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: 2.5★
There is something fitting about a film called Babilônia 2000 arriving at the turn of a millennium. Eduardo Coutinho's documentary, produced in collaboration between VideoFilmes, Centro de Criação de Imagem Popular (CECIP) and TvZERO, plants itself on New Year's Eve 1999 inside the Babilônia and Chapéu
Rating: 3.0★
There's a certain kind of film that dares you to keep watching, and Glauber Rocha's The Lion Has Seven Heads is very much one of them. It's a baffling, swirling beast of a picture, and I mean that in the most genuinely ambivalent way
Rating: 3.5★
There's a moment early in I'm Still Here where the warmth of a family home, the laughter, the cluttered kitchen, the sun coming through the windows, feels almost unbearably fragile. You know what's coming. The film knows you know. And Walter Salles lets that
Rating: 3.0★
Sometimes a film feels like it's standing right at the edge of a cliff, ready to jump, and then it just... doesn't. That's Murina in a nutshell. It's a sun-scorched, salt-sprayed Croatian drama with every ingredient you'd want,
Rating: 2.0★
There's a version of Anaconda that works. A giant snake, a panicked crew trapped on a river boat in the Amazon, a scenery-chewing villain, and a cast you'd never expect to share a screen together. That's a recipe for a genuinely enjoyable B-
Rating: 3.5★
That closing scene. You know the one. A father sits with his son and says, without judgement, without awkwardness, exactly what any young person in pain needs to hear. It's one of the finest scenes I've watched in a very long time, and it alone would
Rating: 1.0★
Twenty minutes. That's all it asks of you. And yet somehow, Candomblé in Togo still manages to feel like an imposition. Directed by José Agripino de Paula, this 1972 short is, by any honest measure, barely a film. What you get is handheld footage of traditional Candomblé dancing,
Rating: 4.0★
There's a moment in Frances Ha where the title character describes her ideal relationship as two people who are so in sync they don't even need to talk across a crowded room, they just look at each other and know. It's the kind of
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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