Egypt

Blu-ray: Pharaoh

Tuesday, 19 November 2024

Jerzy Kawalerowicz’s Pharaoh (Faraon) is a state-funded superprodukcja, a 152-minute Polish epic, set, incongruously, in Ancient Egypt. First released in 1966, it wasn’t intended to be an Eastern Bloc copy of Mankiewicz’s Cleopatra; Pharaoh is an...

Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare's Globe review - Egypt in sign language, Rome in pale force

Monday, 19 August 2024

More surely than any other London stage, the Globe has opened up our theatrical perspective on different languages. Its triumphant “Globe to Globe” 2012 season presented the Shakespeare canon in 37 different linguistic interpretations.Among those...

Giulio Cesare, Glyndebourne review - every number a winner from dazzling revival cast

Monday, 24 June 2024

How much better can a classic get? Sebastian Scotney more or less asked the same question on theartsdesk the last time Giulio Cesare returned in triumph to Glyndebourne. I never saw David McVicar’s justly famous production of what has to be Handel’s...

Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire review - a bit of a monster let-down

Saturday, 30 March 2024

The latest blockbuster of 2024 is this disappointing fifth entry in the so-called MonsterVerse franchise, owned by Legendary Pictures. About half of the film contain actors, while half of it is computer-generated – the likely brief future of cinema...

World on Fire, Series 2, BBC One - return of Peter Bowker's panoramic view of World War Two

Tuesday, 18 July 2023

Writer Peter Bowker apparently had plans to make six series of World on Fire, but the arrival of Covid after 2019’s first series threw a spanner in the works. Anyway, here’s the second one at last, and it’s a little strange to find that this...

Harka review - when hope is a desert

Sunday, 07 May 2023

The incendiary topic of Egyptian-American director Lotfy Nathan’s debut feature Harka is poverty and corruption in Tunisia a decade after the failed promise of the Arab Spring.The word harka in the local Arabic dialect means either “to burn” or “to...

Filmmaker Tarik Saleh: ‘A director is at heart an immigrant’

Saturday, 15 April 2023

Tarik Saleh was born between two worlds, with a Swedish mum and Egyptian dad. His Egyptian side has inspired his two highest-profile releases.Seedy, sweeping noir epic The Nile Hilton Incident (2017) followed Cairo cop Noredin (Fares Fares) as his...

Music Reissues Weekly: The Best of 2022

Sunday, 25 December 2022

The Beatles loomed over everything else. It wasn’t inevitable, but the arrival of the revealing Revolver box set and Peter Jackson’s compelling Get Back film confirmed that there is more to say about what’s known, and also that there are new things...

Music Reissues Weekly: Maha - Orkos

Sunday, 16 October 2022

Orkos was originally released in 1979 on cassette. The only album by Egyptian singer Maha seems to have been little known. The liner notes for its first-ever reissue say “it was not a success when it was originally released. While nobody remembers...

The Band's Visit, Donmar Warehouse review - still waters run bittersweet

Monday, 10 October 2022

Not much happens but, in its way, everything does in The Band's Visit, the gentle, sweet-natured musical that rather unexpectedly stormed Broadway late in 2017 and is just now receiving a notably empathic London debut.Broadway...

Death on the Nile review - Kenneth Branagh flounders again as Poirot

Friday, 11 February 2022

Death on the Nile, Kenneth Branagh's second visit to Agatha Christie's oeuvre, was supposed to be released in November 2020 but Covid, a studio sale and some embarrassing revelations about one of its cast members put paid to that. Was it worth the...

Luxor review - Andrea Riseborough stars in cathartic drama about healing old wounds

Wednesday, 04 November 2020

Zeina Durra’s sophomore feature arrives on our screens a decade on from her debut, The Imperialists Are Still Alive! It was worth the wait. Luxor is a subtle, low-key drama that possesses an atmosphere of meditative calm, exploring a life that has...

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