A whistleblower tries to stop the Iraq war

The filmmaking isn't flashy, but Official Secrets tells a compelling story.

In 2003, Katherine Gun did her best to stop Britain from entering the Iraq war. As a British intelligence employee with a specialty in translation, Gun violated the country's Secrets Act so that she could reveal a controversial email. The email instructed those working at Britain's Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) to look for information that could be used to pressure U.N. Security Council members to vote for a resolution authorizing the war.

Although Gun's leaked email was published by The Observer, it obviously didn't stop British participation in a war that was being carefully engineered and for which the "intelligence'' books were being cooked.

Directed by Gavin Hood (Eye in the Sky) and starring Keira Knightley, Official Secrets tells Gun's story in straightforward fashion, taking us inside a whistleblower's anxiety-riddled world. Things don't go smoothly for Gun, who eventually was put on trial for violating the Official Secrets Act of 1989.

Knightley and Hood don't add much by way of over-dramatized flourish to the portrayal of Gun, a woman who lived with her Muslim husband (Adam Bakri) in London. After making her momentous decision, Gun tormented herself. Would she get caught? Had she done the right thing?

Written by Sara and Gregory Bernstein, Official Secrets boasts a strong supporting cast. Matt Smith appears as Observer reporter Martin Bright, the journalist who fights to publish the explosive email. Matthew Goode portrays one of Bright's colleagues and Rhys Ifans signs on as the Observer's wild-eyed U.S. correspondent, a reporter who works hard to confirm the authenticity of the email Gun leaked.

Conleth Hill portrays the editor who struggles about publishing a story that could derail a war effort his paper previously supported. Late in the movie, an understated (what else?) Ralph Fiennes shows up as Ben Emmerson, the barrister who defends Katharine.

Official Secrets doesn't always make for rousing cinema but it serves as an important reminder of what can happen to those who realize that secret government objectives sometimes should be subordinated to higher values, one of them being the truth.

A hopless tangle in the West Bank

People living in extreme situations deal with complexities that can drive them to the edge of madness. Director Hany Abu-Assad's Omar -- which recently lost Oscar's best foreign-language film race to Italy's The Great Beauty -- does a convincing job of presenting these complexities in a movie that brims with personal betrayals, political protest, violence and suppression -- not to mention the hurts and pleasures of ordinary life.

Moviegoers who remember Abu-Assad's previous two films -- Paradise Now and Rana's Wedding -- know that this Palestinian filmmaker has serious chops. In Omar, he again mingles political observation and high-stakes drama in a story that focuses on Omar (Adam Bakri), a Palestinian baker who's constantly negotiating barriers between Israel and the West Bank.

A pivotal event arrives when Omar joins with a couple of childhood friends to stage a violent assault on Israeli soldiers. Tarak (Iyad Hoorani), Amjad (Samer Bisharat) and Omar mount their three-person assault on an Israeli military outpost, but only Omar is captured.

The Israelis release him when he agrees to help locate Tarak, the group's leader. But will he?

A love triangle further complicates the proceedings. Both Amjad and Omar are taken with Tarek's sister Nadia (Leem Lubany). This conflict echoes throughout the movie, resulting in an emotionally tangled mess in which personal and political issues disastrously overlap.

Abu-Assad spends a fair amount of time developing the relationship between Omar and an Israeli intelligence officer (Waleed Zuaiter). At times, Zuaiter's Rami seems sympathetic to Omar; at other times, he bullies him. It's never entirely clear whether Omar can trust anything that he hears from Rami.

There's enough sincerity in the performances from Abu-Assad's mostly non-professional cast to keep us involved and encourage us to sympathize with Omar's mounting torment. By the movie's end, he's left with no good options.

I didn't find Omar quite as compelling as either Paradise Now (about suicide bombers) or Rana's Wedding (about a young woman's search for her lover in occupied Jerusalem). But the movie definitely adds to the body of Middle Eastern literature that helps us understand why solutions to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict remain so elusive, and why this apparently endless struggle breeds so much sadness.