The Time That Remains - NYT Critics' Pick

[lsanderson]

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