Rating: 1.5★
There are films that disturb you because something terrible happens on screen, and then there are films that disturb you because the director has decided that you, the person sitting in the dark, are the real subject of the exercise. Michael Haneke's Funny Games, made in Austria in
Rating: 4.0★
Euzhan Palcy's Sugar Cane Alley arrived in 1983 as something of a landmark, not just for Caribbean cinema but for French-language filmmaking more broadly. Set in Martinique during the early 1930s, the film draws on Joseph Zobel's 1950 autobiographical novel La Rue Cases-Nègres, 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: 1.5★
Bulgarian cinema has spent the better part of the last two decades earning a quiet, patchy reputation on the international festival circuit, producing the odd gem alongside a good deal of material that never travels far beyond the region. Zift (2008) remains perhaps the most striking example of Bulgarian genre
Rating: 3.5★
Luca Guadagnino's Call Me by Your Name arrived in 2017 as one of the most talked-about films of that awards season, and it has barely been out of the conversation since. Based on André Aciman's 2007 novel of the same name, the story is set
Rating: 1.0★
Cigarette (known in Tigrinya as Shigara) arrived in 2005 as a short-form family comedy produced across the United States and Eritrea, one of the few feature-adjacent works to emerge from a country whose domestic film industry has remained largely invisible to international audiences. Eritrea's cinema culture
Rating: 2.5★
When Gareth Evans and Iko Uwais unleashed The Raid on the world in 2011, the response was somewhere between astonishment and mild disbelief. A Welsh director working in Indonesia with a relatively modest budget had produced one of the most viscerally efficient action films in years, a single-location siege
Rating: 1.5★
The original Castle Freak (1995) holds a modest but affectionate place in the annals of low-budget American horror. Directed by Stuart Gordon, the man behind Re-Animator, and produced by the ever-reliable Charles Band at Full Moon Entertainment, it was a grimy, mean-spirited little picture loosely adapted
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: 4.0★
American Samoa is, by most conventional football metrics, about as far from the top of the world game as it is possible to get. A small archipelago in the South Pacific with a population of around 55,000, it fields a national side that, in the early 2000s, had become
Rating: 2.5★
Soca music and the streets of Port of Spain make for a vivid backdrop, but She Paradise (2020) is less interested in tourism than in the particular pressures facing a young woman trying to carve out a life on her own terms. The film arrives as part of a modest
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