Rating: 3.5★
There are films that arrive as events, reshaping the cultural landscape around them simply by existing, and Tim Burton's Batman from 1989 is one of the clearest examples of that phenomenon British and American cinema has ever produced. Before a single frame had been projected in a public
Rating: 3.5★
There is a particular kind of film that arrives with relatively little fanfare, circulates quietly among cinephiles for decades, and then one day gets reassessed as something rather essential. Djibril Diop Mambéty's Touki Bouki is exactly that kind of film. Released in 1973, the same year as Ousmane
Rating: 3.5★
Released in 2003, Elephant arrived at a moment when American culture was still reckoning, openly and anxiously, with the legacy of the Columbine High School massacre of April 1999. The film takes its title loosely from Alan Clarke's 1989 BBC short of the same name, itself a study
Rating: 3.5★
Few films in recent memory have arrived with quite the cultural weight that Barbie carried into cinemas in the summer of 2023. Mattel's most famous product has been a fixture of popular culture since Ruth Handler introduced the doll at the New York Toy Fair in 1959, and
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: 3.5★
The Western is one of Hollywood's oldest and most codified genres, stretching back to the nickelodeon era and carrying with it a set of visual and moral assumptions that have proved remarkably stubborn. For most of that history, the genre's mythology was a white one, despite
Rating: 3.5★
There is something almost quaint, in the best possible sense, about a horror film that roots its scares in the world of late-night television. By 1977, the American talk show had become a nightly ritual for millions of households, a warm and familiar presence glowing in the corner of
Rating: 3.5★
Canada and Pakistan make for an unusual co-production pairing, but The Queen of My Dreams (2023) earns that combination honestly. The film sits at the crossroads of a Pakistani immigrant experience and a rural Canadian coming-of-age story, using the sudden death of a father as the catalyst
Rating: 3.5★
Montserrat is a small British Overseas Territory in the Lesser Antilles, roughly the size of a medium-sized English market town, and for most of its modern history it was best known for its lush hills, its recording studios (the Rolling Stones and Paul McCartney both worked there in the
Rating: 3.5★
South Korean cinema had, by the mid-2000s, already announced itself to international audiences in no uncertain terms. Bong Joon-ho's Memories of Murder had arrived in 2003 to widespread critical admiration, and Park Chan-wook was busy cementing his reputation with the Vengeance trilogy. Into this fertile
Rating: 3.5★
There are films you watch and films you experience, and A River Called Titas (1973) sits very firmly in the second category. Based on the celebrated Bengali novel Titas Ekti Nadir Naam by Adwaita Malla Barman, the film is set in the river delta region of what is now Bangladesh,
Rating: 3.5★
Short horror films occupy a curious corner of the genre. Freed from the obligation to pad a story to feature length, the best of them can land a single, well-aimed punch and walk away clean. Moshari (2022) is one such film: a Bangladeshi production running to around twenty-two
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