Hardly a day goes by without an above-the-fold dateline from the Middle East, but while insurgent attacks and suicide bombings hog the headlines, there's little to give Americans a sense of life on the ground. Marc Levin's documentary Protocols of Zion, which focuses on the recent resurgence of anti-Semitism, is full of ill-informed ranters spewing vile and illogical calumnies, from the widely circulated rumor that 4,000 Israelis who worked in the World Trade Center were told to stay home on Sept. 11 to the less publicized allegation that Pepsi's profits are funneled entirely to the Jewish homeland. It's right there in the name, an agitated young man explains to Levin: Pay Every Penny Support Israel.

Protocols, which takes its name from a notorious forgery purporting to document a Jewish plot for world domination, focuses on a very specific form of ignorance, the kind of willful blindness that allows a White Power spokesman to tell Levin, "I don't see Hitler as suicidal in the slightest." (Levin, who rarely misses a chance to inject himself into the movie, can't resist a riposte -- "But he committed suicide!" -- although he doesn't show how his subject responds.) But the ingrained illogic of Protocols' street-corner Semitophobes travels furthest in a vacuum; most Americans, particularly the undereducated types who give Levin his juiciest sound bites, can't even find the Middle East on a map, let alone grasp the complexity of the region's conflicts.

For a brief period after Sept. 11, movies from the Arab world fed the public's curiosity, but the vogue died as quickly as it arose; Mohsen Makhmalbaf's Kandahar got a run on the art-house circuit, but his daughter Samira's At Five in the Afternoon, which tackled the shoulda-been trendy subject of Afghan democracy, went undistributed. Paradise Now, the second fiction feature from Palestinian director Hany Abu-Assad, has regained the national spotlight on its way to becoming the most financially successful Arab-language film ever released in the United States. But the attention comes at a cost. In his previous movies, Rana's Wedding and Ford Transit, Abu-Assad intriguingly mixed fiction and documentary techniques: Wedding keeps pulling away from its main story to show mundane but rarely captured episodes of life in Abu-Assad's native Nazareth, while Ford Transit sets ostensibly random encounters between Arab and Jewish intellectuals in the back of a van ferrying passengers across the Israel-Palestine border. Paradise Now dumps the self-awareness for straightforward drama, and shifts its focus from the quotidian to the sensational: The movie's main characters are two young Palestinians who are recruited for a suicide bombing in Tel Aviv.

Saîd (Kais Nashef) and Khaled (Ali Suliman) look like typical mid-20s slackers, with heads of long, shaggy hair and sullen, prideful attitudes. Hostility is in the air; when a young boy brings the two men tea as they sit on a hilltop, Khaled stiffs him on the tip, and the two glare at each other with frightening intensity. Still, it's a long way from everyday anger to murder-suicide, and Abu-Assad draws out the pitch-black comedy in Saîd and Khaled's stumble towards martyrdom. As he tapes his farewell communique (destined to join dozens available in a nearby video shop), Khaled fumbles with an automatic rifle and stiffly reads jihadist copy from a prepared script. The camera jams, someone starts snacking, and suddenly Khaled's cautioning his family against bad water filters. Still, the words have the desired effect: The more Khaled reads, the more his conviction grows.

But as the deadly hour draws near, Paradise Now starts to unravel, its will-they-or-won't-they machinations growing increasingly contrived and remote. As in the upcoming, inferior The War Within, the focus on individual suicide bombers blunts the movie's ability to address their environment. It's no surprise that disenfranchised young men can be convinced to kill for a cause. What's more important is the culture that spawns them, where photos of so-called martyrs are traded like baseball cards. Any sense of the bigger picture is lost, and with it, an opportunity.

Written by and starring ultra-Orthodox actor Shuli Rand, Ushpizin is ostensibly apolitical, but Gidi Dar's winning parable is more incisive than Paradise Now when it comes to the conflict between religious tradition and modern life. Rand's Moshe, like Rand himself, is a recent convert to Hasidism, a former petty criminal who now lives with his childless wife, Malli (Michal Bat-Sheva Rand, his real-life spouse). As the Sukkot holiday approaches, Moshe bewails the fact that he is too poor to afford a sukkah, the temporary dwelling into which observant Jews move for the duration. His prayers are answered (or so he thinks) when he finds an unused sukkah lying around for the taking, but the apparent windfall comes with a price: In addition to the harvest, the holiday commemorates Jewish hospitality -- the title translates as "holy guests" -- which means Moshe is powerless to rebuff the two thugs (Shaul Mizrahi and Ilan Ganani) from his past who come calling and quickly seek to exploit his generosity. The bearish Rand plays Moshe as a gentle giant, his girth only sharpening the irony of his inability to act. Director Gidi Dar doesn't have Abu-Assad's rhetorical skill or Levin's flair for self-dramatization, but Ushpizin's fable-like simplicity is ultimately its most winning asset.

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