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Herbs Write the Reggae Soundtrack to New Zealand’s 1980s Protest Movement

Herbs’ debut ‘Whats’ Be Happen?’ is more than just a stirring example of the spread of reggae across Oceania in the 1970s: it's an important political document that teaches us about a time in New Zealand’s history and a symbol of resistance.

Satyajit Ray’s ‘Charulata’ Feels Like a Contemporary Masterpiece

Max Hayward reviews the fifty-five-year-old film of auteur Satyajit Ray that takes us inside a wealthy household in colonial India with an understated emotional resonance that transcends language and era.

Berlin before dawn; a one-shot odyssey with ‘Victoria’

Filmed in one continuous shot through concrete Berlin, this film is a two-hour cinematic ride that takes us through the romance, musicality and uncertainty of a city that wakes at night.

‘Cold War’: Poland’s Grey, Electric Love Story

Set in Poland’s rural villages and rain-soaked cities during the first years of the Cold War, Paweł Pawlikowski lights up the screen in this sweeping black-and-white film that captures the aching and energy that comes from first love.

From Poetry to the Big Screen; ‘A Room and a Half’ Captures Russia’s Artistic History

In Andrei Khrzhanovsky’s film ‘A Room and a Half’ (2009), we are taken ‘back’ to Joseph Brodsky’s Leningrad in the only way the poet, exiled at the age of thirty-two, could revisit it: through memory and imagination.

Book Review / Brazil

“In her isolated plain beyond all knowledge, Lispector delicately and vulnerably exposes our beautiful, tragic world for exactly that: its beauty and its tragedy.”

Olivia Dennis on Clarice Lispector’s The Hour of the Star

Ghostly Intimacy at the Edge of the World: Jane Campion’s ‘The Piano’

A man’s world is seen through a woman’s lens in New Zealand’s cinematic triumph. Max Hayward reviews this intimate story between man and woman, woman and piano, as it unravels in an unknowable, rain-drenched landscape.

Che Guevara’s Political Awakening in ‘The Motorcycle Diaries’

Max Hayward reviews this full-hearted biopic following a charismatic Che Guevara and his friend Alberto Granado as they navigate the windswept landscape and harsh social climate of South America.

Book Review / Japan

“Ozeki’s portrait of a modern country tightly threaded with the past leaves us not with concrete explanations but a feeling for the country’s delicate ambiguity.”

Katherine Brabon on Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being

‘Call Me By Your Name’: a Tale of Inimitable Love Leaves its Mark

The latest film by Italian director Luca Guadagnino transports us to a romantic northern Italy, drenched in summer light and a tender love. Olivia Dennis reviews one of the most intimate love stories in recent cinematic history.

Book Review / France

“We are made of all the places we’ve loved, or of all the places where we’ve changed.”

Lauren Elkin, Flâneuse

The Story of America Told Through the Words of James Baldwin

Max Hayward draws our attention to past and present race relations in America through the powerful and poetic words of civil rights activist and writer James Baldwin in the essayistic documentary ‘I Am Not Your Negro’.

Film Review / Germany

“Everything, from Christiane’s favourite East German pickles to Alexander’s t-shirts to the statues of political figures throughout Berlin, must one day change.”

Max Hayward on Good Bye, Lenin!

In the Heat and the Haze: Marguerite Duras’s Love Affair

The real life affair of writer Marguerite Duras in 1930s French Indochina (former Vietnam) challenged gender, social and racial stereotypes. Nearly a century later, Rachel Wilson revisits this transgressive yet ever-intoxicating relationship in Duras’s award-winning novel “The Lover.”

Daymé Arocena Creates the New Sound of Cuba

Daymé Arocena takes us to the streets of Havana in her latest record ‘Cubafonía’, where a backdrop of soul, jazz, salsa and Afro-Cuban rhythms supports her bold and tender voice.

Film Review / India

“The organic way in which director Shubhashish Bhutiani approaches aging and death is decidedly anti-Best Exotic Marigold Hotel; the story isn’t about fulfilling dreams, it’s about the acceptance of death.”

Max Hayward on Shubhashish Bhutiani’s Hotel Salvation

‘Breathless’ (À Bout de Souffle): Jean-Luc Godard’s New Wave Ode to Youth

Considered one of the films that kick-started the French New Wave (Nouvelle Vague), Jean-Luc Godard’s ‘Breathless’ is a rule-breaking tribute to youthfulness, recklessness and gangster movies. Max Hayward escorts us through this black and white 60s Parisian maze.

‘Famiglia’: a Tale Told Through Food

Food, over family, brings the characters together in Natalia Ginzburg’s 1977 dissection of the Roman middle-class.

Music Review / Brazil

“I can’t always work out whether I am in a dark jazz club in Manhattan’s Lower East Side or dancing in Copacabana.”

Olivia Dennis on Eliane Elias’s Dance of Time

Book Review / Spain

“I gazed at the deep blue Mediterranean below the mountain and felt at peace.”

Sofia Papastergiadis, Hot Milk

Wong Kar-wai’s Cinematic Muse, Hong Kong, Shines in ‘In the Mood for Love’

Max Hayward walks us through Wong Kar-wai's dizzying portrait of a man and a woman living in a ramshackle Hong Kong neighbourhood in—what has been granted time and time again—one of the best films ever made.

Zadie Smith Takes Us to an ‘Ungentrifiable’ North West London

In this review of Zadie Smith’s narrative and experimental novel ‘NW,’ Olivia Dennis introduces us to four thirty-somethings born of their location—a diverse and divided district of London.