A film that engages with the very core of the complicated conflict without offering easy explanations or random solutions.

| Oct 26, 2023

With inspired judgment and skill, the film embeds its debating points in the trajectory of the story, or humanises them with everyday emotions.

| Oct 7, 2018

... it has the great advantage of letting an audience feel it is seeing things it would otherwise never see.

| Sep 26, 2017

... remarkable ...

Full Review | Dec 9, 2005

The film continues to twist and turn until the very end, keeping us guessing as to what the would-be martyrs will do.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Dec 6, 2005

Certainly what Said says will not come as a surprise to any Israeli. It's simply that they disagree. We may disagree, too, and yet watch the film with a fearsome fascination.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Dec 6, 2005

A risk-taking but enlightening film that takes the novel approach of examining the Israeli-Arab impasse from the perspective of the Palestinians.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 1, 2005

Very good.

Full Review | Nov 21, 2005

Viewers of all persuasions can find a human perspective on an aspect of terrorism that, no matter how often it occurs, is beyond imagining for most of us.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Nov 18, 2005

The director's two impulses -- to keep the audience hooked while illuminating the Palestinian plight -- never feel entirely compatible.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Nov 18, 2005

[A] sensitive, occasionally didactic film.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Nov 11, 2005

A movie hardly lacking for anxiety and uneasiness.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Nov 11, 2005

Writer-director Hany Abu-Assad can't tell the entire story in Paradise Now, but he can show glimmers of it.

Full Review | Original Score: B | Nov 11, 2005

The movie is driven by the characters' passionate, despairing arguments about the fine line between victimization and violence. But Paradise Now also has, at times, an almost surreal visual flair.

Full Review | Original Score: B+ | Nov 10, 2005

Asks the big questions and answers quite a few of them, although its ending is tantalizingly ambiguous.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Nov 4, 2005

The film captures the bleakness of the West Bank and, more powerfully, shows us lives so grim that the thought of paradise now seems enticing.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Nov 4, 2005

With a documentarian's eye and a dramatist's urgency, Abu-Assad sneaks into the mind of a suicide bomber, and also his heart.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Nov 4, 2005

It's too simply reasoned and too tidily made to shake you up.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Nov 4, 2005

Paradise may not change anyone's ideology, but it should convince some that, but for some deeply divisive views of religious morality, people are pretty much the same on either side of the holy fence.

| Nov 3, 2005

Paradise catches and keeps your attention because of its daring subject, real-life backdrops and the intensity of its actors.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Nov 3, 2005