Telluride 2005 #5

The fifth and final (for me) movie of this year's Telluride was the Arabic movie Paradise Now. This is a story of two young Palestinian men (who are childhood friends) who, one day, are recruited to carry out a suicide bombing attack in Tel Aviv. The operation is botched at the very initial stages by one of them, after which things go off plan and we end up with a tense thriller as first one, and then both, of the men try to salvage the operation while dealing with troubling questions of the immorality and pointlessness of it all.

This movie could easily have been politically shrill but it largely avoids that. I say "largely" because there are clear moments of see-this-point-of-view dialogue inserted into the movie and to the extent that they feel "inserted", the movie fails artistically. However, the taut suspense makes the movie worth watching. Score: 6.5/10