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: 3.5★
A Town Called Panic arrives from a corner of European animation that rarely gets much attention on this side of the Channel: the Belgian tradition of wilfully odd, low-budget, high-energy filmmaking that seems entirely unbothered by what anyone else is doing. The film grew out of a television
Rating: 2.5★
In the spring of 1992, the acquittal of four Los Angeles Police Department officers in the beating of Rodney King set off five days of uprising across the city that left more than fifty people dead and caused over a billion dollars in damage. It remains one of the most
Rating: 3.5★
The image that stays with me from Johnny Mad Dog is the dressing-up. Boys of ten to fifteen years old going into battle wearing wedding dresses, wigs, angel wings, whatever they have managed to loot along the way, each one answering to some fearsome nom de guerre. It is
Rating: 2.5★
There's a version of The Red Turtle that I think I could love. The version that exists purely as a sequence of images, a moving watercolour book you'd leave open on a coffee table and let wash over you. Michael Dudok de Wit has made something
Rating: 3.5★
Press play on Tomm Moore's 2009 animated feature and within seconds you're struck dumb by how gorgeous it all is. The vibrant colours, the geometric, illuminated-manuscript art style, the sheer fluidity of the movement across the screen. It's a genuine visual feast, and
Rating: 4.0★
Eight minutes. No dialogue. One of the most devastating things I've ever watched. That's the short version of my thoughts on Michael Dudok de Wit's Father and Daughter, and honestly, it nearly does the job on its own. But it deserves more than that.
Rating: 3.5★
Some of my wife's family hails from Cambodia, so I've heard my fair share of harrowing stories about the Khmer Rouge over the years. Those conversations, shared around kitchen tables and over family dinners, are heavy in a way that's hard to articulate. And
Rating: 2.5★
That opening sequence is something special. We're dropped into a quaint fishing village, Marat heading out to sea with his wife while her younger sister watches from the docks. Then, without warning, a colossal sandstorm rolls in across the horizon, swallowing everything in its path. It's
Rating: 2.5★
There's something genuinely stirring about sitting down with a film that carries the weight of a nation's entire cinematic identity on its shoulders. The Island of Contenda holds the remarkable distinction of being the very first feature film both set in and produced entirely by native
Rating: 2.5★
There's a particular tightrope that films about colonial history have to walk, and most of them fall off it in one direction or the other. Either they sanitise the era into something palatable and pretty, or they overload the screen with guilt until the story suffocates under the
Rating: 3.0★
There's a moment early in Listen to the Voices where a grandmother and her teenage grandson are ribbing each other about girlfriends and social media, and it's so warm and unforced that you almost forget you're watching a film. It feels like you'
Rating: 4.0★
There's a moment watching Grand Prix where you stop thinking about cinema entirely and just grip the armrest. John Frankenheimer mounted cameras directly onto the cars, put you inside the cockpit, and suddenly you're not sitting in a darkened room anymore. You're hurtling around
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