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Critics Consensus: The Band's Visit is both a clever, subtle slice-of-life comedy, and poignant cross-cultural exploration.
Critic Consensus: The Band's Visit is both a clever, subtle slice-of-life comedy, and poignant cross-cultural exploration.
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All Critics (117) | Top Critics (33) | Fresh (115) | Rotten (2) | DVD (2)
The Band's Visit has pathos, but it is also very funny.
Like no fish-out-of-water film in recent memory, it leaves you with the hope that these fish will find their way back to water, and maybe learn to share that puddle before the desert dries it up entirely.
Kolirin has a fine sense of where to place the camera and when to cut between shots for maximum comic effect.
It's a small, profoundly satisfying movie that keeps echoing long after it's over.
A quiet, sympathetic film about the loneliness that surrounds us.
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.
Even without the coveted Oscar pedigree, this modest comedy has to be the most delightful and enjoyable movie now playing in local theaters.
It's not going to solve any problems in the Middle East, and it doesn't attempt to, either. It's just a quiet story about the uncomfortable charm of coerced hospitality.
It's both quintessentially Israeli and an enjoyable experience that will touch audiences no matter what their background.
[Writer/director Eran] Kolirin finds bittersweet humor in the comedy of their melancholy lives and fumbling efforts at communication and common ground
Filmmaker Kolirin shows Israelis what they've been missing, and the rest of us what the Middle East could be, in the gentle, human-scale antics of the confused Egyptian band.
A conventional humanistic parable that it is wise and graceful all the same
A trip to Israeli nowheresville by a minor Egyptian civic band is an occasion for a interesting little filmic investigation into what forces make us all tick. Everyone expects trouble ... and are pleasantly disappointed. Slowly budding revelation sparkles like light on a pond across the faces of this cast of unknowns.
Super Reviewer
A touching and considered slice of life that's kind of like those small-town-in-the-Midwest movies where everyone's in pain, except it happens in the Israeli desert, and the new guys in town are a police band from Egypt. A lean film, but one that still takes its time, and one that was well lauded on the festival circuit. Definitely worth a look - reminded me of Wim Wenders for no obvious reason.
An enormously touching slice-of-life drama that I really connected with. *more thoughts soon*
"Once-not long ago-a small Egyptian police band arrived in Israel. Not many remember this...It wasn't that important." A band comprised of members of the Egyptian police force head to Israel to play at the inaugural ceremony of an Arab arts center, only to find themselves lost in the wrong town.
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