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: 3.0★
And Then We Danced arrived in 2019 against a backdrop of real political tension. When the film screened at the Tbilisi Film Festival, far-right and nationalist groups organised protests outside cinemas, with some screenings requiring police protection. That reception said rather a lot about the territory the film was
Rating: 4.0★
Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul occupies a singular corner of world cinema, one that tends to divide audiences cleanly into the devoted and the bewildered. His work operates at a frequency all its own: unhurried, sensory, preoccupied with memory, landscape, and the thin membrane between the living and whatever comes after.
Rating: 3.0★
French Guiana occupies a peculiar place in the cultural imagination: an overseas territory of France, geographically part of South America, historically shaped by the brutal legacy of the penal colony at Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni, and today home to communities whose lives bear little resemblance to anything you might associate
Rating: 2.5★
Utama, which takes its title from the Quechua word for "our home", arrived in 2022 carrying a substantial weight of festival expectation. It won the World Cinema Grand Jury Prize at Sundance, placing it in a lineage of landscape-driven, politically conscious films from Latin America that use
Rating: 4.0★
By the mid-1960s, Formula One had grown from a specialist motorsport into a genuinely global spectacle, its calendar sweeping through Monaco, Spa, Monza, and beyond, drawing enormous crowds and an air of glamorous, sometimes fatal, theatre. The 1966 season in particular marked a major technical turning point for the
Rating: 3.5★
There are political thrillers, and then there are films that arrive so charged with real-world fury that the fiction barely disguises the rage beneath. Costa-Gavras's Z (1969) is very much the latter. Based on Vassilis Vassilikos's 1966 novel of the same name, the film
Rating: 3.0★
The University of Bangui sits at something of a crossroads. Founded in 1970 and long regarded as the intellectual heart of the Central African Republic, it has spent much of the past two decades operating under extraordinary pressure: chronic underfunding, the displacement caused by recurring armed conflict across the country,
Rating: 2.5★
Reproduction has been a recurring preoccupation of science fiction, from the bleakest dystopias to gentler satirical fables, and it is not hard to see why. Few subjects carry more political, philosophical, and emotional weight, and few lend themselves so readily to the kind of "what if" speculation that
Rating: 3.0★
Claire Denis made Chocolat as her debut feature in 1988, drawing directly on her own experience of growing up in French colonial West Africa. The timing matters: by the late 1980s, the postcolonial reckoning in French cinema was gathering pace, and Denis arrived not as an outside observer but as
Rating: 3.0★
Animation from outside the Hollywood and major European studio circuits has had something of a quiet renaissance over the past decade or so, with films like Josep and No Dogs or Italians Allowed demonstrating that hand-crafted, personal animation can carry real emotional weight without the backing of a nine-
Rating: 4.5★
Released in 2015 and selected as France's entry for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film (a choice that raised a few eyebrows given the film's Turkish setting and co-production roots), Mustang arrived at a moment when European and international cinema was in lively
Rating: 2.0★
There are films made for the multiplex, films made for the festival circuit, and then films that seem to exist in a category entirely their own. Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010) falls squarely into that third group. Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul (known affectionately to critics and
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