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100Emotionally mesmerizing.
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The film is all the more remarkable because its actors are untrained and their lines are improvised. Clearly, they've lived this.
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90A timely and timeless look at the intersecting lives, fortunes and fates of Jews, Christians and Muslims in the fragile Ajami neighborhood of Jaffa, Israel.
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90A remarkable accomplishment, a swirling, choral sea of humanity that forces us to confront that a man who does terrible things can also be a loving father who gives his infant daughter a bath.
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90One of the pleasures of Ajami, a tough and in many ways unsparing movie, is its deep immersion in the beats and melodies of everyday life in Jaffa and beyond.
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89Electrifying and decidedly downbeat slice of life and death in Ajami.
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88It's much too easy to call Ajami an Arab-Israeli "Crash,'' but it's a pretty good place to start.
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88Ajami is neither a puzzle nor a polemic. It's an admirably even-handed portrait of life in an occupied ghetto that is bounded by checkpoints. Everyone we meet is a more or less honorably motivated victim of circumstance. That the circumstances were inscribed centuries ago makes Ajami a tragedy of biblical proportions.
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83Copti and Shani show characters of different backgrounds interacting peacefully as individuals, then show how those characters subtly change when their affiliation with a group becomes an issue. And always the threat of violence looms.
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The main drawback to this noble effort, just nominated for the foreign-language Oscar, is that the two-hour film is unrelievedly grim and tense.
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80But don't worry if you miss some details; this is the kind of movie that rewards a second viewing.
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80Ajami is Israel's submission to the Oscars, and like the gritty "City of God" before it, it takes harrowing, tricky circumstances and illuminates them with Scorsesian snap.
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To the extent that its sympathies lie with the occupied and with those who must do the work of enforcing occupation, Ajami brings a warmly generous spirit to its subjects, almost all of whom become gangsters by default. No one is demonized or sanctified. The movie's sensibilities are humanistic.
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80The last thing you see in Ajami should be the first thing on your mind about this compelling new film from Israel. That would be the closing credits, written in both Hebrew and Arabic, separate but equal, side by side, mirroring the creative process behind this potent work and the story it has to tell.
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80Time shifts may overcomplicate the narrative for some, but the pay-off packs a major punch.
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75The latest and one of the most harrowing films set along the religious divides in Israel.
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75The complexity might require a second viewing, but there is compensation in the realistic acting by a cast of non-pros and the eye-grabbing, hand-held lensing by Boaz Yehonatan Yacov.
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75Ajami brings its audience into a world where the cultural conflict is fierce, emotions run high, yet the hopeful vision of peaceful coexistence shines through the cracks.
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75At its best, Ajami shows you things you never would have considered or imagined.
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75While its themes of revenge, mutual resentment and grim fatalism offer little hope for a ready solutions, the movie itself testifies to the power of creative collaboration in finding common ground.
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75The stylings of Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino come to the Mideast, but more credibly grounded in a complex setting fraught with raw contemporary politics and ancient class tensions. It makes for a compelling movie but hardly a pretty picture.
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70Shani and Copti (who costars as a hipster druggie) elicit moving performances from their nonprofessional actors, who ground the somewhat breathless action in a streetwise realism.
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