The Time That Remains - NYT Critics' Pick

From left, Zuhair Abu Hanna, Samar Qudha Tanus and Saleh Bakri in “The Time That Remains.”
In Nazareth, Human Comedy as Wind Rustles the Olive Branches
By A. O. SCOTT
Published: January 6, 2011

“The Time That Remains” is described by its subtitle as the “chronicle of a present absentee,” a paradoxical formulation that reveals a lot about the temperament of its director, Elia Suleiman. Mr. Suleiman, an Arab born in the Israeli city Nazareth in 1960 and currently living in Paris, has an exquisite eye for the conflicts and contradictions that bedevil his native city, but he examines them without polemics or sentimentality. “The Time That Remains” has the scope of a historical epic with none of the expected heaviness. It presents a half-century of tragedy and turmoil as a series of mordant comic vignettes. Imagine a heroic poem boiled down to a flurry of witty epigrams, or a martial statue made of origami, and you will have some idea of the improbable way this filmmaker folds big themes into delicate forms. More

Go Go Tales (2007) NYT Critics' Pick

Willem Dafoe as a club owner in Abel Ferrara’s “Go Go Tales.”
A Bar Where Everybody Knows Your Pole Dance
By MANOHLA DARGIS
Published: January 6, 2011

Heaven, David Byrne likes to sing, is a bar where the band plays your favorite song and everyone leaves the party at the same time. Mostly, though, “heaven is a place, a place where nothing, nothing ever happens,” which pretty much describes the usual scene at Ray Ruby’s Paradise Lounge. A gorgeously tawdry nirvana set in Manhattan, Paradise Lounge is an old-school strip club run by a soulful dreamer, Ray Ruby (a wonderful Willem Dafoe), who with love and not enough money is struggling to keep his people and parts in play — a beautiful metaphor for the filmmaking hard times faced by the likes of Abel Ferrara. More

Deserters From the Crusades

Deserters From the Crusades

"our heroes traverse a wolf-infested forest, plague-stricken villages and a plot with more holes than a macramé plant holder. Around them, characters converse in period-appropriate dialogue (“We’re gonna need more holy water”), while the cinematographer, Amir Mokri, conceals the magnificent Austrian Alps beneath a palette of sludge and fudge. The entire film seems to be happening on the other side of a dirty window — good news for the dreadful computer-generated effects, if not for our eyes."