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★
Lynne Ramsay has never been a director interested in comfort. From the suffocating council-estate grief of Ratcatcher (1999) to the cold, forensic dread of We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011), she has spent her career making films that sit in the chest like a stone. You Were Never
Rating: 4.0★
There is a version of David Lynch's career that reads as a consistent exercise in the uncanny: industrial wastelands, dream logic, violence lurking beneath the surface of small-town America. Under the Skin fans will recognise that particular brand of alienating, unsettling cinema, even if Lynch had no
Rating: 4.0★
Park Chan-wook returns in 2025 with No Other Choice, a South Korean and French co-production that wears its genre labels, comedy, crime, thriller, with a studied looseness that feels entirely characteristic of the director. The film is adapted, in broad strokes, from Donald Westlake's 1993 novel
Rating: 2.0★
Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet are, depending on your disposition, either two of European cinema's most uncompromising visionaries or two of its most wilfully alienating formalists. Possibly both. The Franco-German couple worked together from the early 1960s until Huillet's death in 2006, producing a
Rating: 3.0★
Gus Van Sant arrived at Paranoid Park fresh from one of the more celebrated stretches of his career. His loosely connected "Death Trilogy" (comprising Gerry, Elephant, and Last Days) had established him as one of American independent cinema's most formally adventurous directors, a filmmaker willing to
Rating: 3.5★
Paolo Sorrentino arrived at Youth in 2015 as one of European cinema's most distinctive voices, fresh from the international success of The Great Beauty, which had taken the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 2014. Where that earlier picture roamed the ruins and remnants of Rome,
Rating: 3.5★
There are animated films that arrive, do their job, and are more or less forgotten within a generation. Then there are the ones that come embedded in a culture so thoroughly that even people who have never sat down and actually watched them feel they already know them. The Twelve
Rating: 3.5★
Johnny Mad Dog arrives from a corner of world cinema that rarely gets much attention on mainstream screens: the co-production networks of France and Belgium that, through the 2000s, funded a number of films made on location in sub-Saharan Africa with non-professional casts and limited budgets. Released
Rating: 2.5★
There is a particular kind of prestige that arrives pre-loaded, and The Red Turtle carried more of it than most. A co-production between the French outfits Wild Bunch, Why Not Productions and CN4 Productions, the Belgian studio Belvision, and, most eye-catchingly, Japan's Studio Ghibli, the
Rating: 3.5★
There are films that arrive quietly, made on modest budgets by small studios in countries not traditionally associated with feature animation, and then somehow end up nominated for the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. The Secret of Kells is precisely that kind of film. Released in 2009 and co-
Rating: 3.5★
Sarah Maldoror occupies a singular position in the history of world cinema. Born in France to Guadeloupean parents, she studied filmmaking in Moscow in the late 1950s alongside figures who would go on to define Third Cinema, and she spent much of her career making films on the African continent,
Rating: 3.0★
Glauber Rocha is one of those directors whose reputation in film studies circles far outstrips his name recognition among general audiences, and The Lion Has Seven Heads (original title: Der Leone Have Sept Cabeças, a title that itself announces the film's polyglot, deliberately fractured identity) is a reasonable
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