70
Metascore
8 reviews · Provided by Metacritic.com
- 91Entertainment WeeklyChris NashawatyEntertainment WeeklyChris NashawatyThe whole thing feels a bit like an Arabic riff on "Chinatown" or "L.A. Confidential" — a neonoir with a tawdry edge where our imperfect hero will eventually be doomed. It’s not a question of if, only when he will lose.
- 80The Hollywood ReporterJustin LoweThe Hollywood ReporterJustin LoweThe 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.
- 80VarietyNick SchagerVarietyNick SchagerLike 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.
- 80EmpireOlly RichardsEmpireOlly RichardsA story with all the qualities of a classic LA noir is given a very effective spin by transposing it to politically charged Cairo. It’s angry, frustrated and thrilling.
- 70Los Angeles TimesRobert AbeleLos Angeles TimesRobert AbeleAs doomed as Noredin’s actions often seem, they’re tinged with enough simmering humanity to keep us caring.
- 63Slant MagazineEd GonzalezSlant MagazineEd GonzalezThe film may not reimagine our sense of how the ties that bind bad men are rewritten in times of war, but it nonetheless gives a casually electric sense of how hardscrabble lives persist in such times.
- 50Village VoiceKristen Yoonsoo KimVillage VoiceKristen Yoonsoo KimThe Nile Hilton Incident, despite a stylish, seedy coating, fails to even come close to the canon of greats that have influenced it.
- 50The New York TimesKen JaworowskiThe New York TimesKen JaworowskiThe trouble with the movie — and it’s significant — is that Mr. Saleh is so keen to survey Egypt’s dysfunction that his pacing wanes. It’s possible to admire each scene and still see this film, in its entirety, as in need of some serious sharpening.