While the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign continues to attract strong interest worldwide, amid wall-to-wall news coverage and poll frenzies, politics-related films are always interesting to watch in the weeks leading up to Election Day. Although there is no proven record of cinema influencing the outcome of...
Marjane Satrapi‘s 2007 animated film ‘Persepolis’ is a moving, perceptive and funny coming-of-age tale about growing up in Tehran during the Islamic Revolution. The French-Iranian film debuted at the Cannes Film Festival and it was very successful both commercially as well as critically, winning several recognitions...
“Non essere cattivo” (Don’t be bad) is the third and final posthumous feature by Italian cult director Claudio Caligari who died last year from cancer aged 67, just before completion of the editing of the film. A Pasolini-esque look at low life in Ostia in the...
Das Leben der Anderen (“The Life of Others”) the Oscar-winning 2006 German drama, is a remarkably authentic portrait of life in East Germany during the communist era but most of all it is an insightful study of human nature and compassion under totalitarianisms. Written and directed...
Can a military dictatorship fall to an advertising campaign, a cheerful one at that? The affirmative answer to that question is “No” the 2012 Chilean political drama directed by Pablo Larrain about the twilight of Pinochet’s regime, narrating one of the most seminal moments in the...
The 2014 British film Pride is inspired by the extraordinary true story of a group of London LGBT activists who during the 1984-5 miners’ strike - the longest in British history - raised funds to assist and support families in a Welsh mining village. Written by...
Winner of the Palme d’Or at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival, the latest film from acclaimed French director Jacques Audiard is a gripping and intense drama about refugee life and integration. Dheepan’s Palme d’Or was followed this February by the Golden Bear to Gianfranco Rosi’s “Fire...
“It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets”. Joshua Oppenheimer’s The act of killing opens with this emblematic quote by Voltaire. An unprecedented account of the 1965 anti-communist mass murders in Indonesia...
What if an alien spaceship landed over Johannesburg, and instead of conquering the planet the stranded visitors ended up victims of a new, inter-planetarian Apartheid? One of the most sensational and original films of 2009, South African science fiction mockumentary DISTRICT 9, avoids all the genre...
The latest documentary film by Italian-born, American based, director Roberto Minervini is a disturbing yet poetic look at the hidden underbelly of America’s Deep South, a forgotten reality seldom depicted onscreen that shines a light on the abyss of today’s America. The film was screened in...
To celebrate yesterday’s International Women’s Day, this week we will discuss a recent film which was directed by a woman, written by a woman and with a cast led by women. Suffragette (2015) is the first feature film portraying the struggle of ordinary British women, who,...
Harper Lee, writer of “To Kill a Mockingbird”, one of last century’s most beloved authors, has died last week, aged 89. Today we want to dedicate our weekly review to the homonymous 1962 film based on the novel. To kill a mockingbird was translated into film...
Released in 1972 (just a year before Bob Marley and the Wailers’ breakthrough international album “Catch a fire”), shot on location in the streets of Kingston with non-professional actors speaking in the local patois, the film created an unprecedented realistic portrayal of Jamaican culture, far from...
Do you know the story of the guy falling from a skyscraper? To reassure himself he keeps repeating “So far so good, so far so good”…But it’s not how you fall that matters, it’s how you land. If you recognise this line, then you’ll know that...
This week’s topic builds upon another remarkable film that since its release in 1966 produced considerable political controversy, dividing critical opinion. The Battle of Algiers, Gillo Pontecorvo’s historical account of the Algerian struggle for independence against French colonial power. The film was awarded a Leone d’Oro...
