Brazilian cinema earned global attention with City of God, Fernando Meirelles's searing portrait of Rio's favelas, and has since proved itself across animation, documentary and drama. Rio 2096: A Story of Love and Fury shows the breadth on offer, spanning centuries of Brazilian history through bold, stylised storytelling. See what Macca made of it all below.
Rating: 3.5★
Brazil's military dictatorship, which ran from 1964 to 1985, is one of the twentieth century's more persistently under-examined periods of state repression in mainstream Western cinema. Tens of thousands of citizens were detained, tortured, or forced into exile during those two decades, yet the regime
Rating: 3.0★
There is a particular kind of coming-of-age film that uses landscape as emotional shorthand, and Murina is very much in that tradition. Antoneta Alamat Kusijanović's debut feature is set almost entirely on and around a small Croatian island in the Adriatic, a place of sunlit water
Rating: 2.0★
There is a particular kind of late-1990s Hollywood product that exists somewhere between genuine genre filmmaking and expensive theme-park attraction, and Anaconda (1997) sits squarely in that territory. The film drops a documentary crew into the Amazon rainforest, where they fall under the control of a dangerously obsessive
Rating: 3.5★
Luca Guadagnino's Call Me by Your Name arrived in 2017 as one of the most talked-about films of that awards season, and it has barely been out of the conversation since. Based on André Aciman's 2007 novel of the same name, the story is set
Rating: 1.0★
Candomblé is a religion of West African origin, carried to the Americas through the transatlantic slave trade and most associated today with Brazil, particularly the north-eastern state of Bahia. Its rituals involve music, movement, possession and a rich system of spiritual figures known as orixás, and it has survived
Rating: 4.0★
There is a particular strain of American indie filmmaking that strips everything back, no genre scaffolding, no high-concept hook, just a character wandering through their own life and hoping you find it as interesting as they do. Done badly, it produces films that feel like homework. Done well, it
Genre Animation
★★★ — Rio 2096: A Story of Love and Fury (2013)
Genre Drama
★★★★★ — City of God (2002)
Genre Romance
The Day I Met You (2023)
Genre Documentary
★★½ — From Trash to Treasure (2020)
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