Broadway hit. But when director Jeremy Kagan tried to film Gibson’s simple monologue, he turned it into a hectoring PowerPoint presentation.

A waxen Valerie Harper clumps expressionlessly through increasingly amateurish video backdrops, including desktop-style “windows” that minimize with an audible swish. Meir needed her wars to appear defensive; sadly, in this ill-considered exercise, the filmmakers commit an indubitably offensive act.