Go for Zucker

The acidic German farce Go for Zucker, about two squabbling brothers who grew up separated by the Berlin Wall, makes jokes about Jews, Communists, capitalists, homosexuals, East Germans, West Germans, rabbis, Ukrainians, and billiards players. The jokes aren't always funny, but that they come at all out of contemporary Germany gives this obstreperous social comedy — a huge hit back home — a modern punch. After his Orthodox mother and older brother (Udo Samel) fled to the West following World War II, Jaeckie Zucker (Henry Hübchen), born Jakob Zuckermann, grew up in the East, discarded his Jewishness, and became first a sportscaster, then a pool shark, a schemer, an East German screwup.

With the Wall down and an inheritance from their dead mother at stake, the estranged siblings are forced to reconcile. Funny, director and co-writer Dani Levy suggests with no little coldness, how the scent of money can do what religion, ideology, and ethical principles cannot.