Belgian cinema is perhaps best known internationally for the Dardenne brothers, whose unflinching social realism has won multiple Palme d'Or awards at Cannes. The country also has a strong tradition of dark comedy and surrealist sensibility, shaped in part by the spirit of Magritte. Have a browse through Macca's Belgian picks below.
Rating: 2.5★
Cape Verde in the mid-1960s was a place caught between worlds. Still a Portuguese colonial territory (independence would not come until 1975), the archipelago was watching the old certainties crack under pressure from economic and social forces that no amount of tradition could hold back. The volcanic island of
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
Rating: 3.0★
French Guiana occupies a peculiar place in the cultural imagination: an overseas territory of France, geographically part of South America, historically shaped by the brutal legacy of the penal colony at Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni, and today home to communities whose lives bear little resemblance to anything you might associate
Rating: 4.0★
By the mid-1960s, Formula One had grown from a specialist motorsport into a genuinely global spectacle, its calendar sweeping through Monaco, Spa, Monza, and beyond, drawing enormous crowds and an air of glamorous, sometimes fatal, theatre. The 1966 season in particular marked a major technical turning point for the
Rating: 2.5★
Reproduction has been a recurring preoccupation of science fiction, from the bleakest dystopias to gentler satirical fables, and it is not hard to see why. Few subjects carry more political, philosophical, and emotional weight, and few lend themselves so readily to the kind of "what if" speculation that
Rating: 3.0★
Animation from outside the Hollywood and major European studio circuits has had something of a quiet renaissance over the past decade or so, with films like Josep and No Dogs or Italians Allowed demonstrating that hand-crafted, personal animation can carry real emotional weight without the backing of a nine-
Rating: 3.0★
Chad is not a country you would typically associate with a thriving film industry, and that context matters when watching Lingui, the Sacred Bonds. The country gained independence from France in 1960, yet for decades its cultural output on screen remained negligible, constrained by poverty, political instability, and an almost
Rating: 3.0★
February 1939 marked one of the most desperate mass movements of people in modern European history. As Franco's Nationalist forces closed in on the last Republican strongholds in Catalonia, somewhere between 400,000 and 500,000 Spanish civilians and soldiers crossed the Pyrenees into France in a matter
Rating: 3.5★
The title alone tells you something about the world this film inhabits. "No Dogs or Italians Allowed" refers to the kind of signs that reportedly appeared outside lodgings and workplaces in early twentieth-century France, a blunt shorthand for the discrimination faced by the waves of Italian labourers
Genre Documentary
★★★ — The Second Night (2016)
Genre Mystery
★★★½ — The Fourth Kind (2009)
Genre Fantasy
★★½ — Kirikou and the Sorceress (1998)
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