Rating: 1.5★
Let me be straight with you before anything else: if you are thinking about sitting down with Valerie and Her Week of Wonders, you deserve to know what you are actually getting into. Because the way this film tends to be packaged and sold, as a whimsical, avant-garde surrealist
Rating: 3.5★
There's a moment in Raj Patel and Zak Piper's documentary where you see it written all over the faces of the Malawian delegates: a quiet, devastating shock. They've travelled from one of the poorest nations on earth to the supposed richest country in the
Rating: 2.5★
I'll be honest: learning that Blondes in the Jungle is considered one of the most popular films ever to come out of Honduras left me completely baffled. I genuinely had to read that twice. Because if this is what earns regional acclaim, I can only imagine what the
Rating: 3.5★
Being half Romani, I came to Time of the Gypsies carrying a particular kind of curiosity. I knew the Romani experience depicted here, in what was then Yugoslavia, would be worlds away from anything I grew up with in the UK. What I didn't quite expect was how
Rating: 3.0★
There's a moment watching this film where you have to stop and remind yourself that what you're seeing is not fiction. An entire community on a tiny island in Vanuatu, genuinely, fervently waiting for a white American soldier called John Frum to descend from the sky
Rating: 3.5★
What does it look like when children rewrite their own pain? That question sits at the beating heart of Liyana, and it's the reason this film has stayed with me in a way I didn't entirely expect. There is something genuinely disarming about watching a documentary
Rating: 3.5★
It's genuinely rare to sit down with a piece of cinema that treats its native folklore with this level of unapologetic, mystical fidelity. Souleymane Cissé's Yeelen doesn't just borrow from Bambara mythology and dress it up for outside consumption. It pulls you entirely into
Rating: 3.5★
That artillery. Good grief, that artillery. Within the first few minutes of Edward Berger's 2022 adaptation of All Quiet on the Western Front, the sound design alone is doing something almost physical to you. It doesn't rumble so much as detonate somewhere behind your eyes, and
Rating: 2.0★
If you've ever wondered what happens when you take the saccharine, paint-by-numbers formula of a daytime television romance and transplant it to the Middle East, Elie El Semaan's Honeymoonish has your answer. And spoiler: the answer is not as interesting as you'd
Rating: 2.5★
There is a specific kind of emotional exhaustion that comes from watching people stubbornly refuse to save themselves. It is one of the most frustratingly, achingly human things a story can put on screen, and Mariya Saakyan's The Lighthouse (known in Armenian as Mayak) leans into it hard.
Rating: 2.0★
There's a particular kind of viewing experience that comes with hunting down films from nations with barely a handful of titles to their name. You're not approaching it the way you'd approach a new thriller from a country with a rich cinematic tradition. You&
Rating: 1.5★
I wanted to love this film. I really did. When I found out that Voodoo Man holds a place as one of the most popular homegrown productions ever to come out of St Vincent and the Grenadines, I was immediately intrigued. The Caribbean is a region so rich in folklore,
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