Get the latest gossip
‘Flight 404’ Review: A Woman Returns to Her Secret Past in Egypt’s Stilted Oscar Submission
The Egyptian submission to the Academy Awards, Hany Khalifa's drama 'Flight 404' withholds its most interesting moments.
The plot is set in motion when Ghada’s noon prayers are interrupted by a phone call, detailing her estranged mother extorting a young relative for cash, a wonderfully symbolic occurrence of the past interfering with her present piety — a running theme. The cost leads Ghada to track down old connections from her past life, from madams to once-regular johns, in order to facilitate land deals, or make good on old favors, or pay find money for her Mecca trio, or … well, the list is long. Instead, the onus for building intrigue falls on disastrously conceived sequences of characters shouting plot reveals about their pasts at one another with machine-gun pacing, ensuring that key elements of the movie’s premise are disguised for the majority of its runtime, before being clunkily exposed and never mentioned again.
Or read this on Variety
