But aha Nothing here is quite what it appears

If nothing else, Dabis, in her first feature, immediately gets added to the impressive list of Sundance discoveries.Adding poignancy, to say nothing of dramatic heft, to this immigrant story is that it concerns a Palestinian mother and her teenage son, who leave their Israeli-occupied homeland for Illinois just as American forces invade Iraq. Few immigrants have been greeted with such fear and animosity as American "patriots" fail to distinguish among Arab groups or to realize this family isn't even Muslim.When Muna Farah (stage actress and director Nisreen Faour) gets a U.S Green Card in the mail, she is shocked. She has forgotten having applied for it when she was married. Her son Fadi (Melkar Muallem), whose educational and job opportunities are limited in Palestine, is overjoyed he can't wait to flee his home.The two fly to the American heartland, where her sister Raghda (veteran actress Hiam Abbass) and her doctor husband Nabeel (Yussuf Abu-Warda) live in a small town. Muna loses all of her money in an airport misfortune then finds bank work impossible to find, despite her experience and degrees.

Meanwhile, Nabeel's practice has all but vanished with the Iraq invasion.The film deals with the setbacks suffered by these two FOBs fresh-off-the-boaters but Dabis also shows the other side of the American Dream with a rich sense of humor. Small cultural misunderstandings, the vital importance of clothes and attitude to get through high school and rousing family quarrels all trigger big laughs.In this way, Dabis subtly shifts the tale away from victimhood to one of human nature finding unexpected ways to triumph under pressure. She nails the universal in every instance and catches people with their pants down, whether it be the doctor's unhealthy obsession with the nightly news or the mother's obsession with weight loss, having lost her husband to a skinny woman.The cast is uniformly wonderful, but let's single out the two leads. Muallem, all of 16, beautifully captures the vacillation of a newcomer who wants to embrace a new life but is torn by homesickness and displacement.Tobias Datum gives the hand-held cinematography different looks for Ramallah warm but sun-blasted and the U.S. (where Winnipeg, Manitoba, plays the Illinois town), overcast and a tad monotonous with lots of artificial lighting.

Kareem Roustom's Middle Eastern-flavored score also contributes greatly.Reuters/Hollywood Reporter Film. LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - "The Lodger" is the third film to be based, at least loosely, on Marie Belloc Lowndes' 1913 novel which itself was based loosely on the unsolved Jack the Ripper murders of Victorian London and the umpteenth film to deal with that infamous killing spree.Only in this film, writer-director David Ondaatje moves the story to contemporary West Hollywood and deconstructs the narrative into alternating levels of reality and illusion.Samuel Goldwyn's January 23 release might amuse some, especially fans of Alfred Hitchcock, but is likely to annoy almost everyone else. So despite whatever allure macabre sex slayings may possess, box office does not look promising.The concept in Lowndes' book, first made into a silent movie in 1927 by Hitchcock himself, is that a mysterious lodger checks into a couple's room for rent at the exact moment a deranged killer is preying on prostitutes. The landlady comes to suspect her lodger is the slayer.In Ondaatje's film, a writer (Simon Baker) rents a backyard cottage from a troubled woman (Hope Davis) and her abusive and frequently absent husband (Donal Logue). Meanwhile, in a parallel narrative, the film follows the efforts of a police detective (Alfred Molina) and his rookie partner (Shane West) to catch the elusive killer while the detective struggles with his own demons that include a crazy, suicidal wife (Mel Harris) and an estranged daughter (Rachael Leigh Cook).But aha! Nothing here is quite what it appears. The detectives are tracking a phantom twice removed if you can follow the logic of this since their serial killer is imitating a serial killer several years before, since captured and executed, who was in fact imitating Jack the Ripper in the impoverished Whitechapel district of 1888 London.To further cloud the issue, three male characters the lodger, detective and husband fall under suspicion of being the killer Oh, and the rental cottage is on Whitechapel Street.

Where, pray tell, is their business A cop pulls a gun on a fellow cop, gets suspended without pay yet keeps turning up at crime scenes to help in the investigation. The rookie detective clearly is established as gay, then suddenly he has a wife.Ondaatje's filmography confirms what any viewer of this film can tell: He is obsessed with Hitchcock. All his short films apparently make references to themes, techniques and in one case actual shots from the master's body of work. In this film, he frequently echoes Hitchcock, from a Bernard Herrmann-influenced musical score by John Frizzell to trick shots culled from Hitchcock movies. But the film relies less on Hitchcock's original "The Lodger" and more on "Vertigo," with its theme of characters who misinterpret what they witness.The movie devolves into a story where a viewer cannot trust anything he sees. If that is your killer, then every scene of prostitutes being murdered is a fake.Reuters/Hollywood Reporter.