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: 2.5★
By the mid-1990s, Disney's theatrical animation division was riding one of the most celebrated winning streaks in the studio's history. The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin and The Lion King had redefined what audiences expected from a Disney release: sweeping scores, polished visuals,
Rating: 3.5★
There are films that wear their cultural heritage lightly, sprinkling in a few local details for colour before defaulting to familiar genre shapes. And then there is Yeelen. Released in 1987 and rooted in the oral traditions and spiritual cosmology of the Bambara people of Mali, Souleymane Cissé's
Rating: 1.5★
There is a particular strand of British genre filmmaking that tries to plant one foot in the kitchen-sink tradition and the other in pure pulp spectacle, and Attack the Block is one of the more talked-about attempts at that balancing act. Released in 2011 and set almost entirely
Rating: 2.0★
The question of what happens to cultural heritage stolen under colonialism is one that museums across Europe have been forced to sit with, uncomfortably, for decades. Nowhere is that discomfort more pointed than in the case of the royal treasures of Dahomey, a powerful West African kingdom (roughly corresponding to
Rating: 3.0★
Jean Genet is best known to most people as a novelist and playwright, the author of works like Our Lady of the Flowers and The Maids, a writer whose entire creative life was shaped by time spent on the margins of French society, including real spells in prison. Un Chant
Rating: 4.0★
Tunisia's post-revolution years produced a wave of filmmaking that wrestled openly with what had been suppressed for decades: questions of religion, gender, state violence, and family. Four Daughters (2023) sits within that tradition while doing something altogether more unusual with it. The film begins from a real
Rating: 3.0★
Jean-Pierre Bekolo arrived at Aristotle's Plot as one of the more provocative voices to emerge from Francophone African cinema in the early 1990s. His debut feature, Quartier Mozart (1992), had already marked him out as a filmmaker more interested in subverting genre conventions than playing it safe,
Rating: 1.5★
Jean-Luc Godard spent the better part of six decades making films that refused to sit still, and by the time Goodbye to Language arrived in 2014 he was eighty-three years old and showing absolutely no interest in making things easier for anyone. The film premiered at Cannes, where
Rating: 2.5★
Jorge Mario Bergoglio became the 266th Pope of the Catholic Church in March 2013, and from the moment he stepped onto the balcony of St Peter's Basilica and asked the crowd to pray for him before he blessed them, it was clear that something had shifted in the
Rating: 2.5★
Olivier Assayas has spent the better part of four decades building a reputation as one of French cinema's more restless and formally curious directors. Coming off the two-part miniseries Carlos (2010) and the well-received Clouds of Sils Maria (2014), in which he first worked with Kristen
Rating: 3.0★
Jean-Marie Straub is not a filmmaker who makes concessions to comfort, either his own or the audience's. Working for decades alongside his wife and creative partner Danièle Huillet, the Franco-German director built a body of work defined by rigorous formalism, political seriousness, and an almost confrontational
Rating: 2.5★
Roberto Rossellini shot Germany, Year Zero in the summer of 1947, on location in the actual ruins of Berlin, less than two years after the city's surrender. That context is worth sitting with for a moment. The rubble you see on screen is not a set. The hollowed-
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