Less than a week after catching Yuval Adler‘s Bethlehem I saw another ace-level melodrama about the Palestinian-Iraeli conflict last night — Hany Abu-Assad‘s Omar. It tells a roughly similar story about a Palestinian youth informing for the Israelis and being suspected by his own. In fact, my description of Bethlehem — “a lucid, tightly wound thriller that regards the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through a filter of double-agenting, family matters, betrayal and anxiety” — pretty much applies to Omar. I’m not sure which film is better, but they’re both expert grippers. So we’ve got two superb films about similar subjects — Bethlehem the official Israeli entry and Omar submitted by the Palestinian territories. How can the Academy’s foreign-language committee select one and not the other?