RECOMMENDED
Eran Kolirin’s “The Band’s Visit,” an Israeli film that got bounced out of the competition by the Academy for Best Foreign Language Feature for having too much English in it, is a sweetly deadpan comedy of miscommunication where an Egyptian police band in boldly baby blue uniforms take a wrong turn and find themselves stranded amid Israelis in a dusty village and can only converse through that lingua franca. (Notch another one for the bureaucrats.) While it’s obvious that Arab-Jewish relations are being made metaphoric, Kolirin is more interested in observational whimsy, and his best moments of comic compostion show the influence of august forebears like Jacques Tati. And the delivery of the line, meant as seduction, “Do you like Chet Baker?” is an instant classic. With Ronit Elkabetz. 87m. (Ray Pride)