Rating: 4.0★
American Samoa is, by most conventional football metrics, about as far from the top of the world game as it is possible to get. A small archipelago in the South Pacific with a population of around 55,000, it fields a national side that, in the early 2000s, had become
Rating: 2.5★
Soca music and the streets of Port of Spain make for a vivid backdrop, but She Paradise (2020) is less interested in tourism than in the particular pressures facing a young woman trying to carve out a life on her own terms. The film arrives as part of a modest
Rating: 1.5★
French Polynesia has served as a canvas for European fantasy and anxiety in equal measure ever since Gauguin packed his bags and headed for Tahiti in the 1890s. That long history of outsiders projecting their desires, their guilt, and their authority onto the islands and the people who live there
Rating: 1.0★
Candomblé is a religion of West African origin, carried to the Americas through the transatlantic slave trade and most associated today with Brazil, particularly the north-eastern state of Bahia. Its rituals involve music, movement, possession and a rich system of spiritual figures known as orixás, and it has survived
Rating: 3.5★
Venezuela's ongoing political crisis, the long shadow cast by the Chavista and then Maduro governments, has produced a wave of diaspora voices across literature, journalism, and film. Simón (2023) sits squarely within that current. Based on real events, it follows a young Venezuelan activist who has made it
Rating: 3.0★
The Federated States of Micronesia sits roughly halfway between Hawaii and the Philippines, a scattering of islands in the western Pacific that most people would struggle to place on a map. Since 1986, Micronesia has been tied to the United States through the Compact of Free Association, an arrangement that
Rating: 4.0★
El Salvador's cinema rarely finds its way onto the international festival circuit, which makes Cachada: The Opportunity something of an event in itself. The country carries one of the heaviest burdens of gender-based violence in Latin America, a social reality that sits quietly beneath this film'
Rating: 2.5★
There are certain franchises that define a particular moment in Hollywood history, and the Transformers series is a fairly clear example of what blockbuster filmmaking looked like in the mid-2000s. The property itself began life as a line of Hasbro toys in the early 1980s, quickly followed by a
Rating: 3.0★
Folk horror has enjoyed something of a quiet renaissance over the past decade or so, with films trading Gothic excess for a more grounded, elemental dread rooted in landscape, superstition, and community. It is a genre that rewards patience, and one that has proved a surprisingly fertile space for debut
Rating: 3.5★
There are certain films that arrive at precisely the right moment, catching a cultural mood and refusing to let go. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, released in the year 2000 and directed by Ang Lee, was very much one of those films. Drawing on the wuxia tradition, a genre with deep
Rating: 3.0★
By the early 1950s, Hollywood was, in most respects, still a man's world behind the camera. The major studios employed armies of contract directors, and women were conspicuously absent from that roster. Ida Lupino was the exception. Already a well-established actress by that point, she had turned
Article
Ten years ago this week, Park Chan-wook's "The Handmaiden" arrived in UK cinemas, a film that seemed almost wilfully designed to wrong-foot audiences. Here was a South Korean director, known for his stylised brutality and moral ambiguity, making what appeared on the surface to
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