This film by director Ramin Bahrani has won golden opinions on the festival circuit, but I found it ultimately elusive and underpowered.

Ahmad Razvi plays a Pakistani guy who is grimly making ends meet in New York, a city in which people from his country are always liable to be called terrorists and beaten up. His job is to sell coffee and bagels from a big and unwieldy steel cart, which he has to push around by hand.

Ahmad was a man of substance back in Pakistan; some of the mysteries of his past are revealed and some are withheld. It is frustrating, though Bahrani's portrait of hidden poverty in New York is keenly felt and, intentionally or not, has something of De Sica's Bicycle Thieves.