“I was so taken with my first viewing of Hany Abu-Assad‘s Omar, a Palestinian-produced thriller about betrayal and double-agenting in the West Bank, that I caught it again last night at the Palm Springs Film Festival,” I wrote on 1.5.14. “It’s a taut, urgent, highly realistic thriller that squeezes its characters and viewers like a vise. Omar is among the Academy’s short-listed Best Foreign Language Feature contenders, and with my personal favorites, Asghar Farhadi‘s The Past and Yuval Adler‘s Bethlehem (which is quite similar to Abu-Assad’s film) out of the running, I guess I’m an Omar guy at this stage.” I’m presuming that the Academy will nominate it Thursday morning as one of five Best Foreign Language Features.
