Rating: 4.0★
Australian horror has a habit of catching you off guard, and Talk to Me (2022) arrived with precisely that quality. Co-produced by Causeway Films alongside Screen Australia, the South Australian Film Corporation, Bankside Films, and Head Gear Films, the picture is rooted firmly in the tradition of supernatural horror
Rating: 3.5★
There is a particular kind of Greek cinema that exists almost entirely outside the mainstream, and Dogtooth (or Kynodontas, in its original Greek) sits right at the centre of that tradition. Released in 2009 and co-produced by the Greek Film Centre alongside Boo Productions and Horsefly Productions, the film
Rating: 2.5★
There is a particular corner of European cinema that seems almost duty-bound to make its audience uncomfortable, and The Tribe, the 2014 Ukrainian drama from writer-director Myroslav Slaboshpytskyi, sits squarely in that tradition. The premise is both simple and disquieting: a teenage boy, Sergey, arrives at a residential
Rating: 3.5★
Paolo Sorrentino arrived at Youth in 2015 as one of European cinema's most distinctive voices, fresh from the international success of The Great Beauty, which had taken the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 2014. Where that earlier picture roamed the ruins and remnants of Rome,
Rating: 3.5★
Johnny Mad Dog arrives from a corner of world cinema that rarely gets much attention on mainstream screens: the co-production networks of France and Belgium that, through the 2000s, funded a number of films made on location in sub-Saharan Africa with non-professional casts and limited budgets. Released
Rating: 1.5★
Horror films shot in genuinely unusual locations tend to carry a certain curiosity value before a single frame has even played, and Gehenna: Where Death Lives arrives with that novelty in abundance. Set and partially produced in Saipan, the largest island in the Northern Mariana Islands, a United States commonwealth
Rating: 3.5★
John le Carré spent the better part of five decades writing about the moral rot that accumulates quietly inside institutions, and The Constant Gardener, his 2001 novel, ranks among his most pointed indictments. Where many of his earlier books trained their scepticism on the intelligence services, this one aimed squarely
Rating: 3.0★
Werner Herzog and Klaus Kinski made five films together between 1972 and 1987, and the story of that partnership has, by now, almost eclipsed the films themselves. Herzog's 1999 documentary My Best Fiend laid it all out in uncomfortable detail: the threats, the tantrums, the mutual fascination that
Rating: 2.0★
Aki Kaurismäki has spent the better part of four decades building one of world cinema's most recognisable signatures: deadpan working-class characters, colour-saturated interiors that feel frozen in some indeterminate post-war decade, and a studied economy of dialogue that his admirers read as poetic restraint. The
Rating: 3.0★
Kosovo's cinema has been finding its feet with remarkable speed since the country's declaration of independence in 2008, and a recurring preoccupation in its films is the long shadow cast by the 1998 to 1999 war. The conflict left wounds that did not close neatly when
Rating: 3.5★
Osama arrived in 2003 as a genuinely singular piece of cinema: the first film to be shot entirely in Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban regime. That fact alone gives it a peculiar, almost documentary weight before a single frame has played. The Taliban had effectively abolished cinema in
Rating: 0.5★
Omani cinema occupies a peculiar position on the world map of film production. The country has no long-established studio infrastructure, no storied tradition of directors passing techniques down through generations, and precious little in the way of international distribution for the work it does produce. That context matters, because
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