{"id":240431,"date":"2026-08-08T00:25:08","date_gmt":"2026-08-08T00:25:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/240431\/"},"modified":"2026-08-08T00:25:08","modified_gmt":"2026-08-08T00:25:08","slug":"best-summer-movies-to-stream-in-israel-operation-thunderbolt-jurassic-park","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/240431\/","title":{"rendered":"Best summer movies to stream in Israel: ‘Operation Thunderbolt,’ ‘Jurassic Park’"},"content":{"rendered":"

If you would like to spend some time this summer watching classic Israeli movies, visit the Israel Film Archive<\/a>, where many beloved films are available to rent.\u00a0<\/p>\n

IFA has just added Operation Thunderbolt<\/a> (1977), the Oscar-nominated dramatization of the Entebbe hijacking and rescue, which took place 50 years ago.<\/p>\n

Directed by Menahem Golan, the movie stars Yehoram Gaon as the late Special Forces commander, Yoni Netanyahu. The cast is a virtual who\u2019s who of big Israeli stars of that era, including Assi Dayan, Gila Almagor, and Shaike Ophir, the actor for whom the Ophir Awards were named. Klaus Kinski plays one of the bad guys.<\/p>\n

Speaking of the Ophir Awards<\/a>, Avi Nesher\u2019s latest movie, Our Loves, received 12 nods this week and was accepted into the Toronto International Film Festival. You can watch one of his earlier classic films, Turn Left at the End of the World, on IFA.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The story of two teen girls, one an Indian immigrant and one from a Moroccan family, in a Negev town in the 1960s, is as fresh as it was when it was released in 2004.<\/p>\n

\"\u2018LITTLE\u2018LITTLE HOUSE on the Prairie\u2019 (credit: Eric Zachanowich\/Courtesy Netflix)<\/p>\n

Anne Hathaway is having a moment. She is one of the stars of three big movies this spring\/summer: The Devil Wears Prada 2, which is now streaming on Disney+ and Apple TV+<\/a> and which will be fun for fans of the original; the major Oscar-bait film, The Odyssey, in which she plays Penelope; and The End of Oak Street, which opens next week and is about dinosaurs that come alive and rampage through a suburban neighborhood.\u00a0<\/p>\n

August is the month when the shlocky movies like The End of Oak Street open, because all the important, Oscar-voter types are presumed to be on vacation, and because it\u2019s hot as hell, and people stuck home with their kids are starting to go nuts.\u00a0<\/p>\n

However, that doesn\u2019t mean that movies like this new dinosaur flick aren\u2019t fun.<\/p>\n

Even if you are not up for a trip to the multiplex, you can find a lot of dinosaur movies to watch at home.<\/p>\n

Netflix offers a wide range of summer viewing<\/p>\n

Netflix has an especially good selection, including the two best Jurassic movies: the original Jurassic Park (1993), with the nail-biting kitchen scene and special effects that still look pretty good, a testament to director Steven Spielberg\u2019s skill (he released Schindler\u2019s List the same year); and Jurassic World (2015), an amped-up version of the original premise.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Prime Video also offers Jurassic World, as does Apple TV+, which features most of the Jurassic movies.<\/p>\n

Speaking of keeping kids entertained, you should think hard about whether you let your children watch the reboot of the Little House on the Prairie series, now streaming on Netflix.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Based on the beloved books by Laura Ingalls Wilder, who was born just after the Civil War and wrote about her rural childhood, the new series is a sharp departure from the homespun schmaltz of the 1970s-80s TV show.<\/p>\n

That show was all about a family overcoming mild adversity through love. It is remembered for its plucky heroine played by Melissa Gilbert and her hunky father, portrayed by Michael Landon.<\/p>\n

It was part of a nostalgia boom for what people saw as a simpler time, before Watergate and the Vietnam War, along with series such as The Waltons, which made prairie-inspired fashion trendy again.<\/p>\n

The new series presents a more realistic picture of life for those pioneers, and successfully depicts many of the hardships and obstacles they faced, although it also sentimentalizes and softens some aspects of their lives.<\/p>\n

In the first five minutes, as the family journeys from Wisconsin to stake a claim on land in the Kansas prairie, Laura (Alice Halsey, recently seen in Lessons in Chemistry), kills a rabbit with a slingshot so they can have something to eat for dinner, the two young heroines and their mother almost drown as their father leads their horse-drawn carriage across a river, and they lose their beloved dog.<\/p>\n

When they arrive in the town of Independence, it turns out that everything is more complicated than they were led to believe. The land still belongs to the Osage nation, but they stake their claim anyway.<\/p>\n

The process of building a home and working the land is complicated by the fact that Ma (Crosby Fitzgerald) is pregnant again, and Pa (Luke Bracey) must find a laborer and is uncertain whether to trust a lonely, sometimes drunken Civil War veteran who lives nearby.<\/p>\n

They also develop an unrealistically warm friendship with an English-speaking Osage family who also lives in the area.<\/p>\n

As I watched Laura shooting at rabbits and running around grassy fields, I couldn\u2019t help thinking about how much freer she was than most American children seem to be today. I think that has always been a big part of the Little House series\u2019 allure.\u00a0<\/p>\n

These kids have huge amounts of unstructured, unsupervised time in nature, which they use to explore their environment. If you feel your kids will not be too upset by the hunting scenes, you might find that watching this well-acted, well-made series could inspire some conversations about what has changed over the last century or so.<\/p>\n

Many high schools used to stage the musical Bye Bye Birdie for their annual play, because lots of the leading roles are for teenagers, and now Netflix has brought back the original 1963 movie.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Fondly remembering the songs from my high school\u2019s production, I tuned in to the movie, which is mainly remembered today for turning its star, Ann-Margaret, into a sex symbol.<\/p>\n

But while many of the songs are still fun if you like classic musicals, the plot is so dated that the movie could be a Stone Age relic.<\/p>\n

‘Bye Bye Birdie’ satirizes Elvis-era celebrity worship<\/p>\n

Bye Bye Birdie is a parody of celebrity worship in the Elvis era. The plot gets going when a loutish Elvis-clone star, Conrad Birdie (Jesse Pearson), is drafted.\u00a0<\/p>\n

A struggling New York songwriter, Albert (Dick Van Dyke), and his loyal secretary who hopes to marry him, Rosie (Janet Leigh in a black wig, a nod to the fact that the original Broadway character was a Latina), come up with a plot to make money: they convince legendary variety-show Ed Sullivan to feature Birdie\u2019s \u201clast kiss\u201d before he joins the military on the show.<\/p>\n

The lucky young lady he will kiss is chosen at random: Kim (Ann-Margaret), a high school student in the Sweet Apple, Ohio chapter of Birdie\u2019s fan club. Albert has written a song, \u201cOne Last Kiss,\u201d that Birdie will sing to Kim.<\/p>\n

But there are a few problems; mainly that Kim has just gotten \u201cpinned\u201d to her sweetheart, Hugo (Bobby Rydell), meaning they are somewhere between going steady and getting engaged, and he isn\u2019t too fond of the idea of Kim kissing another guy.<\/p>\n

There are subplots galore, including one about how Albert\u2019s meddling mother (Maureen Stapleton) doesn\u2019t like Rosie, and another concerned with a Russian ballet company that reflects Cold War humor, and none of it makes any sense.<\/p>\n

But Van Dyke, now 101 years old, is as charming as he was in Mary Poppins, and you can fast-forward to the \u201cPut on a Happy Face\u201d number, which shows off his dancing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"If you would like to spend some time this summer watching classic Israeli movies, visit the Israel Film…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":240432,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[33],"tags":[37,33738,29659,65680,16179],"class_list":["post-240431","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-israel","tag-israel","tag-israel-film-archive","tag-israeli-films","tag-ophir-awards","tag-toronto"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@iran\/117057049684436158","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/240431","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=240431"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/240431\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/240432"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=240431"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=240431"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=240431"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}