Luxor

Filmmaker Zeina Durra’s entrancing, languorous Luxor wonders about the allure of the backward gaze and the uncertainty inspired by an unknowable future, and co-stars Andrea Riseborough and Karim Saleh are practically perfect in this thoughtful romance.

The dialogue is thin and the action is patchy, but Durra films Hana’s travels—and the places that she visits—with an ardent attention that fuses emotional life with aesthetic and intellectual exploration.

In its modest, quiet maturity, Luxor avoids the cliché of presenting the East as exotic or renewal as a catharsis — it’s the rare travel story that understands how sometimes being someplace else is as much about the “being” as it is the “someplace else.”

There's an extraordinary immediacy to Luxor, born of director Durra's unromantic but loving view of the environment.

While the indecision of the plot reflects the hapless existential angst of Hana’s mid-life crisis, Luxor moves further away from meaningful rumination as the film progresses, and ends not with a bang, but a whimper.