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Rating: rating

Paradise Now opens strong, with a wordless confrontation at a checkpoint between an Israeli soldier and a clear-eyed Palestinian woman (who turns out to be Suha [Lubna Azabal focuses primarily on the eyes of the two characters as one tries to size the other up and the other defiantly resists being sized up. It's clear that in this quiet little seemingly inconsequential moment -- a moment that might happen a hundred times a day -- a battle is being waged, and it's a battle for something more than just a piece of land. Later in the film, there are strong moments, and weaker ones. There are scenes, like the surprisingly witty one in which two prospective suicide bombers videotape messages to their loved ones proclaiming the divinity of their actions, that cut brilliantly against our expectations. There are moments, like the scene after Said (Kais Nashef) crosses the fence, and he's contemplating boarding a bus full of Israeli settlers, in which Abu-Assad and his fine cast wordlessly take us an unresolvable gamut of human emotion, and there are others scenes wherein the dialogue seems disappointingly pedantic. But it holds together surprisingly well, and Abu-Assad finds an emotional richness in the material, while honing in on the righteous anger that springs from a life lived in humiliated futility. A tragedy regardless of its conclusion, Paradise Now is an important and powerful effort to explicate the inexplicable. Josh Ralske, All Movie Guide