Rating: 2.0★
The early 1990s were a complicated, transitional moment for cinema coming out of the former Soviet republics. With the USSR dissolving in 1991, state film infrastructure collapsed almost overnight in many regions, leaving directors working with shrinking budgets, ageing equipment, and little institutional support. Little Angel, Make Me Happy, made
Rating: 3.0★
Arthur Jafa is a name that carries considerable weight in American visual culture, even if mainstream audiences might not immediately place it. A cinematographer by training (his credits include Spike Lee's Crooklyn and Julie Dash's landmark Daughters of the Dust), Jafa spent decades thinking seriously about
Rating: 2.5★
Aquaman arrived in December 2018 at something of a crossroads for the DC Extended Universe. Warner Bros. had spent several years watching Marvel print money while their own interconnected franchise stumbled through mixed-to-hostile receptions for Batman v Superman and Justice League. The pressure on this one was real:
Rating: 3.0★
Time travel has been a fixture of science fiction storytelling since at least H.G. Wells, and by the early 2000s Hollywood had well and truly made it its own, serving up glossy, effects-heavy productions that prioritised spectacle over rigour. Into that landscape arrived Primer in 2004, a film
Rating: 3.5★
There are films that travel, and there are films that get lost. I Am Cuba (or Soy Cuba, as it was titled on release) belongs to a peculiar third category: films that simply vanished, only to be rediscovered decades later and treated as if they had been divine transmissions all
Rating: 2.5★
Olivier Assayas has spent the better part of four decades building a reputation as one of French cinema's more restless and formally curious directors. Coming off the two-part miniseries Carlos (2010) and the well-received Clouds of Sils Maria (2014), in which he first worked with Kristen
Rating: 3.0★
Jean-Marie Straub is not a filmmaker who makes concessions to comfort, either his own or the audience's. Working for decades alongside his wife and creative partner Danièle Huillet, the Franco-German director built a body of work defined by rigorous formalism, political seriousness, and an almost confrontational
Rating: 2.5★
Roberto Rossellini shot Germany, Year Zero in the summer of 1947, on location in the actual ruins of Berlin, less than two years after the city's surrender. That context is worth sitting with for a moment. The rubble you see on screen is not a set. The hollowed-
Rating: 2.0★
Few toy franchises have had as stubborn a grip on popular imagination as Masters of the Universe. What began as a Mattel action figure line in 1982 snowballed, almost immediately, into an animated television series that became a Saturday morning institution for an entire generation of children on both sides
Rating: 3.5★
Egypt in 1881 sat at a peculiar crossroads: the Ottoman-backed Khedivate was losing its grip, European financial interests were tightening around the country like a slow vice, and the great pharaonic sites of the Nile Valley were being systematically stripped, catalogued, and shipped westward. It was into this charged
Rating: 3.0★
Bhutan does not have a long history as a film-producing nation. For much of the twentieth century it was closed to outside visitors entirely, and even after cautiously opening its borders in the 1970s it remained one of the least-filmed countries on the planet. That cultural insularity, combined
Rating: 1.5★
Artavazd Peleshian occupies a curious position in cinema history: enormously respected within academic and avant-garde circles, yet almost entirely unknown to general audiences outside Armenia and a small cluster of devoted film scholars. Born in 1938 in Leninakan (now Gyumri), Peleshian studied at the VGIK film school in Moscow
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