Youssef Chahine, whose long career outlived its inspiration, died in his eighties in 2008. Fifty years earlier he made the stark, brash, gripping Bab el hadid, for which he cast himself in the lead role of Qinawi, a crippled newspaper vendor at Cairo Station whose twisted dreams and murderous activity are given individual (psychological) and […]

“Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle” — 13th-century Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria Suspenseful films run the risk of being inhuman; when they also bring great compassion to the camera, such as Alfred Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt (1943) does, they can provide a merciful as well as pitiless experience—richly […]