‘A Sad and Beautiful World’ Is Too Cloying for Comfort

A work of art bearing a title like “A Sad and Beautiful World” is bound to trade in schmaltz of one sort or another, and Cyril Aris’s new Arabic-language film is a case in point. Notwithstanding the turbulent specificity of its context, Beirut in perpetual crisis, the screenplay Mr. Aris co-wrote with Bane Fakih is some kind of conventional, a dramedy that leaves no iota of sweetness or sentimentality unmilked. It’s a confection whose constituent parts, though not without their merits, are, in the short term, cloying.