- Critic Score
- Most active
- Publication
- Most clicked
-
100Emotionally mesmerizing.
-
The film is all the more remarkable because its actors are untrained and their lines are improvised. Clearly, they've lived this.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
89Electrifying and decidedly downbeat slice of life and death in Ajami.
-
88It’s much too easy to call Ajami an Arab-Israeli “Crash,’’ but it’s a pretty good place to start.
-
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.
-
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.