World cinema

The Source is an extremely beautiful exploration of the traditional Muslim culture in a small  North African village. It may focus on a single village, yet it represents a much broader picture of femininity and equality that deserves to be brought to the attention of a wide audience. The Source is the...

Italy changed a lot in the years after the Second World War. The country picked itself up from the ruins of war and transformed into one of the world's largest economies. It went from being a country of bicycle thieves and impoverished shoe-shines to one of il (economic) boom. Vittorio De Sica's two...

Plan B is another cerebral whodunnit from Argentine director Marco Berger, where the mystery is not stone cold body, but living, breathing sexuality. Bruno, a long-haired, shaggy long-haired young man played by Manuel Vignau, plans revenge after he is dumped by his girlfriend. His first scheme, plan A,...

It's quirky, it's French, it's Audrey Tautou - what could possibly go wrong? Well, quite a few things, as it turns out... Delicacy follows the story of Nathalie (Tautou) who is so loved up it's almost unbearable. Her cutesy romance with Francois (Pio Marmai) involves kissing outside cafés, twirling in...

Towards the end of Marco Berger's Absent (Ausente) one of the characters remarks that she has been reading a book that has too many 'gaps' in it, which have been included to leave room for the reader's interpretation. She doesn't know if she'd recommend the book, but we're happy to do so for this...

Le Havre is a film about a bunch of very odd people. Luckily, it's also a really good film about a bunch of very odd people. To describe it in a sentence, it tells the tale of a writer-cum-shoe-shiner who helps his wife through her illness and takes care of an illegal immigrant. But it deserves a lot more than...

La Grande Illusion is a war film that is set miles from the front and contains no fighting. Instead it focuses on a motley group of characters for whom the war is over - POWs - and spins out a yarn that is funny, insightful and moving. It's no wonder that the film is regarded as one of the best ever...

It is rare to encounter a film which swaps sentimentality for realism and still remains as watchable as The Kid with a Bike. While the clumsily worded title of this Belgian drama suggests that something may have been lost in translation, the characters, emotions and encounters depicted by directing...

Much of In Darkness takes place in the dank, foul-smelling, and lightless sewer tunnels. Even when the action moves above ground, it is still overshadowed by an absence of light of the moral kind. Despite the serious subject matter, the film still stands a good chance of winning the Oscar for the Best Film in a...

Shivajee Chandrabhushan's third film One More opened London's Pan-Asia Film Festival last Friday. As the director's previous film Frozen won a handful of prizes, expectations might be riding high for this one, but audiences may well find themselves disappointed. The film is set in the Indian region of...