★★★★☆ Leprosy, poverty and a story of social exclusion are the unlikely ingredients for the deeply engaging and often funny road movie Yomeddine, which entered the competition for the Palme d’Or at the 71st Cannes Film Festival earlier today. Beshay (Rady Gamal) is a man who has recovered from leprosy Continue Reading
★★★☆☆ The Kenyan government had already banned Wanuri Kahiu’s second feature, Rafiki, before it even premiered in Cannes. Telling the story of a pair of young women who fall in love only to be ostracised by their local community, the government feared it would “promote lesbianism” which remains illegal in Continue Reading
★★★☆☆ Russian director Kirill Serebrennikov’s Palme d’Or-nominated musical Leto is set among key figures dominating the early 1980s rock club scene in St. Petersburg. Initially fun and lively, it runs out of puff way before the end. “Soviet musicians must find all that is good in humanity,” the jobsworth committee Continue Reading
★★★★☆ Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa frequently switches between found-footage documentaries, shorts and narrative features. With his latest, Donbass, Loznitsa blends aesthetic forms for a nightmarish mockumentary about nationalist identity and the often frightening daily occurrences and hardships dominating the Donbass region of the Ukraine. The distinct blurring between fact and fiction begins Continue Reading
★★★★★ From the duo behind Embrace of the Serpent comes another extraordinary movie full of ethnographic detail and mystical symbolism. In Birds of Passage, a revenge tragedy plot involving the burgeoning market in weed is transformed into a riveting form of acid western. Set in the arid coastal Guajira region Continue Reading
