Summer of Our Discontent: Dabis’ Sophomore Feature an Uneven Venture
Nebraska born filmmaker Cherien Dabis follows up her well received 2009 debut Amreeka with a cotton candy cross-cultural, romantically inclined melodrama, May in the Summer, this time casting herself in the lead. While the ravishingly beautiful Dabis proves to be an utterly engaging lead performance, her latest, while pleasant enough to sit through, seems tonally uneven, to say the least, and plays as if it’s quite undecided about whether it wants to be a socially aware comedy of cultural clashes or, unfortunately, a murky melodrama that pulls out all the subtle stops when it decides to stop spinning.
May (Dabis), basking in the glow of her recently successful first book, has traveled to Amman, Jordan to meet up with her mother, Nadine (Hiam Abbass) and her two younger sisters, Yasmine (Nadine Malouf) and Dalia (Alia Shawkat). She’s about to...
Nebraska born filmmaker Cherien Dabis follows up her well received 2009 debut Amreeka with a cotton candy cross-cultural, romantically inclined melodrama, May in the Summer, this time casting herself in the lead. While the ravishingly beautiful Dabis proves to be an utterly engaging lead performance, her latest, while pleasant enough to sit through, seems tonally uneven, to say the least, and plays as if it’s quite undecided about whether it wants to be a socially aware comedy of cultural clashes or, unfortunately, a murky melodrama that pulls out all the subtle stops when it decides to stop spinning.
May (Dabis), basking in the glow of her recently successful first book, has traveled to Amman, Jordan to meet up with her mother, Nadine (Hiam Abbass) and her two younger sisters, Yasmine (Nadine Malouf) and Dalia (Alia Shawkat). She’s about to...
- 8/20/2014
- by Nicholas Bell
- IONCINEMA.com
Our Sundance Film Festival adventure began by immediately setting a high bar with the sophomore film and acting debut (as leading lady, no less) of Cherien Dabis (Amreeka), May in the Summer.
May (Cherien Dabis), a successful and ambitious writer living in New York with her fiancée Ziad (Alexander Siddig), has come home to Amman, Jordan in order to complete the preparations for her wedding that takes place in a month’s time. In the absence of her fiancée, under the judgmental watch of her born-again-times-ten mother (Hiam Abbass) and the newfound presence of her usually absent father (Bill Pullman) and his new wife Anu (Ritu Singh Pande), May begins to discover that her once structured and well planned future just might be the wrong one for her.
Add her two younger siblings, one permanently sarcastic and the other a big-mouth princess (Alia Shawkat & Nadine Malouf), as well as just...
May (Cherien Dabis), a successful and ambitious writer living in New York with her fiancée Ziad (Alexander Siddig), has come home to Amman, Jordan in order to complete the preparations for her wedding that takes place in a month’s time. In the absence of her fiancée, under the judgmental watch of her born-again-times-ten mother (Hiam Abbass) and the newfound presence of her usually absent father (Bill Pullman) and his new wife Anu (Ritu Singh Pande), May begins to discover that her once structured and well planned future just might be the wrong one for her.
Add her two younger siblings, one permanently sarcastic and the other a big-mouth princess (Alia Shawkat & Nadine Malouf), as well as just...
- 1/21/2013
- by Micah Phillips
- HeyUGuys.co.uk
Title: May in the Summer Director: Cherien Dabis Starring: Cherien Dabis, Hiam Abbass, Bill Pullman, Alia Shawkat, Nadine Malouf, Alexander Siddig, Ritu Singh Pande This cleverly-titled film follows May (Cherien Dabis) as she comes from New York to Amman, Jordan with her sisters as her wedding date approaches. May’s success as an intellectual and an author in the U.S. makes her popular among her mother’s Jordanian friends, but she encounters much greater difficulty dealing with her family and deciding whether or not to go through the wedding. Dabis pulls quadruple duty as star, writer, director, and producer, creating a thoroughly entertaining and thought-provoking look at an American family in a [ Read More ]
The post May in the Summer Movie Review appeared first on Shockya.com.
The post May in the Summer Movie Review appeared first on Shockya.com.
- 1/20/2013
- by abe
- ShockYa
Lights Out: Prasad’s Feature Debut a Messy, Stagnant Immigration Drama
Previously working as a documentary filmmaker, director Shundell Prasad makes her fiction feature debut with Festival of Lights. Here she explores issues of identity and immigration with a family fleeing 1970s Guyana for a better life in the United States. However, despite the population she highlights, mostly unseen or unheard in mainstream Western cinema, the end product is a contrived soap opera of cliché and predictability. Top that off with an extremely grating, off-putting lead performance, a weak screenplay and a rather uninspired look, and you have what feels like a film school conversation piece inspired by innately better material, which something like Mira Nair’s similar 1991 film, Mississippi Masala (yes, different region and immigration experience explored) simply blows out of the water in comparison.
Beginning during a period of political turmoil, we are introduced to Vishnu (Jimi Mistry...
Previously working as a documentary filmmaker, director Shundell Prasad makes her fiction feature debut with Festival of Lights. Here she explores issues of identity and immigration with a family fleeing 1970s Guyana for a better life in the United States. However, despite the population she highlights, mostly unseen or unheard in mainstream Western cinema, the end product is a contrived soap opera of cliché and predictability. Top that off with an extremely grating, off-putting lead performance, a weak screenplay and a rather uninspired look, and you have what feels like a film school conversation piece inspired by innately better material, which something like Mira Nair’s similar 1991 film, Mississippi Masala (yes, different region and immigration experience explored) simply blows out of the water in comparison.
Beginning during a period of political turmoil, we are introduced to Vishnu (Jimi Mistry...
- 10/31/2012
- by Nicholas Bell
- IONCINEMA.com
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