What to watch this week: Gal Gadot speeds through The Runner, Hearsay delivers gripping thriller

TV Time: A new Gal Gadot thriller, a chilling Israeli TV drama, and Hanoch Daum's return headline this week's entertainment picks.

It's exhausting watching Gal Gadot sprinting for about 95% of the time during The Runner , her new movie directed by Kevin Macdonald, which just became available to stream on Prime Video from Amazon.

The movie is just what the trailer promises: an action-packed thriller featuring Gadot as Maia, a lawyer and single mom in London, who gets a phone call from a man with a scary voice and learns that her son has been kidnapped as she goes for a run in the park before a big trial.

The little boy, Noah (Rory Wilmot), is diabetic, and the caller (Damian Lewis, who played Brody on Homeland) says he has messed with her son's insulin, and she can see for herself through an app on her phone that he has gone into a coma.

The menacing, all-knowing caller threatens to let her son die unless she goes to the hotel suite where her star witness is holed up, waiting to testify in a murder trial, and kills him.

Without this witness's testimony, the murderer will walk free, of course.

Maia protests that she can't kill anyone, and the scary voice says, "Oh, I think you can."

He tells her to run all the way across town to the hotel, and gives her an hour to do the deed.

If any actress could convince us that she has a shot at outfoxing this guy, it's Gadot, who has never looked more intimidatingly fit than she does here.

Most of the movie shows her running across the city, bumping into people, narrowly avoiding cars, and giving us glimpses of postcard-perfect London .

All the while, the caller keeps up a steady stream of malevolent chitchat as he strips her bare psychologically at her most vulnerable moments, the way mysterious movie villains tend to do.

There's a twist about her background that provides one of the movie's two or three most predictable moments, which you will probably see coming from a mile off, but much of The Runner gets pretty wild.

There are a few especially good action sequences, which are right up there with the car chase through Paris in The Bourne Identity.

While Mark Gibson's script throws in a cliché or two (or three), it's fun if you watch it with the right mindset.

Gadot radiates tension effectively and generally seems more relaxed than she has in any movie since Wonder Woman.

The Runner may be enhanced if you see it as a metaphor for the impossible life of a single mother, who tries to please everyone as she races from one obligation to another. Most working mothers will identify with Maia as she becomes progressively more disheveled and desperate as the day goes on and the clock ticks down.

Director Macdonald, who won an Oscar for his documentary about the Munich Olympic massacre, One Day in September, and who also made The Last King of Scotland , comes from British-movie royalty, as his grandfather was Emeric Pressburger, a Hungarian Jew who worked in the German and French film industries until he fled to England rather than Hollywood, as many of his contemporaries did.

With his writing/directing partner Michael Powell, Pressburger made some of the greatest and most quintessentially British classics of all time, including The Red Shoes, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp , and I Know Where I'm Going!

Two of his films, One of Our Aircraft is Missing , a World War II military thriller, and A Matter of Life and Death , a World War II romance with supernatural elements, are available to stream in Israel on Apple TV+.

Macdonald has always been proud of this legacy and made a documentary about his grandfather, The Making of an Englishman.

Macdonald is also known for his music documentaries, such as Whitney, Marley , and One to One: John & Yoko .

Two Blondie songs feature prominently in The Runner , one of which, of course, is "Hanging on the Telephone." Kevin, if you're reading this, please make a documentary about Blondie and/or Debbie Harry.

New psychological thriller: Hearsay on Hot 3

A TERRIFIC new series, Hearsay , just started running on Thursday nights on Hot 3, and it is also available on Hot VOD and Next TV.

It's a dark, psychological thriller/crime drama, set in Jerusalem, about a troubled police detective who discovers that widespread sexual abuse of children is taking place in an ultra-Orthodox neighborhood.

It's disturbing but gripping, and it's the best dark drama on Israeli television since Bad Boy.

Oshri Cohen, who has always been engaging, has matured as an actor in recent years, and he plays Moshe, a detective who is transferred from youth crimes to a precinct in Geula, a promotion arranged by his father-in-law. But Moshe is not particularly happy about it.

He is anxious now that his wife is pregnant with their first son, after having two daughters, and has been wetting the bed.

Reluctantly, he begins therapy with a gruff psychologist, played memorably by Menashe Noy, who opens their first session with an old joke: An atheist puts up a mezuzah, and someone asks him why; he replies that he heard it brings good luck even if you don't believe in it.

Moshe does not believe that exploring his psyche will solve any problems, even as he begins having nightmares that intensify.

The more he learns about multiple cases of child abuse that may be linked to a Christian pedophile ring, which are being covered up by the rabbinic authorities in the neighborhood who want to handle them on their own, the more he makes enemies and feels threatened wherever he goes.

The series was created by Nimrod Eldar, who made an excellent movie a few years ago called The Day After I'm Gone .

The cast includes Sasson Gabay as Moshe's father, Shmil Ben Ari as his uncle, Aleeza Chanowitz as a child psychologist, and Seymor Daniel as his quirky office mate. I binged all the episodes I received from Hot, but if you watch them one episode at a time, the suspense will build slowly.

Looking forward to what Hanoch Daum would say

AFTER THE year we've had, I was looking forward to what Hanoch Daum would have to say in the new season of his often funny series Life is a Difficult Age , which features a fictionalized version of his schlubby self, a guy who never found an awkward situation he couldn't make more awkward.

While the promos looked good, the first episode, which premiered on Keshet on Tuesday (and is available online), was a disappointment.

The first episode focused on how Daum and his wife, Efrat (played by Alma Zak of Eretz Nehederet ), a computer programmer, created an app to help wounded IDF soldiers navigate the bureaucracy to receive all the benefits due to them.

It makes sense that the characters would do just that, and the episode brings attention to the wounded soldiers and features many of them, spotlighting some of the issues surrounding their recovery.

What this isn't, of course, is funny, so Daum brings his trademark irreverent humor to the situation. Occasionally, he gets a genuine laugh, but much of it is repetitive, and some of it is truly cringe-inducing.

Much is made of him buying basketballs in the rehab center gift shop and forging the autographs of famous basketball and soccer stars on them. It's not a spoiler that he gets caught, or that one of the real players arrives to give him hell.

Are Daum and the series running out of decent jokes and funny situations? We'll know more next week, after an episode that features his daughter (Neta Roth, a scene-stealing actress).