THE INVITE (Olivia Wilde, 2026).

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THE INVITE (Olivia Wilde, 2026).

Joe (Seth Rogan) is a music teacher who’s long given up on his dream of a music career and is embarrassed to be living in his late parents’ apartment. Angela (Olivia Wilde) suffers from anxiety and is sublimating all her frustrations into home decoration. She’s invited the couple upstairs (Penélope Cruz and Edward Norton) over for dinner, a shock to Joe as the sound of their orgasms keep are preventing him from sleeping. It turns out the couple upstairs are swingers. Will the dinner turn into an orgy? Will Joe and Angela find a way forward in their marriage? A very funny comedy of manners, well-directed by Olivia Wilde. I laughed out loud throughout and kept marvelling at Penélope Cruz who I find one of those stars, like Audrey Hepburn, who makes everything she does interesting, always compelling and rewarding to look at: a star, and luminous with it; on film, a creature of light. Seth Rogan is …well far from that.. but he’s got a warmth and a way of saying a line that makes his character emotionally accessible, legible and funny simultaneously. A different, though no lesser, type of gift, marvellously on display in this very funny film.

Based on a Spanish film, adapted from a play by Cesc Gay, THE PEOPLE UPSTAIRS.

Rashida Jones and Will McCormack are credited with the screenplay.

José Arroyo

Supergirl (Craig Gillespie, 2026)a

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I’m a big fan of the SUPERGIRL: WOMAN OF TOMORROW graphic novel on which the current SUPERGIRL film is based. I loved the idea of making Supergirl a punky, self-destructive young woman with issues, who heads off to planets with red suns so she can get good and proper drunk; and I think Milly Alcock is excellent. Screenwriter Ana Nogueira has woven in all these proto-feminist elements, the relationship between the super-powered young woman and the young girl out to avenge her family; making some of their biggest adversaries also be powerful women; a sub-theme of young women abducted by macho fascists for child-rearing purposes…..I’m beginning to see why so many young men of a certain type disliked the film. But there is more, more reasonable people may dislike. The director seems tone deaf to the story’s capabilities. A film called SUPERGIRL and Jason Momoa as a who-knows-what drunken semi-God has to rescue HER? Are you kidding? There are too many flashbacks, too much context-telling. But I love Milly Alcok’s bruised, determined, face, fuelled by rebellion. I wish the film had been better. Matthias Schoenaerts is wonderful as the villain (though again the film could have better showcased his performance). David Corenswet, who I love as the most recent Superman, is not only wasted here, but rather diminished, something this director seems to have a knack for.

José Arroyo

Marilyn Monroe NPG

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At the risk of offending all the friends and colleagues who’ve been involved in all the MARILYN events across various institutions in London (BFI, NPG), can someone tell me what the point of it is? Marilyn does not need your help. There was a private, and very popular, exhibition which Adrian and I went to just last year. These events, at this level, involve so much money, organisation, scholarship, resources that could have been focussed on bringing something new to light. There’s something unpleasant about the NATIONAL portrait gallery devoting all those resources and publicity to Marilyn when figures like Deborah Kerr and Jean Simmons risk oblivion. Lastly, it smacks of the very same kind of exploitation that plagued Marilyn all her life. Yes, she’ll bring the punters in. But is that enough for major national institutions to be involved? Shouldn’t they be more daring, more imaginative, more concerned with national histories, education and the public good? The NFT showing Marilyn films is understandable, she is part of national history of filmgoing; the NPG’s involvement, less so. Their combined efforts, bewildering. Nonetheless, I will of course be going.

José Arroyo

A Triple Bill at BFI Southbank

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Had a perfect day yesterday with a triple bill of pre-Coders at the BFI Southbank, SHANGHAI EXPRESS, HOLD YOUR MAN (In 35 mm) and then De Mille’s CLEOPATRA with Claudette Colbert. I’d not seen HOLD YOUR MAN, and it’s barely above an MGM programmer but worth seeing for Gable and Harlow, neither yet quite good but both fizzing and sparkling on their own and with each other and machine-gunning 30s wisecracks – my favourite mode of film speech — at all and sundry. I’d never seen CLEOPATRA on a big screen and it’s sexy and shocking (Colbert’s costumes in Cleopatra’s unfurling onto Ceasar). It’s kitsch of course, and the audience laughed out loud at various moments but it’s gorgeously designed, it moves beautifully, DE Mille has a clear eye for visuals (which are dazzling) and for a narrative that never ceases to move and communicates to all the audience’s instincts (including the basest). What I got from this big screen presentation was the sensuality of fabric (Claudette lounging in feathers and skins that vibrated and seemed alive. Claudette is tremendous, which I did not expect, thinking her too modern. I’ll say nothing about SHANGHAI EXPRESS — what more is there to say about this masterpiece? — except that the audience audibly gasped and swooned at some of Lee Garme’s lighting effects. We also went to see THE ORESTIA at The Bridge, which I loved, and which more on later; and even managed to get home in time to catch the last third of the football and see England win the match.

José Arroyo

Bhowani Junction (George Cukor, 1956)

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I’ve been waiting 50 years to see BHOWANI JUNCTION on a big screen, ever since I read Gavin Lambert’s book of interviews with Cukor, where he described how Ava Gardner grew as an actress here, and of a scene where she washed her mouth with gin, in his eyes tragically edited out and a great loss to the film and the prestige Gardner could have garnered by having it seen. . For me, it’s an amazing discovery of gifts I didn’t know Cukor possessed, here for the epic, for making drama out of the composition of hundreds of figures onscreen, in Cinema Scope and Eastman Colour. The colour design is some of the most beautiful, subtle and dramatic I’ve ever seen, and gorgeously filmed by Freddy Young (with Nicholas Roeg contributing). And someone really must do a book about Cukor’s collaborations with Gene Allen and George Hoyningen-Huene: their work here is at least on the level of A STAR IS BORN or HELLER IN PINK TIGHTS. Sublime. And sublime is also the word to use in relation to Gardner, not only astonishingly beautiful, but externalising all the anguish of a split identity, failed searches for identity, an alienation from groups, people, society; a search for an authentic self that fails and fails again. So much of the internal struggles are externalised in many, varied and sometime extreme close-ups so that it comes across as silent movie acting of the highest order. It’s hard not to read this as a dramatization of Cukor’s own sexual identity mapped onto that of this particular Anglo-Indian. Ava Gardner as Victoria Jones, c’est lui; or could be; certainly the character’s questions and struggles, were not unknow to the director, at least in the abstract. The film was ostensibly butchered in the edit reducing it in Cukor’s eyes from a serious work into trite melodrama. There is a sense in which Indian independence is reduced to a kind of imperial romance amidst colonial independence struggles with Gandhi and the Brits as the good guys, the communist as the bad etc. In a wonderful introduction to the film, curator Anumpa Shanker discusses the problem of ‘brown-face’ and some of the film’s politics while praising Gardner, the film’s sweep, and its in dramatization of action. i was surprised to see the film described as British, though it makes sense, particular as a kind of pre-cursor to the ‘run-away’ production. A film to re-discover and discuss in spite of evident problems.

José Arroyo

MY FATHER’S ISLAND (Vladimir de Fontenay, 2025).

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Beautiful landscapes, beautifully filmed, with a vibrant and charismatic Woody Norman at the centre. The film is based on David Vann’s autobiographical novella Sukkwan Island about a divorced father who wants to take his son to a remote cabin in the Finnish fjords to bond with him. The boy chooses not to go. The father commits suicide and the film is a re-imagining by the son, ten years later, of what might have happened had he indeed gone. I’ve rarely seen such poor visual story-telling, with clearly not a though as to how an audience might react to various moments. It is grim, sometimes assaultive, and ultimately dishonest too. Swann Arlaud is not up to the part and merely comes across as self-indulgent, whiny and overly self-involved at the expense of his son’s needs. Not surprised I was the only person viewing it at the ICA yesterday.

José Arroyo

Eavesdropping at the Movies: 476 – Disclosure Day

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Steven Spielberg returns to science fiction with Disclosure Day, an ambitious alien thriller that consciously recalls Close Encounters of the Third Kind, still one of his defining films fifty years on. We marvel at its extraordinary visual storytelling, virtuoso camerawork and sense of cinematic wonder, while asking whether its ideas about conspiracy, religion, the media and empathy are as sophisticated as its technical brilliance. We also revisit the perennial debate between CGI and practical effects, and consider the different worlds in which Disclosure Day and Close Encounters were made and released. Is Spielberg’s enduring belief in communication and human connection still resonant in an age of fractured media and competing truths?

Listen on the players below, Apple Podcasts, Audible, Spotify, or YouTube Music.

With José Arroyo of First Impressions and Michael Glass of Writing About Film.

 

Eyes Wide Shut (Stanley Kubrick, 1999)

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Saw EYES WIDE SHUT in a dreamy 35mm print at the Prince Charles yesterday for the first time in decades. What struck me most this time around is how inadequate Tom Cruise is in the role. Nicole Kidman is alive, beautiful, sexy, she’s first flirty and drunk, then awakened by desire, traumatised by dreams, later multi-tasking and maternal, intelligent and vulnerable. The film deflates when she’s off-screen. Cruise is handsome, charismatic, a film star. But he’s not a doctor happily in love with his wife who gets awakened to darker desires he can’t comprehend but needs to chase. He should be someone whose unconscious is propulsing him with a magnet to his crotch. Instead, he comes across as a callow, self-centred narcissist rehearsing a future Mission Impossible sprint in walk mode. He does the first bits well and they are part of the role. But there should be so much more. A fascinating but ultimately unsatisfying film overpraised by the Kubrickistas. The orgy scenes verge on the funny.

José Arroyo

Cinema Ritrovato 2026 Wrap-up

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Richard and I get together to chat about our experience of this year’s Cinema Ritrovato. The programming is so vast and diverse that everyone who attends will have a completely different Ritrovato. In this podcast we spend quite a lot of time discussing the strand on Juan Antonio Bardem, Javier’s uncle, one of the key Spanish directors of the Franco era, and a real discovery for Richard. We also touch on the Mitchell Leisen program, concluding that it will invariably raise his standing as a Hollywood director, particularly for those interested in the queer dimension of his work, without quite succeeding in putting him at the level of the very greatest (Lubitsch, Hitchcock, etc). The Stanwyck program demonstrated that the great star could do anything – comedy, drama, westerns; aristocrats and subalterns – much more convincingly than her rivals to the title of classic Hollywood’s greatest star/ actress, Bette Davis and Katharine Hepburn. We touch briefly on the Daisuke Ito, Ritwick Ghatak, and Josephine Baker strands but mainly dwell on some of the films shown under the Cinemalibero banner, always one of the highlights of the festival: A SPRING FOR THE THIRSTY (Yuri Ilyenko, 1965/1987), LA DÉRIVE (Paula Delsol, 1964), WEIGHED BUT FOUND WANTING (Lino Brocka, 1974), MUDAR DE VIDA (Paulo Rocha 1966), among others. From other strands we also discuss SUGATA SHANSHIRO (Kurosawa, 1943), THE LONG MEMORY (Robert Hamer, 1953), LA BUGIARDA (Luigi Comencini, 1965). We end with comments on the chairing (applauding the Guy Maddin event), the Piazza Maggiore screenings (NEW YORK, NEW YORK), the amazing tinting on some of the silent masterpieces (WHAT PRICE GLORY). Our one critique is that the festival really has to remind itself that the introductions are for the audience rather than for the presenters. A great year.

The podcast may be listened to below:

The podcast may also be listened to on: Spotify here: https://open.spotify.com/show/2zWZ7Egdy6xPCwHPHlOOaT

and on itunes here: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/first-impressions-thinking-aloud-about-film/id1548559546

 

José Arroyo and Richard Layne

 

FISTS IN THE POCKET/ I PUGNI IN TASCA (Marco Bellocchio, 1965)

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FISTS IN THE POCKET/ I PUGNI IN TASCA (Marco Bellocchio, 1965) is one of the most audacious first films I’ve ever seen. A bourgeois family on the skids live in a huge manor on the outskirts of a town by the Italian Alps. The mother is blind, two of the brothers, Alessandro (Luc Castel) and Leone (Pier Luigi Troglio), are epileptic; the sister (Paola Pitagora) has mental problems; and it is up to the elder brother (Marino Masé) to maintain the family, though this means he can’t move into town, get an apartment and marry the woman he loves. Alessandro decides to take it upon himself to free his older brother by killing off everyone else. The film has been historicised as a break with neorealism that foreshadowed the events of 1968. I understood it more as a film about a country in which past ways no longer work; where there is still a nostalgia for the certainties of the church, the military, the old (fascist?) order combined with an eagerness for and fear of modernity. In his excellent piece for SENSES OF CINEMA, Karl Schoonover convincingly demonstrates how the film dramatizes a dialectic with the past. Lou Castel, baby-faced, fearful, but with fist in pockets into the future, and rather sexy with it, is an extraordinary presence. It’s clearly a first film by a young filmmaker in love with cinema, it moves with energy and inventiveness, and through some impactful striking imagery. I couldn’t see it in Bologna so bought the DVD put out by the Cinemateca di Bologna, which is accompanied by a marvellous book of essays, chock-full of shot plans, storyboards etc. I’m eager now to see more of Bellocchio

José Arroyo

Orphan (Lázló Nemes, 2025)

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The only other Lázló Nemes that’s come my way previously is SON OF SAUL (2015) and I didn’t go see it because I didn’t have the stomach for another Holocaust film. Had I read more about ORPHANS before the screening, I might also have given it a miss. But I’m glad I didn’t. It’s the story of a young boy in Hungary who starts off as an orphan in the aftermath of WWII only to have his mother – a Jewish woman who’d had him while in hiding – claim him as the film begins. His mother’s husband has not returned from the camps. Almost a decade later, in the aftermath of the failed Hungarian Revolution of 1956, in a city in rubble and in the grip of Soviet repressive forces, the boy still descends to the bowels of his apartment building to converse with this spectral father daily, confessing his daily life and almost worshipping this lost paragon of virtue, talismanically holding on to his notebooks written in a Hebrew the child himself can’t decipher, going to synagogue to try to reconnect with these people and this culture that have survived the latest attempt at extinction and now have to figure out how to survive the present. But was that absent saint really his father or is it the brutal butcher who was paid to save his mother but ended up abusing her then and now?
ORPHANS is a complex story of identity, history, family; of finding you are part of what you most hate. The young boy played by Bojtorján Barábas, beautiful but full of resentment and rage, a perpetual outsider, constantly having the ground pulled from under him, is I suppose a metaphor for Hungary in this period. It’s all secrets and lies, power ploys and powerlessness, rebellion stifled and defeated, the ruins of bombed out streets and the long queues in the grocery stores. The lighting, by Mátyás Erdély, is beautiful, classic, we see a textured almost glossy image that emphasizes the beauty of the people in the rubble of their surroundings, with people often shot through fences, gaps, windows. The place is ruined by its history, the people oppressed and secretive, having to get on their knees and plead for basic decency. It’s a place where one can’t bring oneself to kill the father and yet if one doesn’t one must bow down to the hateful power of the brutish, the petty and the authoritarian. Some people have found it boring. THE GUARDIAN tellingly misquotes the central line in the film, when it claims, the mother tells the boy, ‘the more you hate him, the more you like him’, whereas it should be ‘the more you hate him the more you BECOME like him’. A considerable difference in meaning. At the end the boy is reunited with both parents but now orphaned from safety, security, love, and even his culture. His father, like his government and the society he lives in, has become the enemy; and he is trapped amongst them in a prison that outwardly looks colourful, exciting and secure. I loved it, even though I’m sure some of the symbols and metaphors would be more clearly accessible to a Hungarian audience than to myself. Grégory Gadebois is magnificent as the butcher.

THE BAMBOO BLONDE (Dorothy B. Hughes, 1941)

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Whereas I read THE SO BLUE MARBLE in one big gulp, it has taken me almost two weeks to get through its sequel THE BAMBOO BLONDE, and thus no surprise that the series ends here. It’s the West Coast on the verge of WWII. Griselda Satterlee, Hollywood costume designer is honeymooning in Long Beach with her husband Con. They meet a drunken blonde in a bar. Con goes to take her home. The blonde ends up dead. Griselda does her best to clear her husband; her husband has another agenda; and so does everyone else: murder, spies, jealous lovers. The whole story unfurls through the wife’s consciousness and her point-of-view. The villain is a British major, interesting in the light of the times. But the main villain is not the main murderer. So who is it? It should all have been more gripping than it was. Only willpower, rather than a desire to know who did what, kept me going to the end. My third (In A Lonely Place is the other) and least favourite Dorothy B. Hughes novel. A disappointment.

José Arroyo

Thinking Aloud About Film: Tarik Saleh and The Cairo Trilogy

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Richard and I were so excited after seeing Eagles of the Republic (2025), that when we learned that it was the third film in a trilogy, we made a point of seeing the other two: The Nile Hilton Incident (2017) and Cairo Conspiracy/ Boy From Heaven (2022). José went even further and also saw his first live action film, made in Sweden, Tommy (2005), and, at least up to now, the only feature film he’s made in the US: The Contractor (2022). Thus the podcast encompasses all of his live-action feature films (he also made Metropia (2009), an animated film) and spans a twenty-period.

Saleh is the offspring of an Egyptian father and a Swedish mother. The Nile Hilton Incident  was set to be filmed in Cairo but Saleh was given a week to flee the country before shooting started. Thus the trilogy is a critique of Egypt that could not be made in Egypt. The films are genre pieces — and are satisfying on that level; you don’t need to know anything about Egypt or Egyptian culture to enjoy them — but they are also serious films about morality, ethics, the extent of corruption, and the limits otherwise good people are willing to go to in order to prosper or even survive. In the podcast we discuss this and contrast with his earlier Swedish film, fascinating in that it makes the gangster’s girlfriend the central figure in a genre piece, and his later American film, in that it points to the limits on free speech currently imposed on American cinema.

 

Aside from all of this, we also linger to appreciate the beauty and expressiveness of the mise-en-scène and encourage everyone to see these marvellous works.

Eagles of the Republic is currently on distribution (I saw it at the MOCKINGBIRD)

The Nile Hilton Incident is available on MUBI

Boy From Heaven/ Cairo Conspiracy is available to see on BBC i-player.

 

The podcast may be listened to here:

The podcast may also be listened to on: Spotify here: https://open.spotify.com/show/2zWZ7Egdy6xPCwHPHlOOaT

and on itunes here: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/first-impressions-thinking-aloud-about-film/id1548559546

 

José Arroyo and Richard Layne

THE CONTRACTOR (Tarik Saleh, 2022)

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At the moment, for the US to lecture any other country about freedom of speech has become a joke. THE CONTRACTOR (2022) is a good examples of American cinema’s limits on critiques of the state, limits that have always been there but now seem more exposed. Tarik Saleh’s most famous works, the Cairo Trilogy, are scathing, funny, dark critiques of the Egyptian State’s culture of corruption that could only be made outside Egypt (the financing is an amalgamation of Swedish, Danish, French and other moneys). THE CONTRACTOR  is Saleh’s only American film and it suffers for being so.

James Harper (Chris Pine) a veteran of various duties is discharged from the army, without pension or medical benefits, for taking steroids necessary for him to overcome injuries incurred on previous tours of duty and continue in the army.The first part of the film overeggs this injustice, showing us Harper as a devoted family man, a regular churchgoer, from an army family dedicated to the service for generations.How does he now provide for his family? By becoming a private contractor. He gets lots of offers but doesn’t want to become a mercenary. Mike (Ben Foster), his best friend, tells him of Rusty Jennings (Keifer Sutherland), who runs a private militia but for the Department of Defence. They pay less, work around the law, but for righteous causes.

When Harper goes to see Rusty, Rusty tells him, ‘We gave them our minds, bodies and spirits and they chewed us up and spit us out. Left us with fear, rage, uncertainty, disillusionment, a sense of abandonment, betrayal and finally a sense of self-loathing and guilt, as if somehow everything that happened to us was our own goddamn fault,’ It’s a great speech and I suspect Sutherland took on the role primarily to be able to say those words. But the film chickens out after that, compromises, and turns routine.

Harper might as well have turned mercenary and gone for the cash because this para-governmental operation is just as dirty as any other. The mission involves stealing a scientific formula that they’re told is harmful but the scientist (Saleh regular Fares Fares) in fact had invented a vaccine that he wanted to make available for free. Harper ends up killing a good man, a family man who believed in science and wanted to contribute to the social good to that mutinational pharmaceutical companies may continue to make money. He’s been lied to, chewed up and spit out just as in the army. In fact, his operation now sets out to kill him: he’s become a loose end. Harper succeeds in getting back home only to find  the  best friend he thought dead is alive and well. Did the man whose life he’s already saved twice betray him? They, eventually team up and get rid of Rusty so that Harper may be reunited with his family.

The film’s action is serviceable, the critique muted. The sub-plot about relations between fathers and sons, sentimental and extraneous. It’s not as funny, sharp or dark as Saleh’s other work. The ending should be much bleaker than it is. But THE CONTRACTOR is not a conventional action thriller either. I liked it a lot more most. It’s interesting to see Pine and Foster reunited after HELL OR HIGH WATER (David Mackenzie, 2016). Eddie Marson has a lovely moment as the head of a half-way house who tragically takes in Harper at a critical juncture; and the individual shots, framings and compositions are just as imaginative as we’ve come to expect from Saleh. But the script is neither fish nor fowl; the film, a work that doesn’t’ live up to its intentions. American cinema can do a muddy critique of something vaguely governmental or paramiltary but can’t seem to critique directly much less surgically, as we see so clearly in Saleh’s other works. I don’t think the fault is with Saleh or the cast.

 

José Arroyo

Tommy (Tarik Saleh 2005)

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What happens to gangsters’ girlfriends or wives? In film we see them making pasta, looking after children, held for ransom or shot. Cinema usually use them to create a tension between what they represent and what gangsters do. TOMMY is unusual in making the wife/girlfriend the protagonist. He’s already dead as the film starts. Estelle (Moa Gammel), his partner,  has come home to Sweden to collect his share of the money from a bank heist that netted 4 million euros so she and her daughter can start a new life. But in order to do so, gangland must not know the man they fear is dead.
I was glad to see the film – a combination of noir and maternal melodrama – so clearly focussed on women: wives, daughters, sisters, mothers. The Cairo Trilogy with its focus on power and corruption has little place for them. We see particular types — femme fatales, wives, too-young women impregnated by too-old Imams — and briefly. It didn’t bother me per se but I noted it had the potential to. This film – Saleh’s first live-action feature and second film (METROPIA, his first feature, is an animated film) – is a corrective.
This is also the first film of his I’ve seen that is set in his native Sweden – Saleh is the progeny of an Egyptian father and a Swedish mother who grew up there – and it’s further proof that who makes movies matters. His Sweden is full of people of colour — Turks, blacks, Middle-Easterners; and he’s aware of the tensions between migration and place. There’s a lovely scene at the beginning when our heroine is held by immigration – her husband is wanted for robbery – and the way it’s filmed and edited – the pale blonde faces of our heroine and her daughter in a sea of brown; shots of a young dark-skinned boy looking on that is held just a beat too long — so well communicates that what is happening is the rule for the dark-skinned people and alarmingly exceptional for the likes of her.
The rest is beautifully structured. Estelle stops being treated like a wife/girlfriend at almost exactly 2/3rds through the film, when the gangland gloves come off, and she becomes the hunted. It’s tense, dark, thrilling; and yet it’s not one of those films where women become action heroines. The action is generally enacted by others. Estelle is motivated by fear for her daughter and sister. She’s very beautiful but her looks are never an element she resorts to in getting the money. It’s all wits, smarts and courage; and it’s lovely to see. An excellent genre piece. As you can tell from the poster a noir/maternal melodrama is not something the marketers had much confidence in.
José Arroyo

THE NILE HILTON INCIDENT (Tarik Saleh, 2017)

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THE NILE HILTON INCIDENT (Tarik Saleh, 2017) is a pitch-black Swedish noir, set in Egypt in the days leading up to the 25TH OF JANUARY REVOLUTION in 2011. The film begins in the streets of Cairo as Noredin (Fares Fares), a cop, extorts money from the shopkeepers in his area, just like any old mafia enforcer.  That same evening,  a singer gets killed in a hotel. A Sudanese cleaner sees both the man the singer has been having an affair with and the man who comes in second later to kill her. She’s now a witness. Plus there are also pictures of the before, a couple of having sex. It all  leads to a high-ranking member of government. The film then follows Noredin as he tries to solve the murder, whilst exposing a culture where corruption is like breathing. First, he’s allowed to investigate, then the case is closed, then it gets re-opened again as the various interests map out their possible profit from the case.  No one is ever certain; and no one is completely safe. The question is when does morality revolt? Is it at murder? Of foreigners? Of locals? Of kin?

 

THE NILE HILTON INCIDENT (2017) is the first film in Tarik Saleh’s Cairo trilogy, but many elements I now recognise as characteristic of Saleh’s work are already evident: the theme of corruption, the filming of streets from inside moving cars, the hand-held camera, the expressive play with focus. This is perhaps his most accessible film, as it’s the most traditionally NOIR: the dark streets, whorehouses, songbirds, the moral maze that is the city, its various layers (the homeless, the drug addicts, the foreign workers), the sexual blackmail, corrupt cops,  untouchable upper-classes; the hero whose outward corruption encases a basic decency.

What’s really missing, unusually for noir, is desire. Our hero is a widower, who does drink, and he does have sex with the chanteuse, but what really propels him seems to be a search for justice in a world where none is to be had. A classic existential dilemma.  For his uncle, life is cheap and there’s money to be made. For our corrupt policeman, there has to be something more; and perhaps he finds it in the closing scene, with the people rising on January 25th, beating him short of injury because ‘we’re not like them’, ie, him. There are a couple of nods to Youssef Chahine films (the chase through an external staircase of a modern building, the group prayer on the busy streets). My admiration for Fares has only increased; he’s got that ordinary/ extraordinary quality that all great stars: beautiful in some angles, almost ugly in others, totally at ease and capable of expressing anything. He’s been excellent playing very different characters in each film in the trilogy. A wonderful noir. On MUBI.

José Arroyo

THE CAIRO CONSPIRACY/ BOY FROM HEAVEN (Tarik Saleh, 2022)

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THE CAIRO CONSPIRACY/ BOY FROM HEAVEN (2022) is the second in a trilogy of films that culminates in EAGLES OF THE REPUBLIC, the film that so excited me last week. This one confirms that Tarik Saleh is a major filmmaker. The film begins with the contention that there’s always been a struggle between Church and State in Egypt, and that the state has always attempted to control the Al-Azhar, which the movie depicts as a combination of university but also seat of religious power. When the Grand Imam dies, the NSA (National Security) gets involved to secure the election of a new religious leader that is more in tune with the President’s policies. Adam (Tawfeek Barhom), a young and innocent student from a provincial family gets drawn in to all the political machinations within the Al-Azhar and in the country at large.

 

Cairo through a car

 

This is a tense conspiracy thriller, with murder and threats of violence at every corner, and with the type of Jesuitical discourse so common to all religious hard-heads. Will Adam’s genuine faith, goodness and smarts save him from all the evil forces hand-stringing him?The film has a wonderful contrast between the city — noisy, dirty, usually captured from inside a moving vehicle (I think because Saleh wasn’t allowed to film in Cairo proper) –and the neat, orderly and imposing linearity of the mosque/university; one dark and dirty, the other white, clean, natural light on the mosque’s white marble. Anyone familiar with Medieval History, Phillip Pullman’s novels (THE GOLDEN COMPASS), or any depiction of Vatican politics (CONCLAVE) will be familiar with the structures of this world.

The mosque

The Mosque

As to the visuals, nothing is careless. There’s a section of the film where Adam, the young hero, is directed to become close to the Muslim Brotherhood. In his first attempt (a) he’s far away from the group in a wide long-shot with the camera on the ground; as he gets closer  to being accepted (b), the camera lifts, the distance shortens, the shots get narrower; until when he’s successfully infiltrated the group (c), his face occupies the larger part of a group of  faces, with his occupying half the frame, the others out of focus. Finally (d), in a different type of framing, he’s an indistinguishable member of the group.  And this is just one example of how this film tells its story visually. It’s brilliant.

The film is also very moving. One feels for this boy caught in this web that is beyond his control, constantly threatened with his and his father’s life, for things that are not of his doing. How will he get out? At the beginning of the film, the father smells the hands of Adam’s brother, notices that he’s been smoking, and belts all of their hands. Each is responsible for the other; the actions of one, affect all. This is a theme this wonderful film develops to the end. Fares Fares is superb as the NSA operative pulling the strings. It’s on BBC Iplayer and I highly recommend. Richard and I will be podcasting on the trilogy soon.

Rhyming beginning an end:

More examples of the visuals, the brilliance of framing and composition, the sheer imaginative beauty, each with its own purpose, may be seen below:

José Arroyo

 

The Christophers (Steven Soderbergh, 2025)

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THE CHRISTOPHERS is an exercise in style, with a half-baked script by Ed Solomon (MEN IN BLACK, CHARLIE’S ANGELS, The BILL AND TED films ) with under-developed themes on aging, celebrity culture, art, the relationship to one’s past, and a moral reckoning with one’s actions. None of these are satisfyingly dramatised. The story concerns a once famous painter and acerbic television critic, Julian Sklar (Ian McKellen), who exhibited two sets of paintings of Christopher, his then lover, to great acclaim. There’s another set, half-finished, in the attic. His greedy worthless children (Jessica Gunning and James Corden, beautifully cast) plot to have Lori Butler (Michaela Cole) a victim of Sklar’s judgment and already known to have forged one of his paintings, to be hired as his assistant, and finish off the third set of Christophers so they can be sold for a fortune after his death. The camera dollies in and out, constantly mobile as Sklar monologues, uninterested in the views of Butler, who glowers at him impassively and judges. The whole drama revolves around how the relationship between the two artists, young and old, successful and not, develops. The issue of race is not explored, rather mystifyingly, as it’s another, obvious, antinomy. One can understand why it’s good for Soderbergh to keep active, try new things, and keep directing these exercises. Why the audience should go watch them is less clear. McKellen and Cole would be part of an answer; and it is funny in spots. It has been getting very good reviews but I didn’t find it worth going to a cinema for. The print I saw it in was overly dark, grey and washed out. I’m not sure if that’s the film itself or the projection. Soderbergh did the cinematography (under the name of Peter Andrews). I didn’t actively dislike this. McKellen and Cole make it worth seeing. i just didn’t see the point of it. And I’m not surprised at the lack of business. I’m sure it will all look better on TV.

Eagles of the Republic (Tarek Saleh, 2025)

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EAGLES OF THE REPUBLIC is my first Tarik Saleh film. I knew nothing about the film or the director when I saw it yesterday. But I returned home so elated from the film that I looked him up, found that the film is the third in a trilogy; and promptly ordered the other two: BOY FROM HEAVEN/ (AKA CAIRO CONSPIRACY, 2002) and THE NILE HILTON INCIDENT, 2017) all starring Fares Fares. What gave me so much pleasure initially was the mise-en-scène. It’s not just every frame a painting, but every shot beautiful to look at, expressive, feeling direct and propulsive, but conveying various things at once. Saleh takes my least favourite shot in contemporary cinema, a steadycam following the protagonist from the back, and makes it tense, sad, poetic. Here the camera is focussed on the neck, like the protagonist is a target, in front of him everything is out of focus, unclear, dangerous, difficult to manoeuvre, entrapping. And that’s just one example. It’s like reading a novel and finding a beautiful sentence one wants to underline, to return to and savour. If one could underline passages in films, this one would be full of ink.
The film is about state corruption and about how even the most powerful artists are limited in the ways they can resist it. Here Egypt’s most famous actor George Fahmy (Fares Fares) is asked to star in a biopic of Egypt’s real-life authoritarian President (Abdel Fattah el-Sisi). He initially and very tactfully refuses but then finds he’s lost his trailer at the studio, his next film’s been given to another actor, his favourite co-star has been blacklisted, and, the clincher, something might happen to his son if he doesn’t. So he does. It’s a world in which, as one character says, ‘principles are like AIDS’. And yet he can’t stop being himself; an artist who even forced to act against his will can’t stop trying to make the dreck better, more truthful, more entertaining. He also can’t stop himself from chasing women, even the most powerful general’s wife, and hopping from frying pans to fires. The film’s achievement is to evoke the arbitrary deadlyness of authoritarianism — it can destroy your life when least expected, at someone else’s will for the most minor reason — whilst doing so with a light hand: it’s a funny, sexy, film. The deadly authoritarianism is what people live under but people are still humans looking for sex, love, a laugh, a solution to particular circumstances, all the while knowing that a mere word, overheard or mis-interpreted by the powerful, can alter or end one’s life.
EAGLES OF THE REPUBLIC is also a cinephile film, in love with Egyptian film history, and also cleverly citing a broader cinematic culture (from Antonioni to De Mille, via Riefenstahl). Saleh is the son of an Egyptian immigrant and a Swedish mother, who was himself forced to flee Egypt in 2015, just as he was about to begin filming THE NILE HILTON INCIDENT. EAGLES OF THE REPUBLIC is a film that couldn’t be made in Egypt. It’s also a film that couldn’t be made in the US today (and Trump’s America is ripe for such filming if people weren’t so afraid). At a time where being famous is seen as a superpower, the film tells us that even superpowers have their limitations. At the end of the film, George has survived and is gambling with people next to some rubble on the outskirts of Cairo. But his co-star has been killed for not wanting to offer sexual favours to generals, his manager tortured and executed for being gay, he’s survived an attempted coup, exchanged his principles for the life of his son. If as the film says, citing Becket, ‘words are the clothes thoughts wear’, the film’s Egypt is a place where you have to be super-careful about your wardrobe.
It’s a thrilling film to see; and an important one. It was nominated for the Palme D’or and won all kinds of Swedish Film Awards. I was sad to be the only person in the audience watching it; and there’s perhaps more to say about how films have lost their place in the cultural conversation. But that will have to wait for another time.
Jose Arroyo

The So Blue Marble by Dorothy Hughes, 1940

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Continuing my reading of Dorothy B. Hughes novels with her first, THE SO BLUE MARBLE, which features as many murders as IN A LONELY PLACE but in a much lighter vein. This one is as if Cole Porter or Astaire and Rogers became enmeshed in a series of murders in upper crust Manhattan on the eve of WWII. It focuses on Griselda Satterlee, a former film star turned fashion designer who goes to New York for a break, borrows her ex-husband’s apartment, only to find that she’s become prey to those who think she knows where an oh so blue and ever so valuable marble might be. Does she?Certainly, her ex once had it in his possession.  There are three beautiful sisters, a pair of very polite and very deadly European twins, one of them involved with the youngest sister, two top box office film stars, one Columbia Professor, an ex-husband who may not be an ex for long, and lots and lots of murders. They’re all searching for that shiny blue marble because, when opened, it reveals a map that will lead to untold wealth. Naturally, they all have their reasons for wanting it. Corpses pile up with a certain nonchalance: none is in itself sufficient to halt a trip to The Stork Club or El Morocco. An elegant, witty, mystery

 

José Arroyo