70
The New York Times by Ben Kenigsberg
Whether In the Last Days of the City ultimately comes together as a feature is open to debate, but this is a film of beauty and skill.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
80
It is not easy to describe In the Last Days of the City, an immersive visual experience with a wisp of a story and a wellspring of ideas.
80
The Hollywood Reporter by Deborah Young
Though the story is fictional, the imagery is grounded in a powerful documentary reality.
80
The real achievement is how the film captures and holds a mood that develops and expands, with a yearning for what was and what might have been.
60
The Guardian by Peter Bradshaw
It’s a melancholy, interesting film, slightly opaque, a cine-journal about the way youth is clouded by experience.
90
Los Angeles Times by Robert Abele
A soulful, atmospheric travelogue that toggles between immersing in and removing itself from the chaotic beauty of teeming humanity, El Said's movie gives a humming, on-the-edge metropolis its heart-pumping, reflective due.
63
Slant Magazine by Steve Macfarlane
By diagramming a vastly complicated metropolis like Cairo from an unabashedly first-person perspective, In the Last Days of the City interrogates middle-class privilege in a time of crisis as a series of either-ors: leaving for Europe or staying in Cairo, hiding at home or protesting in the streets, filming blindly or seeking retrenchment in broad certainty.