It’s a distinct genre of conflict cinema that is all about the human toll of war that scathingly critiques the national policies, protests authoritarianism...

| Oct 26, 2023

Bakri gives a richly detailed performance, often allowing his stoicism to slip and reveal the confused and angry young man within.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 6, 2014

Abu-Assad does not aim for the Dardennes' breathless immediacy. Rather, the story is laid out in a lucid, diagrammatic way, like a mathematical proof that for someone in Omar's position there are no right choices.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Jun 4, 2014

This is a subtle political film: one that fully dramatises a situation and lets us think out its contradictions for ourselves.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 1, 2014

Abu-Assad is simply reflecting the ever-changing nature of his characters' daily lives in a fraught and strange environment in which betrayal has become endemic.

| Original Score: 4/5 | May 30, 2014

The end result is a nerve-rattling entertainment flavoured by vigorous, deeply felt polemic.

| Original Score: 4/5 | May 30, 2014

The story dishes out action and surprises without losing its political intent.

| Original Score: 4/5 | May 29, 2014

Abu-Assad cares about his characters and their wretched but thrilling situations.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | May 29, 2014

A shell game of betrayal and counter-betrayal set in the worlds of police informing and sectarian score-settling on either side of the Israel-Palestine divide.

| Original Score: 3/5 | May 29, 2014

Hard-hitting moments abound amid the slightly tangled plotting.

| Original Score: 3/5 | May 26, 2014

This gripping Palestinian thriller evokes Gillo Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers in its depiction of not only the psychological pressures faced by people under occupation, but the murky moral consequences of retaliating.

| Apr 17, 2014

It's told with a stark, pitiless clarity that leaves you with fewer answers than before.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 13, 2014

Omar is romance and thriller. Of course, trust is at the heart of the matter.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Mar 7, 2014

A fraught film ...

| Mar 3, 2014

Abu-Assad offers no solutions here. Instead he paints a portrait of the daily rhythms of the occupation, an endless conflict that has seeped into every aspect of life in the West Bank.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Feb 28, 2014

The film works best as a straightforward melodrama set in an anything but straightforward world.

| Original Score: B | Feb 28, 2014

Abu-Assad has created a convincingly noirish hell that feeds on distrust and vengeance.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Feb 27, 2014

The somber Omar isn't as controversial as Paradise Now but it too gets behind the 온라인카지노추천 news bulletins to discreetly put a human face on what is often just more electronic noise. Sometimes it's the quietest voices that are really the loudest.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 27, 2014

Abu-Assad does a masterful job of showing, in these seemingly hopeless circumstances, the fragility of life.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 27, 2014

A deft blending of thriller and romance, "Omar" invokes everything from film noir to Shakespeare.

| Feb 21, 2014