Rating: 3.5★
South Korean cinema had, by the mid-2000s, already announced itself to international audiences in no uncertain terms. Bong Joon-ho's Memories of Murder had arrived in 2003 to widespread critical admiration, and Park Chan-wook was busy cementing his reputation with the Vengeance trilogy. Into this fertile
Macca's Must Watch
Cinema has long wrestled with the Palestinian experience, but rarely with the scope and emotional weight that All That's Left of You attempts. The film opens in the Occupied West Bank of the 1980s, where a single act of protest by a teenage boy sets in motion a
Rating: 3.5★
There are films you watch and films you experience, and A River Called Titas (1973) sits very firmly in the second category. Based on the celebrated Bengali novel Titas Ekti Nadir Naam by Adwaita Malla Barman, the film is set in the river delta region of what is now Bangladesh,
Rating: 1.0★
There is a particular corner of the early 2000s direct-to-video market that time has not been especially kind to, and Max Havoc: Ring of Fire (2006) occupies it with a kind of stubborn permanence. The film is a sequel to Max Havoc: Curse of the Dragon (2004), itself
Rating: 1.0★
There are directors who work fast and directors who work cheap, and then there is Albert Pyun, who managed both simultaneously across a career that produced somewhere in the region of fifty feature films. By the time Max Havoc: Curse of the Dragon arrived in 2004, Pyun had already cycled
Rating: 3.0★
Jean Rouch occupies a peculiar corner of film history, one that gets cited constantly in academic circles but rarely makes it onto a Friday night watchlist. A French ethnographer turned filmmaker, he spent decades in West Africa, developing what he came to call ethnofiction, a practice that sat somewhere between
Article
The Fast and the Furious (2001) at twenty-five: a look back at the film, its making and its legacy.
Rating: 1.5★
There are films that disturb you because something terrible happens on screen, and then there are films that disturb you because the director has decided that you, the person sitting in the dark, are the real subject of the exercise. Michael Haneke's Funny Games, made in Austria in
Rating: 4.0★
Euzhan Palcy's Sugar Cane Alley arrived in 1983 as something of a landmark, not just for Caribbean cinema but for French-language filmmaking more broadly. Set in Martinique during the early 1930s, the film draws on Joseph Zobel's 1950 autobiographical novel La Rue Cases-Nègres, a
Rating: 3.5★
Short horror films occupy a curious corner of the genre. Freed from the obligation to pad a story to feature length, the best of them can land a single, well-aimed punch and walk away clean. Moshari (2022) is one such film: a Bangladeshi production running to around twenty-two
Rating: 2.5★
There is a long and restless tradition in world cinema of using the horror genre as a vessel for social and political anxieties, particularly around bodies, identity, and the pressures of conformity. From the body-horror provocations of Cronenberg through to the folk-inflected dread of more recent European and
Rating: 1.5★
Bulgarian cinema has spent the better part of the last two decades earning a quiet, patchy reputation on the international festival circuit, producing the odd gem alongside a good deal of material that never travels far beyond the region. Zift (2008) remains perhaps the most striking example of Bulgarian genre
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