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