O Jerusalem (2007)

The need to touch on pivotal events makes this at times seem like history's 'greatest hits,' although the personal stories provide a narrative thread tying it all together.

It's hard to take the film seriously with [its] contrivances, including a hokey music score, dialogue designed solely to give us historical information.

Director Elie Chouraqui and co-writer Didier Lepecheur [fall] prey to a fatal evenhandedness that reduces a complex battle for the loveliest, most fought-over city in the world to a pile of heroic clichés.

As a history lesson, the film is so elementary and silly that you'd half-expect to find Mr. Peabody and Sherman peeking around the Wailing Wall.

Such fictionalizations are the stuff of TV miniseries, and only serve to add confusion and melodrama to a history that, as Collins and Lapierre's book proves, hardly needs further dramatization.

Unfortunately, French director Elie Chouraqui settles for speed and cliché.

Hammers away at its Arab/Jewish variation on the chicken-or-the-egg debate ad nauseam.

In its struggle to present an unbiased portrait that balances Jewish and Palestinian viewpoints evenly, the film loses some narrative focus. Nevertheless, it presents a valuable history lesson that points out the dire effects of British occupation in the