Critics reviews

An essential [film] for anyone interested in the man himself... ["Alexandria... Why?"] is a sprawling coming-of age drama chronicling Chahine’s adolescence in Alexandria, with an unusual warmth suggesting Chahine’s nostalgia for his youth. The film audaciously includes Chahine’s bisexuality, which breezily exists on screen without apology.

With its multitude of characters and labyrinth of intersecting stories, "Alexandria… Why?" has the detail and density of a great novel. Yet it remains an uneasy watch for Western viewers, perhaps because it does not filter its people and places through a veil of exoticism or ‘otherness’ in the way Hollywood and European films about the Middle East invariably do.

[The] hearty candor of [Chahine's films], their unbuttoned imagination and stylistic exuberance, make them a real pleasure to watch... With its broad canvas and many characters, ["Alexandria... Why?"] gives a really pungent depiction of its time -- and of Chahine himself.

[Alexandria] is Youssef Chahine's from the beginning, as fervidly distinctive as Fellini's Rome... Braiding national and personal identity, the cinéaste directs the last laugh at himself, the crossing of the sea greeted by Lady Liberty, painted and chortling.

A terrific movie in many respects, though perhaps less of a revelation than the trilogy’s 1990 conclusion, "Alexandria, Again and Always."

"Alexandria . . . Why?" is a commonplace mess that attempts to fuse the clichés of the popular cinema into a kind of pop epic, but Mr. Chahine doesn't have the talent or the discipline to fuse clichés into anything except a daisy-chain of peculiar events.