Yacoubian Building, the movie

Last, save room for the Egyptian filmmaker Marwan Hamed’s richly textured melodrama “The Yacoubian Building,” which for 161 absorbing minutes brings us close to a cross section of tenants living in a gently shabby Cairo apartment house. Inside this magnificent relic of an earlier age, a microcosm of the jangling, confused world outside, a faded aristocrat, who frequents a bar where the piano player sings only in French, struggles to find a place in the new Egypt alongside a janitor’s son whose dreams are waylaid by class discrimination, a closeted gay newspaper editor and a young woman who rejects her newly devout Muslim fiancé with a statement as complex as it is inarguable: “You have a religious beard, I wear short skirts.” (NYT)