Paradise Now

Could it be that the rightful winner of this year’s foreign-language Oscar is the only movie released even before it was nominated because it’s so good? That’s as optimistic a theory as any about Paradise Now, and I’m happy to promote it. In thinking about suicide bombers as real people, filmmaker Hany Abu-Assad not only takes on a brutal, troubling subject; he also builds a great, artistically strong, authentically ”foreign” movie. Whether Oscar likes its foreign movies this foreign is anyone’s guess.