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Joseph Fahim

Tomatometer-approved critic
Biography:

Joseph Fahim is a film critic, curator, and lecturer. His curated programs have been presented in the U.S., Europe, and the Middle East. He co-authored various books on Arab cinema and has contributed to numerous outlets in the Middle East, including Middle East Eye, Middle East Institute, Al Monitor, and Al Jazeera along with various international platforms and publications such as Mubi’s Notebook, Sight & Sound, British Film Institute, and BBC Culture. To date, his writings have been published in nine different languages.

Reviews

Movies TV Shows
Irkalla: Gilgamesh's Dream (2025) EDIT “Self-importantly bleak and exasperatingly formulaic, Irkalla is the bastard child of Capernaum: a regressive piece of misery porn replete with child labour, terrorist plots, and underage prostitution. ” – Middle East Eye Jan 23, 2026 Full Review The Voice of Hind Rajab (2025) 95% EDIT “The film’s unmodulated use of the child’s calls leaves space only for enforced sympathy rather than reflective distance. The aestheticisation of actual events through such a synthetic narrative ultimately denies Hind individuality.” – BFI Jan 16, 2026 Full Review Cotton Queen (2025) EDIT “The patchy, uneven performances fail to bring the emotion of the story to the fore. And the overstuffed script never takes the unpredictable left turns it constantly hints at. ” – Middle East Eye Dec 21, 2025 Full Review A Sad and Beautiful World (2025) EDIT “Love is hard work: a series of difficult compromises, Aris suggests, and living in the permanent purgatory that is Lebanon certainly compounds these compromises. ” – Middle East Eye Dec 21, 2025 Full Review Hijra (2025) EDIT “Part affecting tale of female bonding, part perceptive reflection on evolving intergenerational relationships, and part an incisive dissection of class and race in the kingdom, Ameen’s brilliant picture is one of the most daring Saudi films ever made. ” – Middle East Eye Sep 5, 2025 Full Review Mektoub, My Love: Canto Due (2025) EDIT “Canto Due remains as light as a feather; a diverting wish-fulfillment fronted by a maddingly passive, soulless protagonist. Kechiche no longer has anything remotely fresh or noteworthy to say about the Arab experience in France. ” – Middle East Eye Aug 22, 2025 Full Review With Hasan in Gaza (2025) 100% EDIT “Gaza has endured plenty of pain, Aljafari emphasises, but it never lost its humanity, its joy, its resilience. Aljafari captures this world so vividly, so tenderly, so unassumingly in his futile search for a piece of himself forever lost in detention. ” – Middle East Eye Aug 22, 2025 Full Review Hysteria (2025) 93% EDIT “Hysteria is superlative political entertainment: a bold, intelligent picture that explores the complex and often contradictory relationship of second-generation Germans to their Islamic heritage, class privilege, the moral price of artistic integrity. ” – BFI Aug 16, 2025 Full Review Dreams (2024) 90% EDIT “Storytelling may have aided Johanne’s healing; it may have given her a powerful tool for self-affirmation, for reclaiming the narrative Johanna has never and may never acknowledge, but it couldn’t grant her closure. ” – BFI Aug 16, 2025 Full Review The President's Cake (2025) 100% EDIT “Hadi paints a stark portrait of a dog-eat-dog world with fizzling morality. His political commentary is pronounced, finding no difference between Hussein’s megalomania and the West’s casual ambivalence towards Iraqi civilians. ” – Middle East Eye Aug 16, 2025 Full Review October 8 (2024) 63% EDIT “October 8 is built on a series of deliberate omissions and fear mongering, an unscrupulous if familiar tactic that betrays the subjects’ indignation and their weak conviction. ” – Middle East Eye Jun 2, 2025 Full Review The Encampments (2025) 94% EDIT “Personal histories of the activists provide ample opportunities for reflections around questions of identity, trauma, and the youthful desire for tangible change. The Encampments is an urgent document of an event that has been tarnished by the media. ” – Middle East Eye Jun 2, 2025 Full Review 1001 Frames (2025) EDIT “1001 Frames never transcends its narrow experimental parameters, never managing to build tension due to the rigidity of a static structure that grows tiresome by the halfway mark. ” – Middle East Eye Mar 23, 2025 Full Review No Beast. So Fierce. (2025) EDIT “With no socio-political context provided, the self-congratulatory stylisation of No Beast quickly runs thin as it sluggishly salivates for relevance in its waning moments. ” – Middle East Eye Mar 23, 2025 Full Review Khartoum (2025) 93% EDIT “Realised with remarkable sensitivity and shot with distinctive lyricism, Khartoum never solely relies on its urgent politics to lift the picture up; its mature, striking artistry is inseparable from its unsentimental humanism. ” – Middle East Eye Mar 23, 2025 Full Review Yunan (2025) EDIT “Yunan is self-involved, stubbornly insular narration, leading to a highly problematic standardisation and flattening of Arab exile – a complex experience shaped by class, politics, and disparate psychological factors. ” – Middle East Eye Mar 23, 2025 Full Review Yalla Parkour (2024) 82% EDIT “Zuaiter fails to convey the full essence of Ahmad. Zuaiter’s hagiographic, one-dimensional presentation of her protagonist leaves off his loves, his weaknesses, his relationships, and even his political convictions. ” – Middle East Eye Mar 11, 2025 Full Review The Brutalist (2024) 93% EDIT “The Brutalist is the story of modern America’s derision of art, of any creative endeavour that has no immediate monetary value. America has no place for a man of Laszlo’s ilk, for defiant art that refuses to abide by the rules of the market. ” – Middle East Eye Feb 3, 2025 Full Review To a Land Unknown (2024) 98% EDIT “The biggest feat of Fleifel’s humanistic tour de force is the agency it gives his young men to be whoever they are: hustling junkies, headstrong hoodlums forever thrust in a quixotic quest to find a home they can never attain” – Middle East Eye Dec 28, 2024 Full Review A Fidai Film (2024) EDIT “A Fidai Film is a dense if playful picture that questions our belief in the veracity of the image while exposing the hazardous role of narration: a simultaneous act of disruption and self-affirmation against time, violent depletion, and fate. ” – Middle East Eye Dec 28, 2024 Full Review From Ground Zero (2024) 98% EDIT “The splatter of optimism, of perseverance, fashioned by the Gazan women filmmakers as a form of dignified resistance makes for some of the most powerful moments in any film this year, challenging what cinema is and what it could be. ” – Middle East Eye Dec 28, 2024 Full Review East of Noon (2024) 100% EDIT “Laced with disparate influences – from the colloquial poetry of Salah Jahin and Egyptian musicals of the 1940s, to the use of political symbolism in the Brazilian Cinema Novo, East of Noon is the year’s most formally inventive Middle Eastern picture.” – Middle East Eye Dec 28, 2024 Full Review Perfumed with Mint (2024) EDIT “Hamdy's film flouts the rules of classical storytelling associated with Egyptian cinema, conjuring up a disorienting mist of a film about fear, trauma, and the overbearing stupefaction that has taken over the broken generation of the 2011 Revolution. ” – Middle East Eye Dec 28, 2024 Full Review The Bibi Files (2024) 95% EDIT “The Bibi Files is not just an expertly made investigation of Israel's most notorious head of state: it’s a Macbeth-like fable of a man punch-drunk on blind ambition; a penetrating study of a man corrupted and empowered by his violent addiction to power. ” – Middle East Eye Dec 28, 2024 Full Review Mond (2024) EDIT “The occasional thrills offered by the genre tropes cannot conceal the predictability of the material at hand. Mond is yet another account of young bright girls oppressed by their controlling family for reasons that never manage to convince. ” – Middle East Eye Dec 28, 2024 Full Review
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