I wasn't wild about seeing The Band's Visit. From the publicity materials, it looked like another one of those watered-down, Hallmarky foreign-language films that have slowly seeped into the American box office, stuff like Like Water for Chocolate, Il Postino or Life Is Beautiful that appeals to wide audiences without ever rising above pure fluff. (Many of these films fell under Harvey Weinstein's scissors, and were each similarly shaped according to his commercial instincts.) But happily The Band's Visit has its own rhythms and personality apart from all this. It's a crowd-pleaser, to be sure, but an expertly crafted and hugely rewarding one.

Written and directed by Eran Kolirin, making his feature debut, the film is a member of that great, but underused genre: disparate personalities thrown together by unexpected circumstances, like Hitchcock's Lifeboat (1944), Sidney Lumet's 12 Angry Men (1957) or John Hughes' The Breakfast Club (1985). The Band's Visit sets up its visual displacement right away, as the eight members of the Alexandria Ceremonial Police Band from Egypt wait at an Israeli airport, on an almost abandoned, sun-baked platform, vainly hoping that their hosts will pick them up. They stand, starch-stiff in their immaculate uniforms, silent instruments crated at their feet. The leader, Tawfiq (Sasson Gabai, also in Rambo III -- no kidding) decides to take action. He orders the band's youngest member, a tall ladies man, Khaled (Saleh Bakri) to get directions. But in speaking to an attractive girl behind a counter, he gets the wrong pronunciation and the band winds up in a desolate town on the far side of the country.

Egyptian cinema hasn't been too popular in America, but now there's good news. A production company based out of Cairo called Good News for Film and Music is trying to make Egyptian films that appeal to Western audiences in addition to those in Arab countries. Last year Good News released The Yacoubian Building, which was the most expensive film ever produced in Egypt and was intended to be accessible to moviegoers in Europe and North America. The film has screened at a number of international festivals, including Berlin, Rome and Tribeca, where it won an award for Best New Feature Director, and though it wasn't nominated or even shortlisted for the foreign language Oscar -- it was Egypt's official submission -- it has so far been pretty well received (see Cinematical's review here).

Now Good News is following the success of The Yacoubian Building with a few more high-profile films that should be geared towards and possibly appeal to American audiences. The first is a biopic about Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri and the history of al Qaeda. According to Good News head Adel Adeeb, the plot will focus on the two al Qaeda leaders as they contact an American journalist in order to tell their life stories. This seems likely to be a framing device for a film told in flashback, and the fictional Western filter should make it easier for American audiences to digest the film, which will certainly be controversial no matter how accessible.