Scheherazade: Tell Me a Story

Lively, swift, vibrantly colorful and for the most part wonderfully acted, the film is slyly aware of the daytime talk show as a vehicle for women's concerns.

Nasrallah's artistry is ultimately incapable of matching his narrative's social significance.

Scheherazade brims with faith in storytelling as art's great way of lifting society's veils.

"Scheherazade, Tell Me a Story" is a powerful indictment of misogyny that overturns stereotypes about Egypt through the dramatic stories women recount on a television show.

Together with scribe Waheed Hamed, helmer Yousry Nasrallah presents women's sexuality as an expression of self-determination, making clear the parallels with an ever-degenerating political system.

An urgent political statement that's also a funny, sexy entertainment.

A scathing update of the Thousand And One Nights classic of a queen's bid to stay alive through unique female survival instincts linked to the gift of gab. And a film that was surely a political prophesy, of the historic Tahrir Square uprisings to come.

A clarion call for the Middle East to emerge from the Middle Ages!

Read in terms of a pure melodrama the movie is wrenching.