Rating: 4.0★
Few films arrive with quite the weight of expectation that Capernaum carried into cinemas in 2018. Directed by Lebanese filmmaker Nadine Labaki and premiering at Cannes, where it won the Jury Prize, the film centres on Zain, a twelve-year-old boy living in the poverty-stricken backstreets of Beirut,
Rating: 2.5★
There is a certain romantic melancholy baked into the very source material of Ali and Nino. The 1937 novel of the same name, published under the pen name Kurban Said, has been attributed to various authors over the decades (the true identity of its writer remains genuinely disputed), but its
Rating: 1.0★
Two of Us (also released under the alternate title Paradise Z, which is the version most viewers outside a handful of markets are likely to encounter) is a 2020 post-apocalyptic thriller clocking in at a brisk eighty minutes. On paper, it sits within a well-worn genre tradition: two
Rating: 4.0★
The early 2000s were something of a golden era for the prestige Hollywood epic, the kind of film that demanded a big screen and an interval ice cream, and The Last Samurai arrived in 2003 very much as a product of that moment. Set against the backdrop of the Meiji
Rating: 3.0★
The Adopted Son (known in Kyrgyz as Beshkempir) arrived in 1998 as something close to a cultural landmark, not just for Kyrgyzstan but for the broader wave of Central Asian cinema that was quietly finding an international audience in the decade following the Soviet Union's collapse. Kyrgyzfilm, the
Rating: 2.5★
Madagascar in the late 1960s and early 1970s was a place caught between two worlds. France had formally granted the island independence in 1960, yet its military presence lingered, and the communities clustered around those air bases existed in a curious bubble, half-French and half-adrift, insulated from both
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Marking Tom Hanks at 70: a look back across Tom's career through the films I've reviewed.
Rating: 3.0★
There is a version of the DC Extended Universe that feels perpetually at war with itself, and then there is The Suicide Squad. Released in August 2021, James Gunn's film arrived carrying an unusual amount of baggage: it was simultaneously a soft reboot of David Ayer's
Rating: 2.0★
The Mummy is one of those properties that refuses to stay buried. From the Universal Monsters era of the 1930s through to the sun-baked, adventure-serial fun of the late 1990s and early 2000s, the franchise has proved remarkably elastic, bending itself to suit whatever the prevailing mood in
Rating: 4.0★
Sudan is not a country with a long or well-resourced filmmaking tradition. Decades of conflict, economic instability, and a cultural climate that offered little institutional support for the arts meant that, for much of the twentieth century, Sudanese cinema barely existed as a going concern. That context matters when
Rating: 3.5★
There is a particular kind of film that arrives with little fanfare, plays a handful of festivals, and then quietly refuses to leave your head for weeks afterwards. Rungano Nyoni's I Am Not a Witch (2017) is very much one of those films. The premise draws from a
Rating: 4.0★
There is a specific kind of dread that the best horror thrillers manage to conjure, not the kind built from a sudden bang on the soundtrack or a face appearing in a mirror, but a slow, creeping certainty that something has gone very wrong and nobody is going to be
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