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: 3.0★
Kiyoshi Kurosawa has built one of the most distinctive careers in contemporary Japanese cinema, arriving at international recognition on the back of unsettling genre films like Cure (1997) and Pulse (2001) before gradually broadening his scope into quieter, more domestically scaled dramas. To the Ends of the Earth, released in
Rating: 3.0★
There is a particular kind of coming-of-age film that uses landscape as emotional shorthand, and Murina is very much in that tradition. Antoneta Alamat Kusijanović's debut feature is set almost entirely on and around a small Croatian island in the Adriatic, a place of sunlit water
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★
The original Starsky & Hutch ran on American television from 1975 to 1979, and for a good stretch of those four series it was one of the most-watched programmes on either side of the Atlantic. Paul Michael Glaser and David Soul made the mismatched-partners formula feel genuinely fresh,
Rating: 3.0★
Action cinema has always had a restless relationship with the camera. From the bone-crunching physicality of films like The Raid 2 to the elegantly choreographed mayhem of Hong Kong classics, directors have spent decades searching for new ways to put audiences inside the violence rather than simply watching it
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: 3.0★
Some film properties feel like they have no business working as feature-length cinema. The Trolls, those wide-eyed, neon-haired plastic dolls originally designed by Danish woodcutter Thomas Dam in 1959, spent decades as a toy-shelf curiosity and occasional cultural shorthand for gaudy kitsch. By the time DreamWorks
Rating: 3.0★
Jean Rouch occupies a peculiar corner of film history, one that gets cited constantly in academic circles but rarely makes it onto a Friday night watchlist. A French ethnographer turned filmmaker, he spent decades in West Africa, developing what he came to call ethnofiction, a practice that sat somewhere between
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: 3.0★
There is a particular kind of horror film that earns its chills not from monsters in the traditional sense but from the unsettling suggestion that the world contains systems of belief and power that Western rationalism simply cannot account for. The Serpent and the Rainbow, released in 1988 by Universal
Rating: 3.0★
The Federated States of Micronesia sits roughly halfway between Hawaii and the Philippines, a scattering of islands in the western Pacific that most people would struggle to place on a map. Since 1986, Micronesia has been tied to the United States through the Compact of Free Association, an arrangement that
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