French cinema gave the world the Nouvelle Vague, but its adventurousness runs far deeper, from the philosophical strangeness of Fantastic Planet to the quiet alienation of The Man Who Sleeps. France has long rewarded directors who treat film as a genuinely literary form, and that spirit runs through everything here. See what Macca made of it below.
Rating: 3.5★
By 1964, Italian genre cinema was operating in a world of its own, producing work that bore little resemblance to what Hollywood or the British studios were turning out. Blood and Black Lace sits at the centre of that moment, a film that helped crystallise the giallo as a recognisable
Rating: 3.5★
There is a version of O Brother, Where Art Thou? that exists purely as a genre exercise: three bumbling convicts on the run through Depression-era Mississippi, chased by a lawman who seems to belong to a different and more unforgiving film entirely. That version would have been perfectly watchable.
Country France
Here is a short that understands the oldest rule in horror: what you do not see is almost always scarier than what you do. The Last Snow, Rodolphe Bouquet's tense little French creature feature, is really impressive for its length, a lean, dread-soaked chiller that had me
2020s
There is a lovely idea buried inside Comédie-Française, and every so often the film brushes up against it. The Comédie-Française is the oldest still-performing theatre company in the world, an institution with three and a half centuries of history and one iron rule: the show is never
Rating: 3.0★
There are films that matter because of what they are, and there are films that matter because of what they started. Nanook of the North belongs firmly to the second category. Released in 1922 and produced under the banner of the French trading company Les Frères Revillon, it is widely
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: 3.5★
Katia and Maurice Krafft were, by most reasonable measures, operating at the outer limit of what a human being can choose to do and survive. The French volcanologist couple spent roughly two decades driving themselves as close as physically possible to active eruptions, camera in hand, building an extraordinary personal
Rating: 1.5★
Paraguay's Chaco War of 1932 to 1935 was one of the bloodiest conflicts in twentieth-century South American history, a grinding territorial dispute between Paraguay and Bolivia fought over scrubland so remote and punishing that disease and thirst killed as many soldiers as combat did. It is not,
Rating: 2.5★
Catherine Breillat has never been a filmmaker interested in making things easy for her audience. The French director built her reputation across a string of provocative, sexually frank features, from Romance (1999) to Fat Girl (2001), that placed the female body and female desire at the centre of the screen
Rating: 2.0★
The Resident Evil franchise has had a complicated relationship with cinema since Paul W.S. Anderson launched the Milla Jovovich series back in 2002. That run stretched to six films, earning a certain loyal following while frustrating fans of Capcom's survival horror games in roughly equal measure. A
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★
Some films you find for yourself. This one was handed to me, in a school history class, and it is one of the rare occasions I can say the curriculum did me a favour. Peter Medak's drama tells the true story of Derek Bentley, a young man with
Film images and data courtesy of TMDB. This product uses the TMDB API but is not endorsed or certified by TMDB.
The best new reviews, a buried gem with where to watch it, and where the every-country challenge is up to. Free, no spam.
Subscribe free