Dough

In Brief: The closing film for this year's Asheville Jewish Film Festival, Dough, is an unlikely delight. On paper — and to a certain degree, in practice — this sounds like a movie that packs every culture-clash and generation-gap cliche imaginable into one small space. Jonathan Pryce plays Nat, an elderly Jewish baker who refuses to give up his faltering — and beleaguered (yes, there's a villain trying to put him out of business) — bake shop, despite the urgings of his son (Daniel Caltagirone) to retire. (For his part, Nat considers his son a disappointment for not going into the family business.) When Nat's assistant defects to his competitor, Nat ends up hiring a young Muslim, Shaun (Malachi Kirby), whose mother is an old customer. This is not a match made in heaven — or so it seems. However, the bakery becomes unexpectedly successful — all because Shaun drops a bag of marijuana into a batch of dough. And, yes, this all plays out pretty much like you expect, but that's not factoring in a screenplay (by Jez Freedman and Jonathan Benson) that's actually witty, and it's certainly not factoring in the chemistry between Pryce and Kirby. Somehow this becomes at once utterly predictable and wholly charming and entertaining. I don't think you'll be disappointed. It shouldn't work, but it does.