One thing you don’t automatically associate with the Israeli Defense Forces is dry observational comedy. Nevertheless, that’s the key ingredient in this mordant, diverting cross between Three Kings and Reality Bites (with an unavoidable, aspirational sprinkling of Robert Altman’s M.A.S.H. and maybe a maraschino cherry of Lena Dunham’s Girls on top). Writer/director Talya Lavie’s combination of the bureaucratic drudgery and genuine life-and-death threat pulls off the good trick of making the story of non-combat soldiers doing clerical work in a remote IDF camp feel simultaneously universal and specific, timeless and contemporary. There’s a humanistic charge in seeing what basically amounts to a slacker comedy (with some violence) play out against the backdrop of ideologically fraught and war-ravaged lands. But then, the privilege of thinking that anything even vaguely associated with Israel or Palestine can be free from ideological freight probably constitutes its own ideology, and since ideology is the enemy of art and of human discourse, this well-crafted and entertaining movie can’t help but offer a complicated experience. by Sean Nelson