Metacritic reviews

A highly political movie that's also a personal story of two men going head-to-head while the women around them are left to pick up the pieces, this gorgeously shot and classily acted feature might be a reel too long but is nonetheless a fascinating piece of work.

It’s weighed down by symbolic significance, yet powerful and instructive all the same, with a few flickerings of black comedy.

How Joelle Touma’s script progresses is heavy-handed in its desire to augment the tensions and provide justifications, but it’s still powerful nonetheless.

The film also has plenty to say about male stubbornness and the casual misogyny that lurks behind the apparent equality of Lebanese society.

There is something undeniably exhilarating about the film’s honest assessment of the never-ending conflict between decency and cruelty that rages in every nation, neighborhood and heart.

While it doesn’t quite justify the sprawling courtroom antics or the blunt metaphor they entail, the movie nevertheless provides a profound look at the effect of historical trauma on modern Lebanese society.

Ziad Doueiri's film is well acted and staged with periodic liveliness, but its earnestness grows wearying.

The film can't be faulted for its attempt to argue for some kind of humane kinship and reconciliation, even if this attempt ends up dissolving the enmity in a sentimentality that, given what has come before, strains credibility.

Toward the end, Doueiri attempts to give his two leads a little more nuance, but Tony’s overwhelming anger steamrolls over occasional conciliatory behavior, which winds up feeling just manipulative.

As a study of inflammation in the body politic, The Insult is engaged and astute. In comparison with “West Beirut,” though, it seems oddly programmatic in its moral layout, designed to prove that, in Wajdi’s phrase, “no one has a monopoly on suffering.” Some viewers will emerge from the cinema feeling more schooled than stirred.