A few shades darker than your average thriller, writer-director Hany Abu-Assad’s Omar, a nominee for the 2014 Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, explores the psychological trauma endured by the eponymous Palestinian twentysomething (Adam Bakri) and his childhood friends Amjad (Samer Bisharat) and Tarek (Eyad Hourani) as they struggle to survive in the violently, psychologically oppressive climate of Israeli-occupied Palestine. Though narratively uninspired and lacking strong performances to lead us through the tale, Abu-Assad’s pensive examination of the toxic environment in the Middle East is as riveting as it was in his lauded suicide bomber drama Paradise Now.

Omar is a brazen, handsome young man with a ferocious will; he scales the twenty foot wall standing between him and Tarek’s house with ease, only to be met at the top by Israeli gunfire, which grazes, but doesn’t phase him. He’s on his way to meet with Amjad and Tarek for their regular “freedom fighter” training, which includes sniper rifle target practice and planning an attack on an Israeli army base over cups of tea. Serving them the tea is Tarek’s beautiful sister Nadia (Leem Lubany), who slips Omar a love note on his saucer as they play eyes. (Amjad’s clearly interested in Nadia too, though his tiny frame suggests he shouldn’t be serious competition for Omar.)

The trio carries out their covert assault at night, and they successfully pick off an Israeli soldier from atop afar (Amjad pulls the trigger). The next day, Omar is caught (following a conventionally choreographed foot chase) and imprisoned by the Israelis and forced to choose between a lifetime in prison and freedom, providing he brings them Tarek (who they believe shot the soldier) on a silver platter. He’s got a month to deliver his friend to the enemy, and the rest of the film follows Omar as he scrambles to placate the suspicions of his people (why was he released so quickly?), win Nadia’s hand in marriage, smoke out the real rat in his inner circle, and keep himself out of prison. It’s an impossible juggling act, but Omar’s nimble of foot and wit and driven by the hope of a future with Nadia.

Doom and danger dominate Omar’s life, as his role in the Palestinian cause takes precedence over his love for Nadia whether he likes it or not. Tarek will only agree to endorse he and Nadia’s marriage after they carry out an ambush on the Israelis. Omar obliges. The ambush is botched (this is surely the work of the rat), and the film rinse-and-repeats–Omar is caught, sent to prison, and set free again, gifted with one last shot at retrieving Tarek by prison warden Rami (Waleed Zuaiter), who we can sense is taking a liking to Omar. The film ends with a bang, a startling flash of violence that is the film’s most resonant moment.

Like many filmmakers depicting the volatile climate of the Middle East, Abu-Assad is evasive in his moralistic statements about the conflict itself, so as not to incur a backlash from either side. What he instead chooses to focus on is the tragedy that the fog of death will forever lie between these young men and their friendship, hopes, and dreams. Omar’s connection to the Israelis instills mistrust and paranoia in the group, and Amjad carries with him a secret about Nadia that could cause their group to implode.

The cast (with the exception of Zuaiter) is non-professional, and it shows. Bakri and Bisharat in particular wear perpetually blank faces, even in the most intense scenes, and it hurts the film. Zuaiter, Hourani, and Lubani’s efforts are more than respectable, but their parts are secondary. Abu-Assad is a storyteller of symbolism; a shot of an older, depleted Omar struggling desperately to scuttle up the wall from the beginning of the movie, is a powerful visual indication of just how far our hero has fallen.

Omar trailer

Director Eran Riklis awkwardly sets a breezy odd-couple road trip movie under the dark cloud of the Israeli-Arab conflict in Zaytoun. The extreme polarity Riklis’ heavy-handed, inappropriately silly humor and the horrifying depictions of the 1982 war in Lebanon in which the story is set cancel each other out and leave nothing but a cringe-worthy, unfunny, tonally confused bore.

A miscast Stephen Dorff (who is much better in the upcoming The Motel Life) plays Yoni, a scruffy, cunning Israeli pilot who’s been downed across enemy lines, right into the hands of the PLO. Among Yoni’s captors is a 12-year-old boy with a giant chip on his shoulder named Fahed (a promising Abdallah El Akal), whose father’s just been killed in the streets, caught in crossfire. Fahed proposes a deal–he helps Yoni escape, and in return, Yoni escorts him to the home of his ancestors, where he can plant his father’s olive tree.

Predictably, the two warm up to each other over the course of their treacherous trek, but the bond doesn’t feel earned or convincing. In fact, the formation of their friendship seems virtually untraceable: They’re casting evil glares at each other one minute. Blink. All of a sudden, they’re hugging and yucking it up like they’re old pals, out of the blue. Where the hell did that come from? I thought you hated that guy! Fahed, you shot him just a few days ago for goodness sake! Their relationship just doesn’t develop organically enough to buy into.

Dorff and El Akal make the best with what they’re given, and even make a handful of sloppily-written scenes work that shouldn’t; a sequence involving a minefield is utterly absurd, but the actors’ performances sell the suspense.

Zaytoun’s most glaring issue is its schizophrenic shifts in mood and tone. It darts around in a frenzy, wanting to be a gaggy comedy, master-pupil story, fun action movie, gritty action movie, and Hollywood heart-toucher (especially in the finale), all at once. Its conceit is confused, and so are we.

In one of many grim depictions of the Arab-Israeli conflict, we see Fahed sprint across a road in Lebanon, the deafening sound of gunfire echoing in the night, to kneel next to his father, whose body’s been mutilated after just being killed in an explosion. It’s harrowing. Not much later, we see Fahed sharing a taxi with Yoni and an awful comic-relief cab driver who blasts the Bee Gee’s “Staying Alive” (seriously?) as he spouts idiotic one-liners. The humor is a big miss, just like every other joke in the movie, because the looming presence of the terrible war raging around them makes the comedy feel inappropriate and tasteless. It’s possible to make humor work under the weight of war, but it requires more finesse and tact than Riklis and penner Nader Rizq exhibit.

Visually, Zaytoun looks quite nice, even poetic at times. DP Dan Lausten photographs the majestic Israeli locales wonderfully, and despite the cloying sentimentality of Fahed and Yoni’s friendship, their picturesque surroundings impart their journey with a subtle, poetic sense of serenity that wouldn’t be there otherwise.

Though set in the trenches of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Ziad Doueiri’s mystery-thriller The Attack operates predominantly on an intimate, human level, centering on a Palestinian man living in Tel Aviv (Ali Suliman) who’s bent on smoking out the people responsible for somehow compelling his Christian Arab wife to take her own life via suicide bombing (a shock to him), all the while wrestling with suppressed issues of identity. The film, based on Yasmina Khadra’s award-winning novel, is best viewed as a detective story of a man retracing his wife’s footsteps into a shadowy, nebulous world he’s perhaps incapable of understanding rather than a political thriller, though it offers plenty of substance on that front as well.

Suliman plays Amin, a decorated surgeon and the first Arab-Israeli in history to receive a career achievement award (the ceremony opens the film.) He’s reached the pinnacle of his career, and he’s worked hard to become fully integrated into his cushy life in Tel Aviv. Late the next night, Amin is called back to the hospital, not to save a life, but to identify the deformed body of his beloved, wife, Siham (Reymond Amsalem) who he thought had been out of town visiting her grandfather. She’s implicated in a suicide bombing that’s taken the lives of nineteen innocents, including children.

Amin is viciously interrogated and barked at by the police (a trope that’s made interesting by Doueiri’s creative camerawork), and after the authorities conclude that he didn’t, in fact, have any knowledge of his wife’s attack, they let him walk. Amin is vehemently opposed to the notion that Siham was capable of such a senseless act of violence; he believes she’d been “brainwashed”, though the evidence almost concretely confirms her as guilty. Drowning in paranoia and denial (evoked brilliantly by Suliman), he retraces Siham’s steps—gathering clues, interrogating strangers, getting in a scuffle or two—until his searching leads him to Nablus, where he uncovers truths that prove more amorphous than satisfactory.

The tragedy here isn’t simply that Amin’s lost his wife; it’s that her memory’s been tarnished and distorted so badly it’s now unrecognizable to him. In the form of judiciously placed flashbacks and quiet moments of agonizing reflection (at times Suliman resembles a lost child), we see Amin’s world come undone. He recalls an impassioned dispute with Siham over her decision to miss his award ceremony. She was suspiciously evasive in her reasoning for missing the most important day of Amin’s career, and the likely possibility that she ditched him to launch a terrorist attack is as petrifying as it is confounding.

Doueiri doesn’t make any biased political statements about the Middle Eastern conflict, playing it fair in his portrayals of both the Israeli and Palestinian perspectives. Amin is wary of the Israelis who he believes framed Siham, and he seeks out the Palestinians who “brainwashed” her with a vengeance. Neither side is unfairly vilified, and the narrative is focused squarely on Amin’s plight as opposed to the political baggage inherent in the setting. Any political observations are allegorical, presented in the form of Amin’s festering inner-conflict.

Suliman’s obsessive chase after the image of a mysterious woman lightly recalls James Stewart in Vertigo at times, though he’s not nearly as charismatic. Doueiri has a gift for visual storytelling; he’s able to put us right inside Amin’s state of mind with artfully blocked and composed shots. As Amin walks into the morgue to see Siham’s corpse, Doueiri places the camera inches behind Suliman’s head, making his dread our own. Occasionally, Doueiri’s visual vocabulary outshines his penmanship; some of the expositional dialogue in the latter half of the film is so cryptic it became tiresome for me to follow. However, the lasting images Doueiri conjures are what I ultimately took with me after all was said and done, and the droning, ambient electronic music he pairs with the visuals adds a surprising amount of tension and mood. The Attack’s finale is equal parts thought-provoking and heart-crushing, and a fitting end to an intense rush of a movie that gets more thrilling as it goes.