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Your Weekly Roundup of New Movies: “Limbo’s” Unforced Comedy Is Remarkably Shrewd Yet Innocent What to see and skip while streaming at home or going to the theater. (TIFF)
Limbo Syrian refugee Omar won’t pluck his oud (an 11-stringed Middle Eastern lute) outside his home country. It doesn’t sound right on Scottish soil, he says. Given the natural acoustics, who could blame him? Omnipresent in U.K. director Ben Sharrock’s spare comedy are the oppressive gusts and rumbling waves of this Scottish isle, creating a sensorial conundrum for asylum seekers like Omar awaiting their papers. The wild, whistling remoteness all around is a prison of freedom. All the while, Omar (Amir El-Masry) hauls his encased oud around “like a coffin for [his] soul,” teases flatmate Farhad (Vikash Bhai), exemplifying
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Films about the refugee experience tend to explore the obvious pain and waywardness of how bleak the situation can be. Mostly because, well, that’s how it really is for a lot of people around the world. So it’s interesting to see a new film like
Limbo approaching this issue from a different angle, leaning into the off-beat, dry humor of asylum-seekers trying to get by in a country that is as foreign to them as they are to it.
Ben Sharrock’s sophomore feature stars Amir El-Masry as Omar, an oud musician from Syria who fled the country during the real-life civil war, leaving his family behind for his own safety and maybe a chance to make some money. He’s currently in the limbo of awaiting asylum on a remote, Scottish island, a narrative decision that helps strain his isolation between these two worlds. The Scottish inhabitants of this fictional countryside, a dull and drab location to be clear, treat Omar and his fellow refugees as inconvenient outsiders, or with co
‘Mortal Kombat’ & ‘Demon Slayer’ Continue Gritty B.O. Fight For No. 1; But Both Pics Hit The Mat Hard In Weekend 2 Deadline 3 hrs ago
Demon Slayer, which had very notable openings and further revived the domestic B.O. last weekend, dropped precipitously this weekend, respectively at
-73% and
$6.4M for No. 1, with a running total of
$32.2M, and New Line’s
Mortal Kombat is at No. 2 with a weekend 2 of
$6.2M and a $34M 10-day total. No one was expecting this type of tumble. What does this say as the US has close to 70% of 40,7K screens reopened, and there’s talk of Los Angeles and San Francisco moving to the yellow tier, which could get theaters at 75% capacity? (It’s not as easy as that reads, more on that in a bit).
0Shares
Films about the refugee experience tend to explore the obvious pain and waywardness of how bleak the situation can be. Mostly because, well, that’s how it really is for a lot of people around the world. So it’s interesting to see a new film like
Limbo approaching this issue from a different angle, leaning into the off-beat, dry humor of asylum-seekers trying to get by in a country that is as foreign to them as they are to it.
Ben Sharrock’s sophomore feature stars Amir El-Masry as Omar, an oud musician from Syria who fled the country during the real-life civil war, leaving his family behind for his own safety and maybe a chance to make some money. He’s currently in the limbo of awaiting asylum on a remote, Scottish island, a narrative decision that helps strain his isolation between these two worlds. The Scottish inhabitants of this fictional countryside, a dull and drab location to be clear, treat Omar and his fellow refugees as inconvenient outsiders, or with co