The Phoenix Network:
 
 
About  |  Advertise
Adult  |  Moonsigns  |  Band Guide  |  Blogs  |  In Pictures
 
Features  |  Reviews
FIND MOVIES
Find a Movie
Movie List
Loading ...
or
Find Theaters and Movie Times
or
Search Movies

The Yacoubian Building

Three-hour Egyptian epic
By MICHAEL ATKINSON  |  December 12, 2007
2.5 2.5 Stars
inside_TRAILERS_yacoubian10
THE YACOUBIAN BUILDING: A Cairo-based Gone with the Wind.

This three-hour Egyptian epic — the most expensive ever made, and the first to get US release — has been crafted in the old school, by youngish pro Marwan Hamed, as a massive Arabic soap opera, a Cairo-based Gone with the Wind swoony with mourning for a privileged colonialist past and with a melodramatic fascination for the bloody ideological conflicts of the present. Notably in a nation with strict censorship laws (somewhere slackly west of Iranian sharia), Hamed’s film revolves around the need for, and the degeneration of, sex and money, and it’s groundbreakingly frank in its native territory about homosexuality and female exploitation. Hammy, lavish, and often thunderfooted, the movie is an immersion in rare pulp, and as much a window on Egyptian urbanity as on a semi-polished Arab film industry trying to come to grips with a tumultuous world and its own sociopolitical contradictions. Arabic | 161 minutes | MFA: December 14-16, 20, 22-23, 29-30; January 6
Related: El cantante, La Mujer de mi Hermano, Union dos, More more >
  Topics: Reviews , Entertainment, Media, Television,  More more >
  • Share:
  • Share this entry with Facebook
  • Share this entry with Digg
  • Share this entry with Delicious
  • RSS feed
  • Email this article to a friend
  • Print this article
Comments

ARTICLES BY MICHAEL ATKINSON
Share this entry with Delicious
  •   WILLIAM FRIEDKIN AT THE HARVARD FILM ARCHIVE  |  February 11, 2009
    However we may still praise, and therefore bury, the American New Wave, we do still run the genuine risk of slipping down the wormhole slicked by present-moment techno obsessions and amnesiac entertainment-media narcissism.
  •   REVIEW: CHE  |  January 13, 2009
    An ambitious, whole-hog, four-hour-plus bio-pic of Che Guevara, c'mon.
  •   DREAM CATCHER  |  November 25, 2008
    Karen Shakhnazarov at the MFA
  •   ENDS OF THE EARTH  |  November 07, 2008
    Now in its 20th incarnation, the Boston Jewish Film Festival is almost the oldest three-ring circus of its kind (San Francisco’s annual program got there first by nine years), and in that span we’ve seen the elusive idea of “Jewish film” become an institution.
  •   KINO PRAVDA  |  August 26, 2008
    Because Mosfilm, the subject of the Museum of Fine Arts’ “Envisioning Russia” retrospective, was the Soviet state production studio, any cross-section of its history lays out the entirety of Soviet film history.

 See all articles by: MICHAEL ATKINSON

MOST POPULAR
RSS Feed of for the most popular articles
 Most Viewed   Most Emailed 



  |  Sign In  |  Register
 
thePhoenix.com:
Phoenix Media/Communications Group:
TODAY'S FEATURED ADVERTISERS
Copyright © 2009 The Phoenix Media/Communications Group