At the Tribeca Film Festival The village voice reviewed the Top 40 Picks under the title of “Best in Show” by J. Hoberman

The reviewer picked The Yacoubian Building as one of the best and wrote that “..This three-hour Egyptian epic- the most expensive ever made- has been crafted (in the old school, by youngish pro Marwan Hamed) as a massive Arabic soap opera, a Cairo-based Gone With the Wind swoony with mourning for a privileged colonialist past and with fascination for the bloody ideological conflicts of the present. Notably in a nation with notoriously strict censorship laws, Hamed's film revolves around the need for, and degeneration of, sex and money, and it's groundbreakingly frank about homosexuality and female exploitation. Hammy, lavish, and often thunderfooted, the movie is an immersion in rare ethnographic pulp”.