A Woman’s Life (La vie d’une femme) is the kind of daily-life movie at which French cinema excels. What we have here is nothing more and nothing less than slices from one woman’s life over a few years and the everyday problems that she experiences. This is both the kind …
Diego Luna has used the attention gained from the success of Andor to make a fascinating movie about a young Mexican woman’s tough life in Spain. Broadly speaking it is about the ways resentment and annoyance can spoil attempts to build a better life. Ashes also knows the power of …
Babe: Pig in the City this ain’t. There are some similarities, in that Hen was filmed using real animals with humans as incidental to the plot, but this Hungarian film set in Greece is so disturbing that it’s definitely not for kids. It is from the perspective of a black …
Two decades after his extensive and impactful work with Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Chidgasornpongse presents his debut feature, 9 Temples to Heaven (9 วัด สู่สวรรค์). The film is a selection of the Quinzaine des Cineastes of the Cannes Film Festival. The film follows a huge family of 9, who take their dying …
Dominga Sotomayor is one of the biggest names of the new generation of the Chilean cinema. Alongside Pablo Larraín and Sebastian Lelio, her films achieved the international recognition and received attention for their boldness. Her debut feature, De Jueves a Domingo, premiered at the International Film Festival Rotterdam. Her most …
In 2011, in the context of the Arab Spring, the Yemeni revolution took place in Sanaa, Yemen’s capital. Thousands of protestors organized themselves in the streets of the city, and the government murdered dozens of them. The result was the popular uprising against the state’s violence, which led to the …
Wolfram, which is full of plot twists that should not be spoiled, contains one particular twist that makes it very difficult to review. I would therefore encourage you to read this review after you have seen the movie. Otherwise please read this months before you actually see it, forgetting everything …
The French director Lila Pinell presented her first feature film, Kiss and Cry, at the Cannes Film Festival in the ACID parallel section, which she co-directed with Chloé Mahieu. Four years later, she released Le Roi David (King David), a short film that premiered at the prestigious Vila do Conde …
The Semaine de la Critique is a spotlight for the debut feature at the Cannes Film Festival. One of the 2026 selections in Flesh and Fuel (Du fioul dans les artères) by Pierre le Gall, whose last effort is the 2018 short Doubout. It tells the story of Étienne (Alexis …
The concept for WAX & GOLD is almost laughably deranged. It aims to examine the history of Ethiopia generally and Haile Selassie personally by filming only within Hilton Addis. Mr. Selassie was personally involved in bringing this Western hotel to the country, to the point of helping to design it, …
Animation is the best art form we have at depicting messy real life, because it heightens reality through the unreal in a way that never loses its realism. Writer-director Yoshitoshi Shinomiya, who developed his skills as a background artist on movies such as Your Name, now bursts onto the world …
In 2022, the debut feature film Tengo Sueños Eléctricos (I Have Electric Dreams) by the Costa Rican filmmaker Valentina Maurel made a potent appearance at that year’s Locarno Film Festival. It won the directing, actor (Reinaldo Amien Gutiérrez), and actress (Daniela Marín Navarro) awards in the main competition. Later, the …
For a movie designed around a teenage pregnancy it’s a surprise that We Are All Strangers focuses on the baby’s father. What writer-director Anthony Chen is exploring here is how family responsibilities force young men to grow up. The assumption seems to be that women have achieved maturity already, regardless …
One of the beauties of non-fiction filmmaking is presenting the audience with a reality that they might never have known before. Yet, there is a fascinating aspect to comprehending how human beings behave and live differently in each corner of the world. In this sense, the Polish documentary The Queen …
The unhappy true story on which Forsaken is based is one of the most traumatising situations in modern French history. It brought together several of the most hot-button issues of the modern era – freedom of speech and how the state handles issues of religion in a legally secular society …
The choice to film in black and white is the wrong one for historical dramas. It signifies to a modern audience that this story is happening in ye olden days and therefore none of the historical nuances matter, because we are watching the distant and irrelevant past. Thanks to an …
Someday a movie featuring an argument about Predator vs Hobbit fanfiction will deserve a negative review, but today is not that day. The Incomer is completely deranged (complimentary), and its derangement is entirely character-based, giving the actors the freedom to go as wild as possible, which they did. It’s a …
Independent Nigerian cinema is so rare that it’s automatically worth a look, but nothing gets a pass based on its cultural background alone. Whether a story is set in Liverpool, Los Angeles or Lagos it needs to be viewed within the same critical framework, and if a concept is offensive …
Before the spread of the academia as a central form of producing and teaching knowledge, the indigenous communities already understand crucial learnings about the world. Historically, civilizations such as the Mayans and Aztecs produced immense amounts of information on mathematics and engineering. Human being tends to seek understanding of their …
During the Berlinale I swung by photography museum C|O Berlin to look at their exhibit of work by Mexican photographer Graciela Iturbide (running until June 2026, and recommended). Her most famous photograph, “Mujer Ángel, Sonoran Desert, 1979,” shows an indigenous woman in traditional dress on the side of a hill, …