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100The Band's Visit has not provided any of the narrative payoffs we might have expected, but has provided something more valuable: An interlude involving two "enemies," Arabs and Israelis, that shows them both as only ordinary people with ordinary hopes, lives and disappointments. It has also shown us two souls with rare beauty.
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A lovely, smart and beautifully understated film.
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100A heartfelt, wry and decidedly spry film.
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100This movie has a tone, look and mood all its own - it's a joyously bittersweet piece of visual music about isolation, melancholy and everyone's yearning for transcendence, through love, art or both.
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91Something marvelous happens as the filmmaker, in his first feature, expertly metes out small scenes of communication between people taught, for generations, to be wary of one another: This Band swings with the rhythms of hope.
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88A modest and charming comedy from Israel.
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88First-time filmmaker Kolirin paces his can-we-all-just-get-along? parable as if it were a silent comedy, which for long stretches it is. This movie about musicians has no soundtrack. Its musical moments are few, but potent.
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88A remote, Israeli desert town is the setting for this droll, endearing comedy about an accidental cultural exchange that very quietly says some very important things about contemporary Arab-Israeli relations.
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88It's a small, profoundly satisfying movie that keeps echoing long after it's over.
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83A charming little film built of bits of music, romance, cultural conflict and the simple human need to connect.
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83Tonally, The Band's Visit steps gingerly on the line between "sweetly humane" and "cloyingly quirky."
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A "little" film with a great reach.
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80There is no shortage of remarkable moments.
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80Has an irresistible tragic and romantic undertow.
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80The Band's Visit resounds with tenderness and melancholy.
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80Both sweet-natured and sharply pointed, a film whose poignant, emotional effects and subtle acting sneak up on you.
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80It's a delicate parable, droll rather than funny, wise rather than smart. Eran Kolirin, debuting as a writer-director, has the deadpan sparseness of the Finnish Aki Kaurismaki, but his vision is gentler, less bleak; at moments, the movie is almost sentimental, but the performances save it every time.
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80Smart, subtle, deceptively simple little.
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By the time Tawfiq, Dina, and the band's boy Lothario, Haled (Bakri), commiserate over "My Funny Valentine" in the film's sublime third act, writer/director Kolirin has created a remarkable world where no struggle is too severe to overcome with a little empathy and the Great American Songbook on your side.
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You can watch The Band's Visit for its political idealism, or you can watch it for entertainment value alone. In either case, it doesn't disappoint.
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75The movie, which is as low-key and subdued as Tewfiq himself, is something of a marvel: a precious work of minimalism that, instead of disappearing into itself the way so many small-scale comedies do, grows before your eyes into something profound and profoundly affecting.
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75A drama about isolation and communication, The Band's Visit is characterized both by strongly delineated characters and low-key comedy. The movie is not lightweight but it is at times lighthearted.
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70I'd be lying if I said that The Band's Visit isn't touching and uplifting and all those other audience-friendly emotions against which film critics are believed to religiously steel themselves. But in a season rife with movies (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Grace Is Gone, The Kite Runner, et al.) that aggressively pry open viewers' chest cavities and yank on their heartstrings, Kolirin's film is the only one that plucks at them gently, tickling the funny bone as it goes.
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70Mr. Kolirin, it emerges, is wrenching comedy out of intense melancholia.
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70A warm and delightful take on cross-cultural relations that proves that sometimes a light touch is just what's needed to address serious topics.
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70This modest little fable from Israel, in English, Hebrew and Arabic, has spellbinding resonances, yet never breaks the spell by blowing its own horn.
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70As the film concludes with his upraised hand, conductor's fingers unfurling against a blue sky, you do feel that you have witnessed a small victory of wisdom over indifference and ennui. When in doubt, strike up the band.
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70Kolirin has a fine sense of where to place the camera and when to cut between shots for maximum comic effect, and his two lead actors--Sasson Gabai as the band's conductor and Ronit Elkabetz (Or) as one of the locals--are terrific.
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67A slight but wise comedy about the loneliness that makes all men brothers.
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Positive: 8 out of 8
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Mixed: 0 out of 8
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Negative: 0 out of 8
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10
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ChadS.10
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JayH.8