The whole thing feels a bit like an Arabic riff on "Chinatown" or "L.A. Confidential" — a neonoir with a tawdry edge where our imperfect hero will eventually be doomed. It’s not a question of if, only when he will lose.
The Nile Hilton Incident represents the type of penetrating filmmaking that only a writer-director intimately familiar with Egyptian culture but possessing an outsider’s perspective could convincingly accomplish.
Like the finest noir, what springs forth from Saleh’s film is the dreary belief that the bad sleep well while the rest are left to suffer in the streets.
A story with all the qualities of a classic LA noir is given a very effective spin by transposing it to politically charged Cairo. It’s angry, frustrated and thrilling.
As doomed as Noredin’s actions often seem, they’re tinged with enough simmering humanity to keep us caring.
63
Slant MagazineEd Gonzalez
Slant MagazineEd Gonzalez
The film may not reimagine our sense of how the ties that bind bad men are rewritten in times of war, but it nonetheless gives a casually electric sense of how hardscrabble lives persist in such times.
50
Village VoiceKristen Yoonsoo Kim
Village VoiceKristen Yoonsoo Kim
The Nile Hilton Incident, despite a stylish, seedy coating, fails to even come close to the canon of greats that have influenced it.
The trouble with the movie — and it’s significant — is that Mr. Saleh is so keen to survey Egypt’s dysfunction that his pacing wanes. It’s possible to admire each scene and still see this film, in its entirety, as in need of some serious sharpening.