Ajami is not pretty and it's not heart-warming - the threat of violence is always looming - but it is emotionally gripping, and it puts you right in its midst.

| Aug 30, 2018

What comes through is that the troubles besetting Muslims and Jews and their emotional responses are similar in nature. The people involved have so much in common.

| Jan 13, 2018

Its sense of ambiance, most apparent during scenes of simple conversation between characters, more than compensates for the cinematic overdetermination.

| Sep 24, 2014

The actors, every one of them new to their craft, make the everydayness of the picture indelible and real.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Jun 24, 2010

The pattern of connections and coincidences is a little overschematic, but the movie has energy, especially in the grippingly real shooting scene at the beginning.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jun 17, 2010

A rare film that will force you to confront your own prejudices.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 17, 2010

This is vividly challenging, utterly inclusive and heartfelt cinema. It's not only gripping to watch, but it'll open your eyes to the intractable human conundrums behind the blood-stained headlines.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 16, 2010

By showing how people fail to live together - in a film you could call Israel's City of God, with its sectarian-feuding story lent power and immediacy by improvisation and non-professional casting - Ajami shows how they might or should live together.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Jun 16, 2010

The performances are searingly intense, all delivered by non-professionals cast to type and extemporizing within the parameters of the script. They take the play out of acting, and the effect is unvarnished realism.

| Original Score: 3/4 | May 28, 2010

The fact that these two Israelis from opposite camps worked together to make this movie is as important as the movie itself.

| Apr 29, 2010

It does place the audience squarely amid the myriad horrors of a land and a conflict predicated, it appears, on little more than an age-old blood feud and Joseph Heller's concept of catch-22.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 23, 2010

A compelling drama about prejudice and folly.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Apr 22, 2010

It's an admirably even-handed portrait of life in an occupied ghetto that is bounded by checkpoints. Everyone we meet is a more or less honorably motivated victim of circumstance.

Full Review | Apr 22, 2010

It's a film that rewards close attention, involving disparate characters whose lives intersect over the course of several chapters.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 12, 2010

Ajami brings its audience into a world where the cultural conflict is fierce, emotions run high, yet the hopeful vision of peaceful coexistence shines through the cracks.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 4, 2010

Good intentions are one thing, of course, and good writing and filmmaking another. Ajami is lucky to have all three.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Feb 26, 2010

It has a complex, elliptical structure that uses unconventional filming techniques to tell a bleak and fatalistic story conveyed with an unnerving sense of verisimilitude.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 19, 2010

While its themes of revenge, mutual resentment and grim fatalism offer little hope for a ready solutions, the movie itself testifies to the power of creative collaboration in finding common ground.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Feb 19, 2010

Ajami keeps asking: When do people cross the line? And when does pulling the trigger become a viable option?

| Original Score: B+ | Feb 18, 2010

Shani and Copti (who costars as a hipster druggie) elicit moving performances from their nonprofessional actors, who ground the somewhat breathless action in a streetwise realism.

| Feb 18, 2010