Rating: 3.0★
Vanuatu, the Pacific island nation spread across more than eighty individual islands, has long occupied a curious space in the anthropological imagination. Its history of colonialism (it was jointly administered by Britain and France under the peculiar arrangement known as the New Hebrides Condominium until independence in 1980) left behind
Rating: 3.0★
Every now and then a documentary arrives that makes you wonder how nobody thought to make it sooner. The Golden Spurtle (2025) trains its camera on Carrbridge, a small Highland village in the Cairngorms, which has hosted the World Porridge Making Championship since 1994. The competition is as straightforward and
Rating: 3.0★
By 1986, the American independent film scene was a world away from the polished studio machinery churning out blockbusters across town. Low-budget, self-financed pictures were finding audiences through word of mouth and festival buzz, and it was in that climate that a young film school graduate from Brooklyn
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: 3.0★
Garrett Bradley is one of the more distinctive voices to have emerged from American documentary filmmaking in recent years, and America (2019) is one of the works that put her firmly on the map. Running at just thirty minutes, it sits comfortably in the tradition of the short-form essay
Rating: 3.0★
By the late 1990s, the slasher genre had made a full commercial comeback. Wes Craven's Scream (1996) had revived interest in masked killers and self-aware horror, and the wave that followed, from I Know What You Did Last Summer to Urban Legend, kept the formula ticking over
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: 3.0★
Bulgarian cinema has, over the past two decades or so, carved out a modest but respected place in the European art house conversation, with films that tend to favour economic storytelling, unglamorous settings, and a willingness to sit with uncomfortable social realities. The Lesson (or Urok in its original Bulgarian)
Rating: 3.0★
When Black Panther arrived in February 2018, it landed with a weight that went well beyond the usual Marvel marketing fanfare. For a studio that had spent a decade building one of the most profitable franchises in cinema history, the film represented something genuinely overdue: a superhero blockbuster centred on
Rating: 3.0★
By 1942, Walt Disney Productions had already proved, with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, that feature-length animation could be taken seriously as an art form and, more to the point, could make audiences feel things they hadn't expected to feel sitting in a cinema. Bambi arrived
Rating: 3.0★
Somali piracy became one of the defining news stories of the late 2000s and early 2010s, filling broadsheet column inches and television bulletins with images of armed men on skiffs, ransomed supertankers, and naval patrols in the Gulf of Aden. Hollywood's response was largely to frame it as
Rating: 3.0★
Arthur Jafa is a name that carries considerable weight in American visual culture, even if mainstream audiences might not immediately place it. A cinematographer by training (his credits include Spike Lee's Crooklyn and Julie Dash's landmark Daughters of the Dust), Jafa spent decades thinking seriously about
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