Lovesusti The Worst Film Ever

ChicRawIdol A brilliant film that helped define a genre

CrawlerChunky In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

FirstWitch A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

Muhammedigbal As other reviewers have mentioned it is about Miri, an El Al fight attendant, twice widowed, who suddenly finds herself with an abandoned Chinese boy who only speaks Chinese. Her actions at this point are unconvincing. She doesn't want to call the police, or anyone. Instead she calls him "Noodle" and tries to teach him her language. Only after a number of days does she think (with some help)to take him to someone in the Chinese community. It all gets worked out (of course) amidst the drama of her sister's difficulty with her husband, with the handsome Mati added to the mix. The second half of the film was a little more interesting, not giving anything away. But there was no chemistry at all between Miri and the Chinese boy who was supposed to be so adorable that she couldn't help but have a strong, emotional bond with him. The actress playing Miri gave a pedestrian,unemotional performance and the Chinese boy's performance was entirely by rote, understandable due his age and his obvious lack of acting experience.

dromasca Kid melodramas can have very different destinies - they can reach (seldom) the sublime, and they can easily fall into cheap melodrama. It is probably the most wide spread mistake of people doing such movies to rely too much on the kid actors. These are usually good and catch the attention as long as they are on screen, but unless they have the talent and personality of a Shirley Temple or Dakota Fanning they quickly fade into forgetting.To their credit the makers of 'Noodle' did not make this mistake. Their Chinese kid-actor does his work, but is not made to be overwhelmingly cued, nor is this immigration light mode comedy completely based on him. On the contrary, the other principal characters in the story are quite interesting, especially the two sisters played by the Hollywood-stricken (but not very successful there) Miri Avital and by Anat Waxman, one of the best actress on Israeli screens and scenes nowadays.Neither does the film completely avoid the flaws of the commercial Israeli cinema, and the story line although intriguing as a premise lacks somehow credibility, and cannot avoid a deus-ex-machina solution to the final climax. Overall however the film works even better than some of the recent light-hearted comedies I have seen coming from Hollywood or other established cinema imperia.

Seamus2829 Isreal, which has certainly had it's share of quirky comedy's, now has yet another film to add to it's ever growing list of contenders for world cinema. Noodle is a cute,low key comedy about an woman in her late 30's, working for El Al airlines as an in flight attendant,who's life is thrown into a tizzy by a five year old Chinese boy,who has been left by his mother in her flat, while she promised to be back in an hour, only to disappear. What follows is the woman,trying to establish contact with the boy's mother, and realizing that she is going to be the unwilling babysitter of a young boy who speaks only Mandarin, and not a word of Hebrew. The boy is given the nick name Noodle, as they're not sure what his real name is. What I admired about this little film is that, although it does dwell in sappy sentimentality, it never lowers or cheapens itself to the level of a John Hughes film (in other words,it's not a smarmy sitcom,with young children who know seem to know more than adults do). A little bit of searching out may be in order to see this little gem.

Nozz Okay, the movie suffers from several absurdities as the plot is forced forward; but no more absurdities than you generally find in an adventure movie. And it is an adventure movie, although the adventure is not about transporting a diamond across the treacherous Andes but about finding security for a stranded boy amid the frustrations of bureaucracy and the distractions of job and family. (One of the absurdities is that when necessary, a job such as gym teaching seems to pose no obstacle to scheduling or financing a quick plane ride across the world.) The usually glamorous Mili Avital and the usually super-cute Anat Waxman look as if they were willing to forgo a layer or two of make-up to look realistically middle-class. The boy actor whose believability is essential retains that believability while leaving no scene unstolen.