The Band's Visit revisited.

"Though it's both a predictable culture-clash comedy and a gentle plea for people of different political backgrounds to 'just get along,' The Band's Visit nevertheless manages to use its central contrivances and inevitable cliches to its favor, and becomes something ethereal and winning," writes Michael Koresky at indieWIRE.

"Poignant in a way that pokes and prods - a little uncertain of itself - until it pierces through, The Band's Visit is a truly lovely film, as patient and generous with its characters as viewers should be with its delicately latent politics and occasional over-love of eccentric tableaux," writes the Reeler. "Writer/director Eran Kolirin presents the unstriking events of an Egyptian police band's single evening spent in a dead-end Israeli village with a strikingly tender, human eye that belies his status as a novice."

Updated through 2/10.

"It appears that many critics saw The Band's Visit as overly sentimental," notes Salon's Andrew O'Hehir. "I don't care. The film's episodic gentleness, I would say, is deceptive."

s "The Band's Visit resounds with tenderness and melancholy," writes David Edelstein in New York. "What's missing is even a hint of dissonance. Having established that unnerving political context, Kolirin treats the situation of Egyptians adrift in Israel as if it were, say, Chinese people in a North Miami Jewish condominium. There's no threat - there's barely a nod to the fact that the countries were at war. It's a breeze making the case for universal harmony when all of your characters are neutered."

"If The Band's Visit is a parable about Arab-Israeli relations, it's only in the most oblique sense; really, the film's subject is language and the difficult necessity of translation between cultures," writes Slate's Dana Stevens.

IFC's Matt Singer finds it "intentionally light, maybe even a little slight, but also unquestionably warm and charming."

"Think of Lost in Translation set in a desert and slow-dripped with the sentiment of Il Postino and Chocolat," suggests Jesse Sweet in the L Magazine.

Erica Abeel talks with Kolirin for indieWIRE.

Earlier: Reviews from Cannes, Toronto and December.

Update, 2/10: Online listening tip. Ed Champion talks with Kolirin.

Posted by dwhudson at February 8, 2008 2:42 PM