Author Archives: Ronnie Scheib

In Alaa Al Aswany’s hugely popular novel the real-life Yacoubian building, erected to house Cairo’s elite and since fallen into genteel decay, functions as a compact metaphor for the shifting strata of a crumbling Egyptian class system. Tyro director Marwan Hamed’s sprawling three-hour adaptation, the most expensive Egyptian movie ever made, weaves myriad plots into […]

For decades Feliks Falk has supplied Polish cinema with undiluted doses of cynicism. Here he zeroes in on a repo man named Lucek whose genius for uncovering hidden assets is matched only by his ruthless disregard for his prey. The camera, galvanized from first frame to last by the extraordinary performance of Andrzej Chrya as […]

Danish director Pernille Fischer Christensen’s claustrophobic debut feature unfolds within a single apartment house. The focus is on an evolving relationship between two apparently incompatible neighbors: a repressed, pre-op transsexual (male-to-female) loner who spends her days watching TV soaps and a no-nonsense beauty salon owner who just left her lover and is enjoying a series […]

Nice-guy hero Mario manfully embarks on a dreaded government career to finance the nightclub he dreams of opening with friends. His cheery helpfulness arouses only vindictive envy—the fever of the title—in his boss, who implicates him in a political scam involving a dug-up cemetery. But Alessandro D’Alatri’s gently incisive satire of government bureaucracy is balanced […]

Slovene director Igor Sterk’s worthy venture into Bergman territory, a stylized contemplation on a disintegrating marriage, makes for heavy sledding, the couple’s winsome blond daughters providing the only grace notes of their sterile bourgeois co-dependency. Each partner drifts into infidelity. The husband’s surprise encounter with a high school sweetheart awakens long-dead emotions, which soon perish […]

This huge, messy blob of a movie by Chicago director Joe Swanberg intentionally wallows in amateur digital verite. Improvised and photographed by its four actors in uncomfortably close, warts-and-all intimacy and filled with uneroticized nudity and sex (genitals exhibited up close and personal in both bathroom and bedroom modes), it almost forces us to ask […]

In the most extraordinary cross-dressing performance since Linda Hunt’s in The Year of Living Dangerously, 85-year-old character actress Krystyna Feldmann incarnates the wizened, semiautistic Polish “primitive” painter Nikifor. Krzysztof Krauze’s oddball biopic shows Nikifor wandering into the neat studio of the bureaucrat-sanctioned brush pusher Marian Wlosinski in 1960. Serenely oblivious to most of the social […]

Iranian director Kambozia Partovi—celebrated screenwriter of The Circle, Deserted Station, and I Am Taraneh, 15—creates a feminist heroine in a less tragic mold in this story of a widow determined to survive on her own. Local custom demands that the recently bereaved Reyhan (Fereshtei Sadre Orafaei) marry her brother-in-law; having no desire to become his […]

The object of some controversy as the first Thai movie directed by a Westerner, Paul Spurrier’s horror tale about a young bar girl who channels dark spirits is altogether more generic, gorier, and sleazier than the Pang brothers’ Bangkok-based chillers, but it hooks neatly into the Asian fascination with nubile young women as portals to […]