Amreeka ***

Director: Cherien Dabis
Cast: Nisreen Faour, Melkar Muallem, Hiam Abbass
Yussuf Abu-Warda, Alia Shawkat, Joseph Ziegler, Andrew Sannie
Daniel Boiteau, Brodie Sanderson

The Iraqi invasion has just begun and Palestinian woman Muna (Faour) and her son Fadi (Muallem) move to the USA after winning a green card lottery.
Muna's sister (Abbass) lives there with her husband (Abu-Warda) and daughters and they help them settle down.
They soon face troubles related to discrimination, cultural differences and homesickness.
Cherien Dabis directorial debut is the kind of film you feel you've seen a million times before, but somehow end up enjoying just the same.
We see Muna work in a fast food restaurant where her charm wins over her co-workers (and even the bank employee from the place where she pretends to work to make her family proud), while Fadi is bullied by jocks and experiences marijuana and parking lot conversations with his cousin Salma (Shawkat).
Touching, funny performances and some witty dialogues help "Amreeka" from moving into extreme territory. While most films either decide Arab characters should give in under the pressure of a new world and become full out terrorists and others simply make them martyrs, this one chooses the most unexpected path by remaining still.
Dabis' love for her characters (it's understandable when we see she dedicates the film to her family) helps her make them very real, even when playing conventional roles, because she goes beyond the political context to ask if the real problem isn't the USA or the Middle East, but actually a whole world that's become soulless.
"If we don't belong here, then where do we belong" asks Muna to her son, while Dabis urges us to see beyond the news and aim for universal changes.

The Limits of Control *1/2

Director: Jim Jarmusch
Cast: Isaach de Bankolé, Bill Murray, Tilda Swinton
Gael García Bernal, Hiam Abbass, John Hurt, Paz de la Huerta

Watching "The Limits of Control" two questions come to mind: does Isaach de Bankolé ever smile and what the hell was Jim Jarmusch thinking when he made this movie?
The stone faced de Bankolé stars as a hitman on some sort of a mission that has him traveling across Spain where he meets with strange characters that give him matchboxes.
Somewhere in between conversations about molecules, Rita Hayworth, bohemians and old guitars Jarmusch expects us to have an epiphany about existence.
What he fails to see is that he's the one who's going through an existential crisis and a plot-less movie will not help him solve it.
The movie plays out like a really bad dream (if Jarmusch was trying to pay homage to David Lynch he never reaches the fascinating creepiness and surprising universality of Lynch's stream-of-consciousness movies) with selfindulgent cinematography by Christopher Doyle who does capture beautiful images, that play like awkward Renault commercials.
The saddest thing is that Jarmusch is probably aware of how empty his movie is and often tries to justify himself in the silliest ways.
When a gangster (played by Murray) asks de Bankolé "how did you get here?" he answers "I used my imagination". This response plays more like "The Matrix" by way of "Sesame Street" than as a spark to make us reflect on how the whole thing might be a dream within a dream.
During the film's only interesting scene Swinton appears as a blond (Jarmusch references tons of film noirs here) with a movie obsession.
She tells de Bankolé that she likes movies where you don't know if you're having a dream or watching a film.
Jarmusch should've learned that sometimes dreams, like films, should be kept all to oneself.

The Visitor **

Director: Thomas McCarthy
Cast: Richard Jenkins
Haaz Sleiman, Danai Jekesai Gurira, Hiam Abbass

Richard Jenkins plays Walter Vale a lonely, college Connecticut professor who goes to New York for a conference and discovers Tarek (Sleiman) and Zainab (Gurira), a young couple that has been squatting in his apartment.
After kicking them out, he feels compassion and invites them to stay over until they find a better place to live. In the process he befriends Tarek who is a talented djembe (Syrian drum) player while slowly earning the trust if Zainab.
The young couple gets him out of his rut, until immigration problems arise and Walter must prove his humanity.
For a film that tries so much to keep small proportions, "The Visitor" retains an underlying condescension that makes it more uncomfortable than sweet.
Writer/director McCarthy tries to deliver both a story about second chances and an exposé on the way immigrants are treated in the United States without really backing up his ideas.
It's as if the plot has a backup plan, thinking that if it doesn't work in a certain way, they will always be able to push the other way.
The melting pot that is New York City brings an organic feeling to the movie, but this can't be attributed to the filmmakers but rather to the inevitability to escape the richness brought by the multiculturality of the city.
What can be attributed to the film are the beautiful performances from all the ensemble. Jenkins gives a master class in subtlety and layering. While his professor could've been an eccentric Grinch of sorts, Jenkins knows better and lets him blossom slowly.
The beauty of his performance is that you're never able to detect the moment where his characters turns into something else.
Sleiman is charismatic and irresistible as is Abbass, who plays Tarek's mother in a role whose quiet dignity and class screams "Shoreh Agdashloo".
But at the end the film can't help but feel a bit inconsistent, because someone like Walter, who harbors so much pain and anger, wouldn't have let two immigrants off the hook for living ilegally in his apartment just like that (he didn't even take a late paper from one of his students!), especially not when the film highlights 9/11 paranoia so much.
And then with all of its worldly wisdom, McCarthy can't help but limit his vision and make the film feel like everything happened in order so that the well to do American learnt a lesson.