‘Casablanca Beats’ Review: A Lively, Unruly Moroccan Hip-Hop Drama

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the 14th century chivalric romance “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight." The movie, like the epic poem, is full of mysteries, most of them unspoken.

How do you make a superhero film for a multi-billion-dollar corporation feel like a personal endeavor? (please refrain from laughing at least until the very end) For filmmaker James Gunn that’s leaning into the two, sometimes contradictory elements of your personality, excavating the tension from that juxtaposition and letting it all bleed into your story.

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Normally on the opening day of a Morgan Neville film, the talk would be about box office potential—after all, his 2018 Mr. Rogers documentary Won’t You Be My Neighbor? earned an astounding $23 million.

other release valve. As with the economic issues, the fact that the men behind the 2003 and 2007 Casablanca attacks came from the same neighborhood is neither elided in the film nor dwelled upon.

Director Nabil Ayouch brings heart and energy to the Cannes Film Festival competition with Casablanca Beats (Haut Et Fort), a story of arts students in the titular Moroccan city. Former rapper Anas (a charismatic Anas Basbousi) takes a job at a cultural center in a working-class part of town, and tries to teach a mixed group of kids and teens to rap.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film CriticAs a filmmaker, Sean Penn has always had a flinty integrity, but the movies he directs work so hard to channel the values of ’70s films — they’re moody and fatalistic, with furrowed brows, and move at a pace of drop-dead deliberation — that early on, in the days of “The Indian Runner” (1991) and “The Crossing Guard” (1995), you could just about feel the sweat of his downbeat virtue.

Nick Vivarelli International CorrespondentFrench-Moroccan director Nabil Ayouch grew up in the Paris suburb of Sarcelles, which he says is “quite violent,” during the late ’70s and early ’80s when hip-hop was emerging in France. In the mid-’90s he moved to Casablanca, where he is now based, and became involved with the sprawling shantytown of Sidi Moumen on that city’s outskirts, a wasteland where extreme poverty and hopelessness have been known to breed Islamic terrorism.

The Doors’ frontman is buried. Many brought candles and pictures, and some burned incense sticks near his grave as police watched nearby.“Jim and The Doors have been heroes of ours since we were kids.