Reviews

There is no such thing as unskilled labour, only unseen, or unappreciated. Inspired by the Atlanta Washing Society of 1881, where African-American laundresses united for better pay and agency, The Washing...

From the cramped quarters of New York’s Chinatown where individual beds are rented, Your Day Is My Night artfully brings hidden immigrants into the light. Following a handful of people from this close...

In 1991, eight intrepid volunteers ventured into the infamous "Biosphere 2". Spaceship Earth opens with footage from this moment: a cacophony of noise, cheers and waves are freely exchanged. These people are...

To most of us, bus stops are a place of boredom and time-killing, a border between actions, a glass and concrete shelter that provides minimal reprieve from the blazing sun or pouring rain. In Carlos Araya...

Influence, the story of Lord Timothy Bell and his hugely powerful, extremely controversial PR company Bell Pottinger, often feels more like the origin story for a Bond villain than an investigative...

The issues that The Garden Left Behind explores are pertinent and vital. We cannot achieve a moral or a just society without addressing them. That they are explored so heavy-handedly and with such a cruel...

Jeff Bezos’ sinister, late-capitalist empire has long cast a shadow over the book industry, yet in a year when independent bookshops and trade fairs have been forced to shut, its shadow looms larger than...

Alyx Ayn Arumpac assesses the Filipino government’s war on drugs, in this pivotal and terrifying examination of the impact on life in the region. When Rodrigo Duterte is voted in as the president of the...

British filmmakers Tim Plester and Rob Currie retrace the steps made in 1959 by Alan Lomax, the American ethnomusicologist who charted folk music in the South of the United States. This road movie and music...

The transcendent debut from Portuguese director Catarina Vasconcelos partly looks back at how Beatriz meets Henrique, and subsequently marry on Beatriz’s 21st birthday. Henrique is often away, serving as a...

This film was previously reviewed in May 2018 as part of our Cannes Film Festival coverage. The Dead and the Others is a complex creation from directors Joao Salaviza and Renee Nader Messora, which can’t...

Jonathan Perel’s audiovisual quandary is a film essay dissecting the relationship between industry and the last military dictatorship in Argentina. Perel documents a present haunting absence of humanity in...

In 1995, commuters in Tokyo were deliberately exposed to a deadly gas called sarin in an act of domestic terrorism. Twelve people were killed and over a thousand injured. Me and the Cult Leader: A Modern...

Named for an old saw that under certain weather conditions one can commune with the dead, Hlynur Palmason’s A White, White Day thrives in exactly this melancholic liminality. Its two opening sequences...

In a year that saw Eurovision cancelled due to Covid, Netflix has swooped in with an imperfect yet heartfelt tribute to the iconic song contest. Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga (retitled so as...