Cinema Releases - The Nile Hilton Incident
★★★★
'A cracking Cairo thriller.'
Simran Hans, THE OBSERVER
★★★★
'Corruption seeps into every pore of Egyptian society in Tarik Saleh’s impressive thriller.
This is a political thriller which takes its inspiration from Roman Polanski’s Chinatown. The convulsions elsewhere in the Middle East, for example in nearby Tunisia, are of no interest to Noredin, played in wonderfully lugubrious and fatalistic fashion by the imposing Fares, who seems at times like an Egyptian Philip Marlowe.
It manages the feat of remaining a moody and atmospheric private eye-style mystery while offering more insight into the final days of Mubarak’s presidency than any didactic, self-righteous documentary could ever manage.'
Geoffrey Macnab, THE INDEPENDENT
'Calls to mind not only the American thrillers of the 1940's but also some of their more recent inheritors: the hallucinatory conspiracy fantasies of David Lynch, and the webs of misogyny, murder and courruption slowly detangled in Scandinavian TV series such as The Killing and The Bridge.'
Hannah McGill, SIGHT & SOUND
★★★★
'What elevates this crime procedural to something sharper is an Arab Spring backdrop that bristles with the threat of violence and some peppery comment on Mubarak's corrosive regime. Surprising, edgy stuff.'Phil de Semlyen, TIME OUT
★★★★
'Inspired by a real-life incident, Swedish writer-director Tarik Saleh's blistering third narrative feature is a straightforward police procedural that packs a powerful punch thanks to its incendiary political backdrop.'
Nikki Baughan, THE LIST
★★★★
'...has the twistiness and nihilism of an Egyptian Chinatown...Saleh's film works not only as a thrilling murder-mystery and morality tale, but as a commentary on a country in the edge of revolution.'
Olly Richards, EMPIRE
★★★★
'A genuinely thrilling neo-noir'
Linda Marric, HEYUGUYS
★★★★
'Haggard cops, hotel homicides, endless ciggies...Helmer Taril Saleh makes 2011 Cairo noir-ish, in a stylishly pungent, politically loaded procedural.'
Kevin Harley, TOTAL FILM
'[The Nile Hilton Incident)…like Andrei Zvyagintsev’s Leviathan, charts one man’s deluded attempt to do the right thing in a world where money and power are the only moral arbiters.'
'Like the finest noir, what springs forth from Saleh’s film is the dreary belief that the bad sleep well while the rest are left to suffer in the streets.'
SCREEN DAILY
'Pierre Aim’s prowling camera unpeels the city’s layers of physical and moral decay in muted, contrasting tones that intermittently highlight sudden, bloody bursts of violence...'
VARIETY
'The Nile Hilton Incident represents the type of penetrating filmmaking that only a writer-director intimately familiar with Egyptian culture but possessing an outsider’s perspective could convincingly accomplish.'
THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER
'The Nile Hilton Incident darkly unfolds like the very best of Graham Greene — did I mention Carol Reed’s The Third Man is my all-time favorite film? — but goes Greene one better.'
'Masterfully shot by Pierre Aïm, the thriller benefits immensely from a harrowing rhythm established by Theis Schmidt’s angry editing ...Obviously [it is] well on its way to becoming a festival, critic and audience darling.'
'The French Connection, Heat and Jean-Pierre Melville are all there in the mix...Brilliant.'
FILMMAKER MAGAZINE
'Beautiful film, dark, precise, burning, mixing suspense and politics.'
LE MONDE
'Twice in a row the first film I’ve seen at Sundance is so brilliant, so accomplished that I start Sundance on a mountain high — and it’s not the thin air.'
LE FIGARO