tue 19/03/2024

Egypt

World on Fire, Series 2, BBC One - return of Peter Bowker's panoramic view of World War Two

Writer Peter Bowker apparently had plans to make six series of World on Fire, but the arrival of Covid after 2019’s first series threw a spanner in the works. Anyway, here’s the second one at last, and it’s a little strange to find that this...

Read more...

Harka review - when hope is a desert

The incendiary topic of Egyptian-American director Lotfy Nathan’s debut feature Harka is poverty and corruption in Tunisia a decade after the failed promise of the Arab Spring.The word harka in the local Arabic dialect means either “to burn” or “to...

Read more...

Filmmaker Tarik Saleh: ‘A director is at heart an immigrant’

Tarik Saleh was born between two worlds, with a Swedish mum and Egyptian dad. His Egyptian side has inspired his two highest-profile releases.Seedy, sweeping noir epic The Nile Hilton Incident (2017) followed Cairo cop Noredin (Fares Fares) as his...

Read more...

Music Reissues Weekly: The Best of 2022

The Beatles loomed over everything else. It wasn’t inevitable, but the arrival of the revealing Revolver box set and Peter Jackson’s compelling Get Back film confirmed that there is more to say about what’s known, and also that there are new things...

Read more...

Music Reissues Weekly: Maha - Orkos

Orkos was originally released in 1979 on cassette. The only album by Egyptian singer Maha seems to have been little known. The liner notes for its first-ever reissue say “it was not a success when it was originally released. While nobody remembers...

Read more...

The Band's Visit, Donmar Warehouse review - still waters run bittersweet

Not much happens but, in its way, everything does in The Band's Visit, the gentle, sweet-natured musical that rather unexpectedly stormed Broadway late in 2017 and is just now receiving a notably empathic London debut.Broadway...

Read more...

Death on the Nile review - Kenneth Branagh flounders again as Poirot

Death on the Nile, Kenneth Branagh's second visit to Agatha Christie's oeuvre, was supposed to be released in November 2020 but Covid, a studio sale and some embarrassing revelations about one of its cast members put paid to that. Was it worth the...

Read more...

Luxor review - Andrea Riseborough stars in cathartic drama about healing old wounds

Zeina Durra’s sophomore feature arrives on our screens a decade on from her debut, The Imperialists Are Still Alive! It was worth the wait. Luxor is a subtle, low-key drama that possesses an atmosphere of meditative calm, exploring a life that has...

Read more...

Tutankhamun in Colour, BBC Four review - amazing enhanced images bring fabled Pharaoh to life

Tut in colour, and he is! The new painstaking technique of colourising vintage black and white photographs and film was touchingly exploited in this documentary for BBC Four to narrate the most thrilling and best-known archaeological discovery ever...

Read more...

The Prince of Egypt, Dominion Theatre review - Moses musical goes big and broad

The theatre gods rained down not fire and pestilence, but a 45-minute technical delay on opening night of this substantially revised musical – a stage adaptation of the 1998 DreamWorks animated movie. But nothing could entirely halt this juggernaut...

Read more...

Tutankhamun: Treasures of the Golden Pharaoh, Saatchi Gallery review - worth its weight?

In 1922 Hussein Abdel-Rassoul, a water boy with Howard Carter’s archaeological dig in the Valley of the Kings, accidentally uncovered a step in the sand. It proved to be the breakthrough for which Carter, on the hunt for the final resting place of...

Read more...

CD: Land of Kush - Sand Enigma

Land of Kush are an ambitious 20-piece plus ensemble which features all manner of instruments from strings, horns, piano, guitar, santur, darbouka, oud and synths, as well as multiple vocalists and percussionists. Led by Sam Shalabi of the trippy...

Read more...
Subscribe to Egypt