Jon Frosch

The humor here is sitcom broad, and Scott displays little sense of rhythm; the film runs under two hours, but feels considerably longer.

Mikael Buch's debut feature is silly and sweet, but also paper thin and mostly unimaginative: a series of cartoonish vignettes during which a generically eccentric Jewish clan confronts movie-family problems (adultery, divorce, health scares, tense sibling relationships).

Although smoothly directed, A Bottle in the Gaza Sea has little visual personality or dramatic urgency. What might have been a tough and adult take on a bond full of hope but thwarted by war plays more like an after-school special.

Of course, everyone in the film - aside from one or two conspicuous villains - turns out to be a resistant, making an otherwise harmlessly corny movie something slightly more bothersome: a revisionist fantasy of French heroism.

The filmmaker never pulls us into the twists and turns of her main character's mind, and she tiptoes around, rather than tackles, her ideas about class envy, the performative nature of identity and the tension between truth and happiness.