Late Marriage (2001)

Lior Ashkenazi and Ronit Elkabetz are excellent actors doing their absolute best with material that gives them nothing to work with. And yes, everyone seems absolutely thrilled about the extended sex scene. Groundbreaking stuff, really. Maybe it swept the Israeli Academy Awards because Orthodox Jews had never seen sex without a sheet with a hole between the parties? Someone alert the Cannes jury: sex has been discovered!

This isn't the first film to tackle arranged marriage or suffocating patriarchy. Indian cinema has been doing it better for decades, including Mira Nair's Golden Globe-winning "Monsoon Wedding"; but it might be the first to turn every role into a screaming caricature devoid of humanity. I swear at one point Judith's little girl had a look on her face like "What's my motivation here?" and honestly, me too. With zero character development and so many missing story pieces, the whole thing plays like propaganda for the Israeli Association of Maternal Matchmakers. "See how important our work is? Without us, these man-children might actually have to make their own decisions!" At 4/10, "Late Marriage" proves that cultural specificity without an actual screenplay is just ethnographic yelling with a side of gratuitous humping.