German cinema spans from the expressionist shadows of the Weimar era to the New German Cinema of Fassbinder, Herzog and Wenders in the 1970s and 80s. Herzog alone covers extraordinary ground, from grand historical epics to documentaries like Lessons of Darkness, his haunting record of Kuwait's burning oil fields. See what Macca has made of German film below.
Rating: 4.0★
July 1995. The town of Srebrenica, in eastern Bosnia, became the site of the worst mass atrocity on European soil since the Second World War. Over the course of a few days, more than eight thousand Bosniak Muslim men and boys were systematically murdered by Bosnian Serb forces under the
Rating: 4.0★
Sudan is not a country with a long or well-resourced filmmaking tradition. Decades of conflict, economic instability, and a cultural climate that offered little institutional support for the arts meant that, for much of the twentieth century, Sudanese cinema barely existed as a going concern. That context matters when
Rating: 3.5★
There is a particular kind of film that arrives with little fanfare, plays a handful of festivals, and then quietly refuses to leave your head for weeks afterwards. Rungano Nyoni's I Am Not a Witch (2017) is very much one of those films. The premise draws from a
Rating: 3.0★
There is a particular kind of British film that arrives quietly, gets called a modest crowd-pleaser, and then refuses to leave the cultural conversation. Bend It Like Beckham, released in 2002, is very much one of those. Gurinder Chadha's third feature (following the well-received Bhaji on
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★
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: 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
Macca's Must Watch
Cinema has long wrestled with the Palestinian experience, but rarely with the scope and emotional weight that All That's Left of You attempts. The film opens in the Occupied West Bank of the 1980s, where a single act of protest by a teenage boy sets in motion a
Rating: 2.5★
There is a long and restless tradition in world cinema of using the horror genre as a vessel for social and political anxieties, particularly around bodies, identity, and the pressures of conformity. From the body-horror provocations of Cronenberg through to the folk-inflected dread of more recent European and
Rating: 3.0★
Chad is not a country you would typically associate with a thriving film industry, and that context matters when watching Lingui, the Sacred Bonds. The country gained independence from France in 1960, yet for decades its cultural output on screen remained negligible, constrained by poverty, political instability, and an almost
Rating: 1.5★
French Polynesia has served as a canvas for European fantasy and anxiety in equal measure ever since Gauguin packed his bags and headed for Tahiti in the 1890s. That long history of outsiders projecting their desires, their guilt, and their authority onto the islands and the people who live there
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