Palestine’s 2022 Oscar submission is a brooding story of lives in limbo in the Golan Heights, stunningly shot and wrenching in its moving evocation of a man mired in self-loathing and paralyzed by the physical and existential no-man’s land resulting in the Israeli occupation and the disaster in Syria.
One of the best-selling instrumentalists of all time is both unaware and charming in Penny Lane’s engaging documentary.
A well-calibrated debut with a fine central performance, weaving together notions of class and familial betrayal when an impoverished mother sells her son’s kidney to a well-off family in exchange for a better life.
In his skillfully helmed first feature, Isaac (Izaokas), Lithuanian writer-director Jurgis Matulevicius delves into his country’s turbulent past under both Communism and Nazism, following a trio of friends in the 1960s whose lives are overshadowed by a massacre that took place during WWII. Mixing historical fact with an existential crime story, the film is bathed […]
A sly, humorous take on the detective genre, set in a placid Uruguayan town where hidden passions rage.
In Io sto bene, Luxembourg’s submission to the Oscars, Donato Rotunno movingly chronicles how present-day Europe has become more diverse and tolerant, but still presents obstacles for new arrivals and leaves the elderly isolated and lonely. In one eloquent scene, an aging Italian immigrant visits his wife’s grave while a more recent arrival from Africa […]
In the 19th century, a 14-year-old Danish girl struggles between her will and God’s in Tea Lindeburg’s impressionistic period drama, winner of the best director nod in San Sebastian.
Nollywood’s most famous director has made a period piece for Netflix that, while good to look and with all the right politics for today, doesn’t quite come alive and yet stays on too long.
While still clearly finding their voice, three young Nigerian directors serve up entertaining vignettes of African life derived from popular made-in-Africa superstitions.
Indian cineaste Aditya Vikram Sengupta delivers a slow-burning and delicate ensemble drama about the corrupted state of his hometown.
Raul Ramon’s first feature as a director is a sweet utopian fable that imagines a peaceful, united Mexico where solidarity and honesty prevail.
Quirky surprises abound in a stylish, suspenseful thriller set in 1970’s Argentina, when lesbians were persecuted and abortion was outlawed.
The conservative new social order sidelines an old-school zookeeper in Emre Kayis’s closely observed, metaphoric first feature about Turkish society, winner of the Fipresci award in Toronto.
A complex, cryptic, compelling film in which Miguel Coyula’s surreal images portray a sci fi Cuba that attempts to mold young minds through genetic engineering.
Slovakia’s former Oscars submission recreates the courageous real-life exploits of two Jewish prisoners who escaped from Auschwitz and alerted the world to the horrors of the Holocaust.
A good pitch, such as the one behind the French aviation thriller Black Box (Boîte noire), can only travel so far when the characters provide little fuel for the story. At some point, usually toward the middle of the second act, the movie stutters, stalls and then takes a nosedive, crashing well before the closing […]
Partly inspired by real events, Otar’s Death is a fractious Georgian family drama with breathless thriller elements and a deep streak of black comedy.
In a vividly dystopic 1938 Leningrad under Stalin’s Great Purge, a young NKVD torturer tries to save his soul, in co-directors Natasha Merkulova and Aleksey Chupov’s high-energy parable ‘Captain Volkonogov Escaped’.
The controversy stirred up by Michel Franco’s previous film ‘New Order’ will be partly placated and partly reignited in ‘Sundown’, the story of English tourists (Tim Roth and Charlotte Gainsbourg) in Mexico.
Ruth Wilson and Tom Burke deliver an emotionally raw but refreshingly nuanced take on female desire.
A girl’s exhilarating mind-trip through swinging London of the Sixties turns wild and woolly and full of zombies in ‘Last Night in Soho’, Edgar Wright’s multi-genre treat, co-starring Anya Taylor-Joy and Thomasin McKenzie.
Produced by Steve McQueen, Bianca Stigter’s experimental essay film is a rigorous exercise in forensic historical excavation commemorating Polish Holocaust victims.
This cat-and-mouse chase thriller offers an opaque commentary on love as a form of psychosis and the paranoid political mood in post-Soviet Lithuania,
The distinctive vision that Omar El Zohairy brought to his two prize-wining shorts is much in evidence in his meticulously crafted absurdist feature debut Feathers. It’s amusing to imagine how he pitched the project at the start, given the narrative’s unlikely elements: a working-class man is turned into a chicken during a private magic show […]
The big prize-winner at Karlovy Vary film festival, As Far as I Can Walk is a modern migrant story with historic literary echoes.