Cinephile

Takes (1516)

• Miracle in Cell No. 7 (7. Koğuştaki Mucize)

  Starting from a 2013 South Korean film, Miracle in Cell No. 7 succeeds in moving the story into a local atmosphere; characters, plot and… Read more →

• Bergen

  In Bergen, Caner Alper and Mehmet Binay face a biopic's hardest test: telling a real tragedy without exploiting it. Farah Zeynep Abdullah… Read more →

• Pocket Hercules: Naim Süleymanoglu (Cep Herkülü: Naim Süleymanoğlu)

  Pocket Hercules is an ambitious production: shooting that stretches from Turkey to Bulgaria and from Australia to Brazil, a Fahir Atakoğlu… Read more →

• The Mountain II (Dağ 2)

  With Alper Çağlar handling script, direction, editing and production himself, The Mountain II is an ambitious genre piece that puts its… Read more →

• Wedding Feast 2: Circumcision (Düğün Dernek 2: Sünnet)

  Selçuk Aydemir's second instalment does not fall headlong into the usual sequel trap, but it does not fully escape it either. The script is… Read more →

• Alone (Issız Adam)

  In Issız Adam, Çağan Irmak brings his own habits of emotional storytelling to their most controlled form. Even the triple pun in the title… Read more →

• Polite Feyzo (Kibar Feyzo)

  Working from Osman Şahin's story, Atıf Yılmaz and screenwriter İhsan Yüce built a comedy that gets the dose of satire right. The film mocks… Read more →

• Magnificent Century (Muhteşem Yüzyıl)

  Judging Muhteşem Yüzyıl starts with its structure. Meral Okay and Yılmaz Şahin's scripts build the tension inside the harem on a classic… Read more →

• Müslüm

  Müslüm applies the familiar template of the music biopic with care: a hard childhood, the steps to fame, a great love and great pain. The… Read more →

• Money Trap (Organize İşler Sazan Sarmalı)

  Fourteen years after the 2005 Organize İşler, Yılmaz Erdoğan returns to that world as writer, director and Asım Noyan all at once. That… Read more →

• Recep İvedik 5

  By the fifth instalment the series can do little more than repeat its own formula. The story, which opens with İsmet's death, is mostly a… Read more →

• The Girl with the Red Scarf (Selvi Boylum Al Yazmalım)

  Atıf Yılmaz's film earns its melodrama label without surrendering to the genre's excesses. The script, co-written with Ali Özgentürk… Read more →

• Dance with the Jackals 5 (Çakallarla Dans 5)

  Çakallarla Dans 5 finds the series at the stage where it repeats its own template. The hundred-metre rule set in the courtroom is actually… Read more →

• The Stranger in My Pocket (Cebimdeki Yabancı)

  Cebimdeki Yabancı adapts the Italian film Perfetti Sconosciuti, and an actor-heavy story built around a dinner table lives or dies by the… Read more →

• Staged Murder (Cinayet Süsü)

  Ali Atay bends the police procedural to the service of comedy and chooses to play with the genre's rules: no evidence, no leads, and… Read more →

• D.I.S.C.O.

  D.I.S.C.O. borrows the well-worn template of the spy comedy: an agent who has never been in the field, a hopeless partner and a criminal… Read more →

• Delibal

  Delibal is a romantic drama adapted from the 2012 Indian film Moonu, and the adaptation stays faithful to the genre's most familiar moulds.… Read more →

• Deliha 2

  The most interesting thing about Deliha 2 is that Gupse Özay adds directing to writing and starring for the first time. That makes it the… Read more →

• Is Enes Batur a Dream or Reality? (Enes Batur Hayal mi Gerçek mi?)

  A film inspired by an internet celebrity's own life, with him playing himself, inevitably risks being seen as a brand extension rather than… Read more →

• For the Two of Us (İkimizin Yerine)

  Umur Turagay's film tries to enrich a romantic drama with elements of mystery, and the real question is how well those two tones are… Read more →

• Cologne Republic (Kolonya Cumhuriyeti)

  Murat Kepez's first feature as director opens on an absurd premise: an alien arriving on Earth lands in Kolonya, a town of five thousand.… Read more →

• What Happened, Happened (Olanlar Oldu)

  Olanlar Oldu pairs Ata Demirer's familiar humour as writer and star with Hakan Algül's tidy but cautious direction. Its skeleton is a… Read more →

• Osman Marketing (Osman Pazarlama)

  Osman Pazarlama can be read as Şahan and Togan Gökbakar's attempt to build a new character beyond Recep İvedik, but the film is not… Read more →

• Recep İvedik 6

  By its sixth outing the series can no longer get past repeating its own formula. A travel agency mixing up Konya and Kenya works as a… Read more →

• My Travel Companion 2 (Yol Arkadaşım 2)

  Sequels often settle for reheating whatever worked the first time, and Yol Arkadaşım 2 does not fully escape that trap. The friendship… Read more →

• A Hindu Father (Bir Baba Hindu)

  Sermiyan Midyat combines script, direction and the lead role, which gives the film a strong personal signature but leaves no second eye to… Read more →

• The Song of Our Village (Bizim Köyün Şarkısı)

  The hardest job in films built on child actors is keeping the performances natural. The coaches' work went into preparing the young cast… Read more →

• Wolf (Börü)

  Börü's clearest problem lies in its origin: designed as the finale of a six-episode series, it works like a closing episode rather than a… Read more →

• Inferno (Cehennem)

  In the third Dan Brown adaptation Ron Howard runs the formula once more, and it is no surprise that critics generally disliked it. The… Read more →

• Cingoz Recai (Cingöz Recai: Bir Efsanenin Dönüşü)

  A third adaptation has to bring a perspective that refreshes the character, and Cingöz Recai only partly manages it. The transitions… Read more →

• If She Returns, She's Yours (Dönerse Senindir)

  Dönerse Senindir leans on the best-known romantic comedy pattern: the break-up, the effort to win her back, the help of a friend. Because… Read more →

• 125 Years Memory

  The film sets up two separate stories: the 1890 sea disaster and the 1985 evacuation. This two-part structure is ambitious, but the risk is… Read more →

• Second Chance (İkinci Şans)

  Özcan Deniz wears three hats here, as director, co-writer and male lead. That makes the film feel personal, but it also makes self-editing… Read more →

• Red Istanbul (İstanbul Kırmızısı)

  Özpetek adapts his own novel for his first Turkish-language film, returning to Istanbul 16 years after his second film, Harem Suare. The… Read more →

• Losers' Club on the Road (Kaybedenler Kulübü Yolda)

  Sequels accept living in the shadow of what came before; Kaybedenler Kulübü Yolda does so by returning to the radio duo of the 2011 film.… Read more →

• Kayhan

  Kayhan carries the familiar problem of comedies that jump from television to cinema: humour resting on a single idea struggles to fill 105… Read more →

• Mortal World (Ölümlü Dünya)

  Ölümlü Dünya starts from a familiar formula: a family that looks ordinary from the outside and works for a secret organisation behind the… Read more →

• Lucky Me (Şansımı Seveyim)

  Şansımı Seveyim leans on a ready-made template: the unlucky hero, a prejudiced neighbourhood, a love interest and a plan to make amends.… Read more →

• Endless Love (Sonsuz Aşk)

  Sonsuz Aşk sets out with a ready-made star couple and a proven formula: two people from different worlds, a love that grows fast, obstacles… Read more →

• Love, Surreal and Odd (Tatlım Tatlım)

  Moving a stage text to the screen always faces the same test: will the word of the stage or the image of cinema carry more weight? On… Read more →

• Vizier's Finger (Vezir Parmağı)

  Vezir Parmağı is a film that published reviews found lacking, and that is hard to ignore. Mahsun Kırmızıgül is director, writer and lead… Read more →

• Let's Hope the President Doesn't Hear About This (Aman Reis Duymasın)

  Taking a successful series to the cinema often means a long episode rather than something rethought for the big screen. Here the set-up… Read more →

• My Mother (Annem)

  Annem sets out with a familiar story: the mother one is ashamed of, the self-sacrificing mother, the return years later. As viewers have… Read more →

• My Father (Babam)

  Babam builds a story of acceptance along a classic line: loss, confrontation, change. Çetin Tekindor and Berker Güven carry the emotional… Read more →

• My Stepfather (Cici Babam)

  Four writers share the screenplay, yet it rests on a single idea: the new stepfather and the siblings who resist him. The set-up is clear… Read more →

• Crazy Love (Deli Aşk)

  Direction is split between two people, Murat Dündar and Murat Kaman, and the writer Emrah Kaman is also the lead. Such in-house productions… Read more →

• The Man from Deliorman (Deliormanlı)

  One critic has written that boxing films are rare in Turkish cinema, so Murat Şeker's attempt can be counted a sign of nerve. Loss of a… Read more →

• All Because of Love (Her Şey Aşktan)

  Being cheated on, a second chance and revenge: the most familiar trio of romantic comedy. The post-breakup adventure with friends and the… Read more →

• Don't Run, Brother (Kaçma Birader)

  Direction is split between Defne Deliormanlı and Murat Kaman, with Ömer Faruk Sorak credited as supervisor; it is not always easy for… Read more →

• The Con (Ketenpere)

  Şafak Sezer both wrote the screenplay and leads, and such a combination often carries the performer's personal world on screen. Though… Read more →

• Burning Days (Kurak Günler)

  Emin Alper turns a small-town story into a political thriller through a water shortage, and he builds the tension not with explosions but… Read more →

• About Dry Grasses (Kuru Otlar Üstüne)

  197 minutes, Cannes main competition, and a Best Actress award for Merve Dizdar. The screenplay Ceylan wrote with Ebru Ceylan and Akın Aksu… Read more →

• Malazgirt 1071

  A historical epic raises high expectations. Özgür Bakar and Bilal Kalyoncu share the directing and Alper Kıvılcım joins on the script… Read more →

• My Name Is Feridun (Benim Adım Feridun)

  The mistaken-identity comedy is an old formula; the real question is how freshly Çağan Irmak can build it. The idea works: a man dazed by a… Read more →

• Yellow Letters (Gelbe Briefe)

  Çatak places state arbitrariness in the aftermath of a play's premiere, testing a career and a marriage at once; the Golden Bear at Berlin… Read more →

• You Are My Everything (Sen Benim HerŞeyimsin)

  Tolga Örnek wrote and directed; for someone known for the documentaries Hititler and Gelibolu, and for Devrim Arabaları and Kaybedenler… Read more →

• Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre

  A spy action comedy from Guy Ritchie: a star cast, an international mission, a witty team. The problem is how easily this familiarity… Read more →

• Siccin 3: The Crime Is Love (Siccin 3: Cürmü Aşk)

  Being the third film means carrying the burden of a sequel: it has to connect to the earlier films and still stand on its own. Treating the… Read more →

• Back Streets (Arka Sokaklar)

  Twenty seasons and 751 episodes is a record in its own right for a weekly show, but a cinephile looks at construction, not volume. The… Read more →

• Behzat Ç.: An Ankara Detective Story (Behzat Ç.: Bir Ankara Polisiyesi)

  Serdar Akar, the director of Gemide, gives the series an unflashy, gloomy visual language. The Ankara murder files unfold in that… Read more →

• Galip Derviş

  As the Turkish adaptation of Monk, the real question is how the same template works in another culture. A new case every episode and an… Read more →

• Leyla and Mecnun (Leyla ile Mecnun)

  Directed by Onur Ünlü and written by Burak Aksak, this series builds its own language by laying surreal humour and science-fiction touches… Read more →

• Tide (Medcezir)

  As an adaptation of The O.C., its patterns are known from the start: poor boy, rich girl, a new life. Keeping this familiar scheme alive is… Read more →

• Shattered (Paramparça)

  Two babies mixed up by a nurse, the daughters of a rich and a poor family swapped: one of melodrama's oldest and best-known set-ups. The… Read more →

• Unconscious Love (Şuursuz Aşk)

  A single, closed location is both an opportunity and a trap for a filmmaker. By keeping most of the action inside the hospital walls, the… Read more →

• World of Lies (Yalan Dünya)

  A sitcom written by Gülse Birsel and directed by Jale Atabey. The idea of setting two lifestyles side by side is solid; but episodes of… Read more →

• Istanbul Tales (Anlat İstanbul)

  Five directors, one screenwriter: what is interesting about Anlat İstanbul is that five tales written by Ümit Ünal were shot by different… Read more →

• Love Doesn't Understand Words (Aşk Laftan Anlamaz)

  Mistaken identity, a boss and his assistant, two opposite worlds: Aşk Laftan Anlamaz uses the best-known moulds of romantic comedy. Because… Read more →

• Separation

  In Ayrılık, which she both wrote and directed, Feo Aladağ builds the story of a woman under family pressure in a plain language. Sibel… Read more →

• Once Upon a Time in Çukurova (Bir Zamanlar Çukurova)

  The story begins in the 1970s and runs up to the present day, and filming took place mainly in Adana and Mersin. Using real locations is a… Read more →

• Don't Let the Children Hear (Çocuklar Duymasın)

  Çocuklar Duymasın knows the mould of the situation comedy well: the same house, the same couple, dialogue that swings between irritation… Read more →

• Inside (İçerde)

  Icerde (Inside) carries Hollywood's The Departed, a story that itself grew out of a Chinese film, to İstanbul. The test of an adaptation is… Read more →

• Bride from Istanbul (İstanbullu Gelin)

  As an adaptation of a book, I am curious how its psychological observation is carried to the screen. Özcan Deniz and Aslı Enver in the… Read more →

• That Life Is Mine (O Hayat Benim)

  Four directors taking over in turn (Merve Girgin, Yıldız Hülya Bilban, Hamdi Alkan, Sadullah Şentürk) is an interesting test of visual and… Read more →

• Magic Carpet Ride (Organize İşler)

  Organize İşler, written and directed by Yılmaz Erdoğan, is a black comedy that fuses the crime comedy with the tangled fabric of Istanbul.… Read more →

• The seat of power: Abdulhamid (Payitaht Abdülhamid)

  Directed by Serdar Akar, the series is seen as a continuation of Filinta and blends historical drama with action. Bülent İnal's Abdul Hamid… Read more →

• Desperate Housewives (Umutsuz Ev Kadınları)

  The question with adaptations is always whether the show has a voice of its own. Umutsuz Ev Kadınları carries over the American source's… Read more →

• Ward 72 (72. Koğuş)

  Ayfer Tunç's screenplay tries to build the novel's walled-in world as an ecosystem running on its own moral code, and the premise is solid.… Read more →

• Love and Punishment (Aşk ve Ceza)

  The dramatic structure of Aşk ve Ceza rests on fate and chance encounters. That is legitimate ground for melodrama, but the script leans… Read more →

• Love and Blue (Aşk ve Mavi)

  The premise of Aşk ve Mavi is a classic melodrama mechanism: a crime pinned on the wrong man, a hidden identity, and a woman caught between… Read more →

• Hunting Season (Av Mevsimi)

  In Av Mevsimi, Yavuz Turgul tries to turn a police procedural into a character study. The script uses an investigation sparked by a young… Read more →

• One Thousand and One Nights (Binbir Gece)

  Binbir Gece is an early and important link in the international rise of Turkish series: the first Turkish show broadcast in Bulgaria, and… Read more →

• The Nanny (Dadı)

  Any assessment of Dadı has to start with its source: The Nanny aired in more than ninety countries, and its local versions generally… Read more →

• Filinta

  Filinta's boldest move is its choice of genre: transplanting the crime procedural into an Ottoman setting. Shooting at the Seka Park Film… Read more →

• Extended Family (Geniş Aile)

  Geniş Aile is one of the notable examples of the sitcom format on Turkish television: a crowded family, humour drawn from everyday life and… Read more →

• Song of Life (Hayat Şarkısı)

  An adaptation of Flames of Desire, which aired on South Korea's MBC in 2010 and 2011, Hayat Şarkısı poses an interesting question: how do… Read more →

• Hercai

  Hercai has a classic melodrama skeleton: feuding families, a bride abandoned the morning after the wedding, a revenge nursed for years and… Read more →

• Robbery Alla Turca (Hırsız Var!)

  Hırsız Var! is the film in which Oğuzhan Tercan, after a long break from cinema following Uzlaşma, carried his advertising experience into… Read more →

• Black Money Love (Kara Para Aşk)

  Ahmet Katıksız's direction builds the genre's visual language with care as it fuses police procedural and romantic drama, and Eylem… Read more →

• Kebab Connection

  Directed by Anno Saul, with Fatih Akın among its credited writers, this Hamburg comedy plays a film-within-a-film game through the… Read more →

• The Butterfly's Dream (Kelebeğin Rüyası)

  The fifth film Yılmaz Erdoğan both wrote and directed tells the real story of two young poets while trying to keep drama and humour under… Read more →

• Kuzey Güney

  Kuzey Güney takes the brotherly opposition inspired by Irwin Shaw's novel Rich Man, Poor Man and places it in an Istanbul baker's family… Read more →

• Mercy (Merhamet)

  Adapted from Hande Altaylı's book Kahperengi, the series pairs the theme of reckoning with a traumatic past with crime elements. Setting it… Read more →

• Where's Firuze? (Neredesin Firuze)

  Ezel Akay, a director who came from advertising, gives Neredesin Firuze a striking look, and Hayk Kirakosyan's cinematography turns the… Read more →

• Matter of Respect (Şeref Meselesi)

  Şeref Meselesi adapts the Italian series L'onore e il rispetto, and the most interesting thing about the adaptation is the change of scale… Read more →

• The Silent Ones (Suskunlar)

  Dramatically, Suskunlar is a well-executed take on the 'perfect life threatened by the past' formula: a rising lawyer's world cracks when… Read more →

• You Can't Handcuff Hope (Umuda Kelepçe Vurulmaz)

  Umuda Kelepçe Vurulmaz sets up an interesting premise that fuses youth drama with prison narrative: a scheme launched for a rich family's… Read more →

• 20 Minutes (20 Dakika)

  20 Dakika adapts the American film The Next Three Days into a series, which creates a tough structural problem: spreading a feature film's… Read more →

• The 400 Blows (Les Quatre Cents Coups)

  Truffaut's feature debut still shows plainly why the French New Wave was a break with what came before. Shot on real locations, the streets… Read more →

• Acacia Stop (Akasya Durağı)

  Akasya Durağı's structure is a solid but familiar sitcom template inherited from Çiçek Taksi: a single location, a wise elder at the… Read more →

• Arif V 216

  After G.O.R.A. and A.R.O.G., the third Arif adventure turns the series' world into a game with film history. The idea is bold: bringing the… Read more →

• Love Likes Coincidences (Aşk Tesadüfleri Sever)

  After his films with Cem Yılmaz and Yılmaz Erdoğan, Ömer Faruk Sorak moves into more emotional territory here and shows his skill at… Read more →

• Love Again (Aşk Yeniden)

  Aşk Yeniden brings one of romantic comedy's best-worn devices, the fake marriage, to the screen and barely tests its limits. The set-up is… Read more →

• Wren (Çalıkuşu)

  Çağan Irmak's direction of Çalıkuşu opts for a soft, romantic aesthetic that foregrounds emotion; the period costumes and locations are… Read more →

• Bold and Beautiful (Cesur ve Güzel)

  In terms of production care, Cesur ve Güzel is one of Turkish television's standout efforts. Ali Bilgin's direction favours a patient… Read more →

• Strawberry Scent (Çilek Kokusu)

  Çilek Kokusu is adapted from the South Korean series The Heirs, and the limits of the adaptation show on screen. The contrast between the… Read more →

• Head-On (Gegen die Wand)

  Head-On is Fatih Akın's cinema at its rawest and most ferocious. The camera closes in on the characters with an almost physical intimacy… Read more →

• Fi

  Regarded as Turkey's first internet series, Fi is an experiment that shows what breaking free of television's moulds might mean. Mert… Read more →

• Gulperi

  As a series inspired by the 1982 film Gülsüm Ana, Gülperi deliberately leans on melodrama's classic moulds: a mother whose life has been… Read more →

• Gümüş

  As storytelling, Gümüş carries every habit of mid-2000s television drama: long close-up scenes, music that announces the emotion in… Read more →

• Revenge (İntikam)

  İntikam adapts the American series Revenge and carries the classic skeleton of The Count of Monte Cristo behind it: a wronged father, a… Read more →

• For Love and Honor (Kabadayı)

  Kabadayı leans on a familiar template: a man with his own morality who has fallen behind the times, and an ambitious new generation eager… Read more →

• Losers' Club (Kaybedenler Kulübü)

  In Losers' Club, Tolga Örnek builds mid-1990s Kadıköy with an unforced texture. The film tries to bring the conversational rhythm of a… Read more →

• Kayıp Şehir

  With three directors and four writers, stylistic unity is hard to expect, and Kayıp Şehir does run that risk. Its ambition to bring drama… Read more →

• Miracle Doctor (Mucize Doktor)

  As an adaptation, Mucize Doktor's strongest card is Taner Ölmez. Playing an autistic character without tipping into caricature is a hard… Read more →

• Coming Soon (Pek Yakında)

  Pek Yakında, the third film Cem Yılmaz both wrote and directed, spins a film about filmmaking out of a pirate-DVD hustler's urge to shoot a… Read more →

• Do Not Forget Me Istanbul (Unutma beni İstanbul)

  Unutma Beni İstanbul carries both the familiar strength and the familiar problem of the anthology film. Seven directors from different… Read more →

• Farewell (Veda)

  In Veda, Zülfü Livaneli wears three hats at once: writer, director and composer. Anchoring the story in the memories of Salih Bozok… Read more →

• Hammer and Rose: A Behzat Ç. Story (Çekiç ve Gül: Bir Behzat Ç. Hikayesi)

  Hammer and Rose carries both the advantages and the burden of being a continuation. Drawing on Emrah Serbes's novel, it offers viewers who… Read more →

• The Life and Movies of Erşan Kuneri

  Erşan Kuneri is essentially an anthology of genre parodies: Erşan's attempts stretch across adventure, period drama, horror and science… Read more →

• The Prince (Prens)

  Prens's boldest move is building a world entirely its own in the fictional country of Bongomia. Turning a character born on social media… Read more →

• Dream (Rüya)

  A fairy-tale adaptation is tempting on paper, but Rüya seems to apply the template as it is rather than reinterpret it. Stepmother… Read more →

• The Big Brass Ring

  The film's real intrigue lies behind the screen: it grew out of a script Orson Welles and Oja Kodar wrote in the early 1980s and could… Read more →

• Damn Istanbul (Ulan İstanbul)

  What makes Ulan İstanbul interesting is its genre blend: action, comedy, romance and crime, which Murat Onbul tries to melt into one. Uğraş… Read more →

• Giuseppe Verdi

  The film makes no secret of its intent: it is built as a melodrama designed to move the audience to tears. For a biopic, that is both a… Read more →

• Wild Soccer Bunch (Die Wilden Kerle)

  The decisive choice here is that Joachim Masannek both wrote and directed. Material from someone who spent years coaching his own sons'… Read more →

• Poison Ivy (Zehirli Sarmaşık)

  Zehirli Sarmaşık's dramatic design rests on a classic imbalance of knowledge: Sinem knows who Yakut's real mother is, and Yakut doesn't.… Read more →

• Urgent Love Wanted (Acil Aşk Aranıyor)

  The on-screen saga of Acil Aşk Aranıyor may be more interesting than the show itself: launched as Acil Servis and pulled after its second… Read more →

• My Father and My Son (Babam ve Oğlum)

  Written and directed by Çağan Irmak, the film owes much of its power to its cast. The tension between Çetin Tekindor and Fikret Kuşkan is… Read more →

• Telling Tales (Bana Masal Anlatma)

  The feature debut of Burak Aksak, known as the writer of Leyla ile Mecnun, tries to melt neighbourhood comedy, old-fashioned melodrama and… Read more →

• The White Angel (Beyaz Melek)

  Mahsun Kırmızıgül's first outing as a director uses every tool of popular melodrama generously and never wavers from its aim of making the… Read more →

• Knife Edge (Bıçak Sırtı)

  The value of Bıçak Sırtı lies in showing that an actor-driven television drama was still possible in the late 2000s. Pairing Nejat İşler… Read more →

• Our Folks (Bizimkiler)

  Bizimkiler turns an idea born from Kapıcılar Kralı, the feature film Umur Bugay wrote, into a long-running situation comedy. One building… Read more →

• Cars of the Revolution (Devrim Arabaları)

  Coming from the documentaries Hititler and Gelibolu, Tolga Örnek brought his research discipline with him into fiction; the two years of… Read more →

• Night Queen (Gecenin Kraliçesi)

  Gecenin Kraliçesi takes its name from the flower that opens for a single night and fades by morning, and the image is actually a strong… Read more →

• War of the Roses (Güllerin Savaşı)

  This Medyapım series for Kanal D builds its servant-girl-and-wealthy-family story out of familiar melodrama parts: admiration, jealousy… Read more →

• I Saw the Sun (Güneşi Gördüm)

  Mahsun Kırmızıgül's second film as director tries to gather its many stories around a single theme of migration instead of leaving them… Read more →

• Pains of Autumn (Güz Sancısı)

  Tomris Giritlioğlu builds Yılmaz Karakoyunlu's novel as a period melodrama, and that choice is both the film's strength and its limit. The… Read more →

• Business and Affairs (İşler Güçler)

  The most interesting thing about İşler Güçler is its form: Ahmet Kural, Murat Cemcir and Sadi Celil Cengiz play versions of themselves… Read more →

• Red Room (Kırmızı Oda)

  Kırmızı Oda picks a bold structure for TV drama: adapted from Gülseren Budayıcıoğlu's book Madalyonun İçi, it devotes each episode to the… Read more →

• Tulip Era (Lale Devri)

  Lale Devri is an instructive case for understanding how the Turkish series industry works. Episodes of around 90 minutes inevitably stretch… Read more →

• Maral

  Maral leans on the telenovela tradition and makes no secret of it: the spirited young woman paired with a rebel running from his past is… Read more →

• No: 309

  The premise of No 309, two strangers sharing a night after sitting at the wrong table and then an unexpected pregnancy, is a fertile spark… Read more →

• Fog and Night (Sis ve Gece)

  An adaptation of Ahmet Ümit's novel, co-written by the author himself. Turgut Yasalar tries to turn a crime framework into a psychological… Read more →

• Black Pearl (Siyah İnci)

  Black Pearl leans on one of Turkish television's most tried formulas: a class divide, a forced marriage and an abandoned lover bent on… Read more →

• The End (Son)

  Son has a narrative boldness rarely seen on Turkish television: it tells a story spanning some thirty years from the end back toward the… Read more →

• Sweet Revenge (Tatlı İntikam)

  Tatlı İntikam puts every familiar piece of the genre in its place but shows little interest in rethinking any of them. A humiliation in the… Read more →

• Whisper If I Forget (Unutursam Fısılda)

  Irmak's tenth feature is a deliberate homage to Yeşilçam. One critic's description of it as a “Yeşilçam fairy tale” fits: rather than… Read more →

• The Edge of Heaven (Auf der anderen Seite)

  Fatih Akın's film, which won Best Screenplay at Cannes, is built with real structural care. The three-chapter design starts in Germany… Read more →

• 300 Words of German (300 Worte Deutsch)

  Züli Aladağ's film swings between comedy and drama, and that is exactly the problem: the tone never quite settles. A plot built around… Read more →

• 50m2

  50m2 builds the classic mistaken-identity template on the fine line between neighbourhood comedy and crime thriller. Selçuk Aydemir's… Read more →

• My Red Scarf (Al Yazmalım)

  Al Yazmalım sets up an intriguing chain of adaptation: from Chinghiz Aitmatov's novel to the 1978 film Selvi Boylum Al Yazmalım, and from… Read more →

• Mr. Wrong (Bay Yanlış)

  Mr. Wrong applies the Turkish summer rom-com formula almost by the textbook: a wealthy man who doesn't believe in love, a woman set on… Read more →

• Behzat Ç.: Seni Kalbime Gömdüm

  Moving a TV series to the big screen is a hard test: when the format changes, the film language has to change with it. I Buried You in My… Read more →

• Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (Bir Zamanlar Anadolu'da)

  Nuri Bilge Ceylan takes the procedure of a murder investigation and turns it into an existential inquiry. The film deliberately suspends… Read more →

• My Grandfather's People (Dedemin İnsanları)

  It is no accident that sources variously call Dedemin İnsanları a comedy-drama or a melodrama; the film never quite settles between the two… Read more →

• After the Revolution (Devrimden Sonra)

  Devrimden Sonra sets out from a bold premise and works it through a structure of twelve separate stories. This kind of episodic… Read more →

• Eşref Rüya

  Eşref Rüya pushes the production scale of Turkish television: a budget of 23 million lira per episode, a director in Uluç Bayraktar who… Read more →

• Lovelorn (Gönül Yarası)

  Lovelorn is a mature example of Yavuz Turgul's character-driven drama: a simple but fertile setup in which a taxi ride crosses the paths of… Read more →

• Watchtower (Gözetleme Kulesi)

  Pelin Esmer's background in documentary is clearly felt in the observational stance of Watchtower. The film builds its story through places… Read more →

• Istanbul Beneath My Wings (İstanbul Kanatlarımın Altında)

  Altıoklar's ambition is clear from the start: mounting a large-scale period film in the mid-1990s, with Eurimages support, was no small… Read more →

• Mommy, I'm Scared (Korkuyorum Anne)

  Reha Erdem's Mommy, I'm Scared attempts a tonal balancing act few Turkish directors would risk: a tragicomic neighbourhood fable set… Read more →

• Lemon Tree (Limon Ağacı)

  Limon Ağacı leans on one of Turkish television's safest formulas: wealthy heir meets small-town girl, city versus province, two feuding… Read more →

• Remake

  For his first feature, director Dino Mustafić picks a bold structure: the stories of Ahmed, a father coming of age in Sarajevo during World… Read more →

• My Wonderful Life (Şahane Hayatım)

  Şahane Hayatım tries out a hybrid form, fusing romantic psychological thriller with drama and crime. On paper it is intriguing: a… Read more →

• The Exam (Sınav)

  Sınav is an ambitious attempt to melt teen film, comedy, drama and action into one mould, and that is exactly where its trouble begins.… Read more →

• Yakamoz S-245

  Yakamoz S-245 is the Turkish branch of the Into the Night universe, and that link shapes both its strengths and its weaknesses. Under Tolga… Read more →

• Zenne

  Zenne Dancer's courage is beyond question: starting from a real murder, it brings to the screen a subject few films in Turkey have tackled… Read more →

• The Gift (Atiye)

  As Netflix's second original series from Turkey, Atiye stakes its ambition largely on atmosphere: putting a real and striking ancient site… Read more →

• Behzat Ç. Ankara Is Burning (Behzat Ç. Ankara Yanıyor)

  The real test for Behzat Ç. Ankara Yanıyor is carrying a well-loved television police drama over into cinematic storytelling. Because… Read more →

• Five Brothers (Beş Kardeş)

  With Onur Ünlü and Erkan Tunç sharing the director's chair, the show raises expectations about its sense of humour from the start. The… Read more →

• Drawers (Çekmeceler)

  Çekmeceler carries both the strength and the limits of independent cinema. Caner Alper and Mehmet Binay's direction shows a determination… Read more →

• Waiting for Heaven (Cenneti Beklerken)

  One critic called it Derviş Zaim's most ambitious work, and you can see why: Waiting for Heaven uses miniature painting not just as a… Read more →

• Turks in Space (Dünyayı Kurtaran Adam'ın Oğlu)

  Dünyayı Kurtaran Adam'ın Oğlu is a sequel that does not know what to do with its own cult legacy. The first film was a happy accident loved… Read more →

• Gulbeyaz

  Gülbeyaz transplants the lovers-from-feuding-families template to the Black Sea; the structure is familiar, but Özer Kızıltan's direction… Read more →

• The Raindrop (Güle Güle)

  Güle Güle marks Zeki Ökten's return after a long break, and it leans on a strong cast. Frenc Pap's cinematography and Engin Düzyol's score… Read more →

• Hicran Street (Hicran Sokağı)

  Hicran Sokağı's most lasting value is almost documentary: it brings Yeşilçam's master actors together in the same frame in 2007. That… Read more →

• Crossing the Bridge: The Sound of Istanbul

  Akın's first feature-length documentary moves through an outsider's eyes rather than a conventional narrator: Alexander Hacke, who speaks… Read more →

• The Club (Kulüp)

  Seren Yüce and Zeynep Günay Tan try to build 1950s Istanbul as a lived-in place rather than a costume showcase, and filming around İstiklal… Read more →

• Labyrinth (Labirent)

  Tolga Örnek's aim is clear: quality popular cinema. One critic wrote that he achieves it to a degree few filmmakers in Turkey manage. In… Read more →

• Neuilly sa mère!

  Gabriel Julien-Laferrière's film works the familiar fish-out-of-water template: a kid from the projects meets the rituals of high society… Read more →

• Five Minarets in New York

  After Beyaz Melek and Güneşi Gördüm, Mahsun Kırmızıgül once again opts for a large-scale story, this time wearing three hats at once as… Read more →

• Until Death (Ölene Kadar)

  Ölene Kadar starts from a strong premise: a man who loses his hope and the best years of his life over a crime he did not commit. That is… Read more →

• Orpheus (Orphée)

  Cocteau's Orphée is one of those films that joyfully remind you cinema is an art of illusion. Moving the myth to 1950s Paris, embodying… Read more →

• The Ottoman Republic (Osmanlı Cumhuriyeti)

  Gani Müjde's starting point is strong: alternative history is fertile ground for political satire. The production pulls its weight too… Read more →

• Water and Fire (Su ve Ateş)

  Özcan Deniz wears three hats here, as director, co-writer and male lead; the ambition deserves respect, but it also sets the film's… Read more →

• Clair Obscur (Tereddüt)

  Yeşim Ustaoğlu's fifth feature is a patiently built drama that places two women's inner lives side by side. As the script moves between a… Read more →

• Yahsi Bati - The Ottoman Cowboys

  Yahşi Batı drops Ottoman agents into the conventions of the Western, and as a concept the parody is genuinely clever. In 1881, Aziz Vefa… Read more →

• Soul Kitchen

  In Fatih Akın's filmography, Soul Kitchen sits somewhere lighter and more relaxed. Writing the script with his lead, Adam Bousdoukos… Read more →

• Times and Winds (Beş Vakit)

  Reha Erdem's fourth feature is built less on plot than on a sense of time. The film uses the five parts of the day as its structural… Read more →

• A Small September Affair (Bi Küçük Eylül Meselesi)

  Written and directed by Kerem Deren, the film rests on one of romantic drama's handiest but most fragile devices: memory loss. The setup is… Read more →

• Let This Be the Last Time (Bu Son Olsun)

  Orçun Benli's first feature, co-written with Şükrü Üçpınar, picks an ambitious tone: telling the story of 12 September through dark comedy.… Read more →

• Grain (Buğday)

  Shooting in black and white, Semih Kaplanoğlu builds a post-apocalyptic world in a slow, contemplative language far removed from Hollywood… Read more →

• Missing (Eksik)

  With Barış Atay wearing three hats at once as director, producer and actor, Eksik shows in every frame that it is a personal project. The… Read more →

• Fadime

  As a Turkish-Iranian co-production remembered within Iran's Filmfarsi tradition, Fadime is an intriguing period document. Türker İnanoğlu's… Read more →

• G.O.R.A.

  G.O.R.A. changed the scale of science-fiction comedy in Turkish cinema. Ömer Faruk Sorak's direction carries the visual ambition you would… Read more →

• To Better Days (Güzel Günler Göreceğiz)

  The first film by Hasan Tolga Pulat and Emre Kavuk chooses to build five lives crossing in Istanbul over a single day as a parallel… Read more →

• Life (Hayat)

  Seven years after Kor, Zeki Demirkubuz returns to cinemas with a film of about 193 minutes whose ambition shows in its length alone. The… Read more →

• Paper (Kağıt)

  Written and directed by Sinan Çetin, Kağıt starts from an interesting place: a film about the act of filmmaking itself. The opposition… Read more →

• In Darkness (Karanlıktakiler)

  In Karanlıktakiler, Çağan Irmak deliberately narrows the storytelling: a dusty, suffocating tale shut inside a small house, shot mostly in… Read more →

• The Crossroads (Kavşak)

  Kavşak builds its intersecting-lives narrative through minimalist direction, and that choice is both the film's strength and its limit.… Read more →

• Hatred (Kin)

  Natuk Baytan's script puts a simple but effective clock on a revenge story: the two months' leave for a change of air granted to Kenan… Read more →

• Winter Sleep (Kış Uykusu)

  Winter Sleep is built like a slow-moving chamber drama in which Nuri Bilge Ceylan puts speech and conversation at the centre. Drawing on… Read more →

• Husband Factor (Kocan Kadar Konuş)

  Kıvanç Baruönü presents BKM's familiar romantic-comedy template with a polished, careful surface. The sequences blending daydream and… Read more →

• Prisoner (Mahkum)

  Mahkum adapts the 2017 South Korean series Innocent Defendant and takes its structural spine from that source: a mystery that opens with… Read more →

• The Blue-Eyed Giant (Mavi Gözlü Dev)

  The familiar trap of the biopic is turning a life into an album of key moments; The Blue-Eyed Giant sidesteps it wisely by limiting itself… Read more →

• Personality (Şahsiyet)

  Onur Saylak's direction and Hakan Günday's script make it clear from the start that character is what lifts Şahsiyet above a routine crime… Read more →

• Love Is in the Air (Sen Çal Kapımı)

  Sen Çal Kapımı puts one of romantic comedy's oldest devices, the fake engagement, at its centre and makes no effort to hide it. The opening… Read more →

• Your Story (Senin Hikayen)

  After works like Gelibolu and Devrim Arabaları, Tolga Örnek's turn to a small-scale family story is an interesting choice. A woman torn… Read more →

• The Bride (La novia)

  In freely adapting Lorca's Blood Wedding, Paula Ortiz sets out to rebuild it in her own cinematic language rather than film a faithful… Read more →

• Vavien

  Vavien pulls off something not often seen in Turkish cinema: an economical, tightly built dark comedy. Engin Günaydın's script sets up… Read more →

• Voyage of the Scorpion (Akrebin Yolculuğu)

  Ömer Kavur's last feature is one of the most concentrated expressions of a cinema he built around time and space. Shot at the Göynük Clock… Read more →

• I Missed You Too (Ben de Özledim)

  Burak Aksak's script and the direction of Onur Ünlü and Erkan Tunç venture into a kind of metafiction rarely tried on television: the cast… Read more →

• Börü 2039

  Börü 2039 heads somewhere Turkish series rarely go, into dystopian science fiction, and that boldness deserves credit. But in trying to… Read more →

• Eyyvah Eyvah 2 (Eyvah Eyvah 2)

  Eyvah Eyvah 2 faces the familiar dilemma of any sequel to a well-loved film: keep the familiar world, or try something new? Ata Demirer's… Read more →

• The Chaos Class in the Military (Hababam Sınıfı Askerde)

  By an eighth film it is hard for a series to do more than reproduce its own formula, and Hababam Sınıfı Askerde does not clear that bar.… Read more →

• Perfidious Byzantium (Kahpe Bizans)

  Parody demands a close knowledge of the target genre's rules, and Gani Müjde and his co-writers clearly know the formulas of 1970s kitsch… Read more →

• Trouble on Wheels (Kara Bela)

  In his second feature after Bana Masal Anlatma, Burak Aksak opts for the road-movie template: a man bound by rules, the car he adores, a… Read more →

• The Cut

  The Cut is the most ambitious and logistically demanding part of Fatih Akın's Love, Death and the Devil trilogy. A route that runs from… Read more →

• Le Beau Serge

  Chabrol's first feature makes it easy to see why it is cited as the first product of the French New Wave: instead of big events, it leans… Read more →

• Romantic Comedy 2: Farewell to Bachelorhood (Romantik Komedi 2: Bekarlığa Veda)

  The classic sequel problem is here too: much of the first film's cast is back, but little new has been built on top. The script leans on… Read more →

• Romantic Comedy (Romantik Komedi)

  By naming itself after its genre, Ketche's film makes a statement of intent, and it does follow the rules to the letter: three very close… Read more →

• Let's Meet at Dawn (Şafakta Buluşalım)

  Şafakta Buluşalım is a remake of the 1972 picture The Summertime Killer, and a typical example of seventies Turkish cinema rebuilding a… Read more →

• Mrs. Salkım's Diamonds (Salkım Hanımın Taneleri)

  Tomris Giritlioğlu builds an ambitious structure by combining history, drama and film noir elements. Durmuş's ambition and the decay in… Read more →

• Singing Women (Şarkı Söyleyen Kadınlar)

  Reha Erdem's eighth film, made after Jin, moves away from realism and leans into an allegorical world. A Büyükada largely evacuated for… Read more →

• Milk (Süt)

  Süt is the middle part of Kaplanoğlu's Yusuf trilogy, which moves backwards in time, and that reverse chronology invites you to read it as… Read more →

• In July (Im Juli)

  In July is a light, cheerful stop in Fatih Akın's filmography before the heavier dramas that began with Head-On. It uses the road-movie… Read more →

• The Water Diviner

  Russell Crowe's first film as director uses its considerable production resources to build a classic epic drama. The search from Istanbul… Read more →

• Sons of Soil (Toprağın Çocukları)

  Ali Adnan Özgür's first feature tries to fit an ambitious subject into about 80 minutes, and that running time is both its asset and its… Read more →

• Keep Your Word (Tut Sözünü)

  Written by and starring Kemal Uçar and Giray Altınok, the film stands on the writer-actor duo's trust in their own chemistry. The need to… Read more →

• Inside (Yeraltı)

  Demirkubuz moves Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground to present-day Ankara and goes after the book's mood rather than its letter, and that… Read more →

• Five Hot Women

  What makes Beş Ateşli Kadın interesting is less the story on screen than the conditions of its making. It is a co-production shot in Arabic… Read more →

• Shattered Soul (Beyza'nın Kadınları)

  Beyza'nın Kadınları is remembered as one of Turkish cinema's early attempts at the serial-killer thriller, and that ambition deserves… Read more →

• The Ignorant Fairies (Le fate ignoranti)

  Ferzan Özpetek's first film shot entirely in Italy, The Ignorant Fairies turns a story of mourning into a story of discovery. The painting… Read more →

• Who Breaks... Pays (Domatesler Silahlar)

  For anyone interested in film history, Who Breaks... Pays is compelling mostly as a production document. Directed by Giorgio Ferroni from… Read more →

• Don't Let Go of My Hand (Elimi Bırakma)

  Adapted from Shining Inheritance, Elimi Bırakma carries the Korean series template into a Turkish family drama and brings along both its… Read more →

• On Board (Gemide)

  Gemide is a harsh film that carved out its own place in 1990s Turkish cinema, and it's easy to see why it is considered a cult work. Serdar… Read more →

• Toll Booth (Gişe Memuru)

  Tolga Karaçelik's debut, Toll Booth, builds the inner world of a withdrawn man through minimalist storytelling, and its Best First Film… Read more →

• Going: My Marlon and Brando (Gitmek: My Marlon And Brando)

  Hüseyin Karabey's first feature deliberately blurs the line between fiction and reality: Ayça Damgacı and Hama Ali play versions of their… Read more →

• Mive-ye gonah (Hak Yolu)

  For film history, Hak Yolu is worth a look as the first project Erler Film took on in Iran with the Koushan brothers, shot at the Pars Film… Read more →

• Law Enforcement (Kanun Gücü)

  Directed by and starring Cüneyt Arkın, who co-wrote the script with Safa Önal, Kanun Gücü is a genre film that applies the crime formulas… Read more →

• The Encounter (Karşılaşma)

  Ömer Kavur's last feature, Karşılaşma, is a search told, in the director's own description, without ornament and with faintly surreal… Read more →

• The Pomegranate (Nar)

  Shot by Ümit Ünal in fifteen days, Nar is a chamber film that tries to turn its constraints into form. Bringing four people of different… Read more →

• And the Rest Will Follow (O da Bir Şey mi)

  In O da Bir Şey mi, Pelin Esmer deliberately blurs the line between reality and fiction. Setting a well-known director who comes from… Read more →

• The Princess's Sleep (Prensesin Uykusu)

  Sleeping Princess is an unusual experiment that takes a pop song as the seed of its screenplay, and having Redd supply the music as well… Read more →

• Propaganda

  Written, directed and produced by Sinan Çetin, Propaganda is an ambitious tragicomedy that tries to fuse harsh, surreal humour with grief.… Read more →

• The Code of Sümela: Temel (Sümela'nın Şifresi: Temel)

  Sümela'nın Şifresi: Temel places a regional stock character in a comedy-adventure mould with franchise potential. The idea of a home-grown… Read more →

• Takva: A Man's Fear of God

  Özer Kızıltan's Takva is a character study that patiently accumulates inner conflict instead of voicing it loudly. Önder Çakar's screenplay… Read more →

• Are We OK? (Tamam mıyız?)

  In Are We OK? Çağan Irmak tries to blend drama with fantasy and thriller elements, and the idea of two strangers whose paths cross through… Read more →

• Sweet Talker (Tatlı Dillim)

  Directed by Ertem Eğilmez, Tatlı Dillim works the rich boy versus idealist village teacher contrast through the classic… Read more →

• Two in the Wave (Deux de la Vague)

  Emmanuel Laurent's Two in the Wave rebuilds the close friendship and eventual rupture of the French New Wave's two pioneers, Truffaut and… Read more →

• Unfinished Loves, Season 1 (Yarım Kalan Aşklar, season 1)

  The first season of Yarım Kalan Aşklar is an ambitious blend that tries to fold drama, crime, detective fiction and romance into a single… Read more →

• Egg (Yumurta)

  Egg opens Semih Kaplanoğlu's Yusuf Trilogy and tells the story in reverse: we meet Yusuf first in later adulthood, while Milk and Honey… Read more →

• Ten to Eleven (11e 10 Kala)

  Pelin Esmer's first narrative feature blurs the line between documentary and fiction with real skill. Having Mithat Bey played by the… Read more →

• Anatolian Eagles (Anadolu Kartalları)

  Made to mark the Air Force's centenary with the institution's cooperation, Anadolu Kartalları is technically ambitious. The 75-metre… Read more →

• My Friend Max (Arkadaşım Max)

  Arkadaşım Max deserves credit for venturing into a genre Turkish cinema has rarely tried: the children's film with an animal hero. As… Read more →

• Beyond the Clouds (Al di là delle nuvole)

  Beyond the Clouds (Al di là delle nuvole) brings two very different temperaments in film history together in one work. Antonioni's four… Read more →

• Offside (Dar Alanda Kısa Paslaşmalar)

  After his debut Gemide, Serdar Akar turns here to a warm, people-centred ensemble comedy, and largely pulls it off. The script he wrote… Read more →

• Everything About Marriage (Evlilik Hakkında Her Şey)

  The most interesting thing about this adaptation is how the British series The Split is moved into Turkish television's format of episodes… Read more →

• Oh Dear, Oh Dear! (Eyyvah Eyvah)

  Directed by Hakan Algül and written by Ata Demirer, Eyyvah Eyvah comes out of BKM's commercial comedy line yet manages to step slightly… Read more →

• For a Moment Freedom (Pour un instant, la liberté)

  You can tell this is Riahi's first narrative feature, and that is both its strength and its weakness. Running three storylines in parallel… Read more →

• Heart Thief (Gönül Hırsızı)

  Written and directed by Arşavir Alyanak, Gönül Hırsızı adapts the transformation idea familiar since Pygmalion to Yeşilçam's blend of… Read more →

• Hababam Class Failed the Class (Hababam Sınıfı Sınıfta Kaldı)

  Ertem Eğilmez, who both directed and produced, leans on his cast more than on film language. The direction is unshowy and leaves the heavy… Read more →

• Steam: The Turkish Bath (Hamam)

  Ferzan Özpetek's first feature is a striking first step from a director still finding his voice. The idea of building a place into a… Read more →

• Harem Soiree (Harem Suare)

  Özpetek's film, shown in the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes in 1999, reflects a director who builds a historical period through… Read more →

• The Magician (Hokkabaz)

  Hokkabaz is a deliberate step away from Cem Yılmaz's box-office comedies. Co-directed with Ali Taner Baltacı, it uses the road-movie form… Read more →

• On Yilda Bir: Insaat 2

  Ömer Vargı's sequel tries to blend the comedy it inherits from the first İnşaat with a noir tone. The way every attempt to get rid of the… Read more →

• L'Immortelle

  Robbe-Grillet's first feature carries everything you would expect from the writer of Last Year at Marienbad: a non-linear structure where… Read more →

• La Carapate

  After unfinished projects and a failed stage play, Gérard Oury finds a new comic star in Pierre Richard, and the pairing with Victor Lanoux… Read more →

• Intoxicated by Love

  Directed by Hassan Fathi, who co-wrote it with Farhad Tohidi, the film sets out to tell a big subject with a big cast. Rumi and Shams… Read more →

• Deadfoot (Ölürayak)

  Aydın Bağardı's 84-minute film rests on a spare two-hander that brings together Ela and Ömer, two strangers on the threshold of death. A… Read more →

• Antidote (Panzehir)

  Alper Çağlar's third feature combines the familiar figures of film noir, an ageing hitman, the father figure who betrays him and a love… Read more →

• Pardon

  Ferhan Şensoy's stage-born language is both the film's strength and its weakness. The wordplay jokes and the characters he calls psychomic… Read more →

• Just You (Sadece Sen)

  Sadece Sen is a remake of the South Korean film Always, and acknowledging this openly in the closing credits is a commendable honesty.… Read more →

• Les Misérables

  Lelouch's Les Misérables refuses to be just one of the novel's dozens of adaptations; it uses Hugo not as a source but as a mirror. Having… Read more →

• The Herd (Sürü)

  Built from the script Yılmaz Güney wrote in prison and brought to the screen under Zeki Ökten's direction, Sürü shows that shared directing… Read more →

• Taken 2

  Takip: İstanbul is the highest-grossing entry in the series, yet critics were mostly unkind, and it's easy to see why. Luc Besson and… Read more →

• Far (Uzak)

  Written, directed, produced and shot by Nuri Bilge Ceylan himself, Uzak feels like the most mature part of the trilogy that began with… Read more →

• Vanilla and Chocolate (Vaniglia e cioccolato)

  Adapted from Sveva Casati Modigliani's novel, the film was recognised in Italy as an art-house release, yet what I saw on screen is closer… Read more →

• Unfinished Loves (Yarım Kalan Aşklar)

  A soul waking in another body is a fertile premise for blending crime and romance, and Yarım Kalan Aşklar is interesting for trying it in… Read more →

• I Won't Mention His Name (Adını Anmayacağım)

  Adını Anmayacağım applies the formulas of Yeşilçam melodrama almost to the letter: news of a death, a misunderstanding, separation, a… Read more →

• Love 101 (Aşk 101)

  Love 101 knowingly works the familiar moulds of the teen series: a band of misfits, a secret plan, friendships blossoming inside the plan.… Read more →

• Love Is Red (Aşk Kırmızı)

  On paper, Aşk Kırmızı starts from a bold question: can there be love between three people? Having Zeynep and Nazlıgül come to care for each… Read more →

• My World (Benim Dünyam)

  It is hard to judge Benim Dünyam without two shadows in view: the Indian film Black and, behind it, The Miracle Worker. Retelling such a… Read more →

• Byzantine Games (Bizans Oyunları)

  Parody is a serious craft: it needs a well-chosen target, sure timing and references woven into the story. The 'Geym of Bizans' pun in the… Read more →

• The Spell (Büyü)

  Büyü deserves attention because it was made when horror had not yet settled in as a genre in Turkish cinema, and its surprise box-office… Read more →

• The Jackal (Çakal)

  The feature debut of director Erhan Kozan and screenwriter Sertan Telli, a film that played in competition at Antalya, Çakal leans on the… Read more →

• Market (Çarşı Pazar)

  On paper Çarşı Pazar's set-up is familiar: a fight to save a single place, a wealthy developer on the other side, a traitor within and a… Read more →

• Cemo

  Atıf Yılmaz's Cemo stands where literary adaptation meets Yeşilçam melodrama. Ayşe Şasa's script tries to preserve the novel's historical… Read more →

• Majority (Çoğunluk)

  Seren Yüce's first feature as writer-director did not win the Lion of the Future at Venice, and best film, director and actor at Antalya… Read more →

• Dracula and Son (Dracula père et fils)

  Dracula and Son is a satire that winks at viewers who know the rules of vampire cinema well. Édouard Molinaro's smartest move is casting… Read more →

• The Trial (Duruşma)

  Duruşma is a performer-driven comedy bearing the stamp of writer-producer Umur Bugay. Yalçın Yelence's direction seems to favour giving the… Read more →

• The Spring That Never Came (Gelmeyen Bahar)

  Emrah İpek's first outing as a director, Gelmeyen Bahar takes on an important issue, but its film language cannot bear the weight. The… Read more →

• Let's Hope So (Hadi İnşallah)

  Hadi İnşallah is Ali Taner Baltacı's third feature after Hokkabaz and A.R.O.G., but there is no point looking here for the storytelling… Read more →

• Government Woman 2 (Hükümet Kadın 2)

  Hükümet Kadın 2 makes an interesting structural choice: it looks like a sequel but is really a prequel set seven years earlier. Because… Read more →

• The Voice Inside Me (Içimdeki Ses)

  Engin Günaydın, who wrote Vavien, retreats to safer ground with İçimdeki Ses and builds a classic romantic-comedy frame: a love that looks… Read more →

• Construction (İnşaat)

  İnşaat is a film unafraid to take its black comedy all the way. Ömer Vargı stays true to the formulas of Her Şey Çok Güzel Olacak but… Read more →

• The Crimean (Kırımlı)

  A Turkish-German co-production with dialogue in three languages and distribution by Warner Bros, Kırımlı is an ambitious historical drama.… Read more →

• Envy (Kıskanmak)

  Kıskanmak is a threshold for Zeki Demirkubuz: his first period film, his first literary adaptation if you set Yazgı aside, and an unusually… Read more →

• My Little Sweetheart (Küçük Sevgilim)

  Küçük Sevgilim lays bare Yeşilçam's economy of adaptation: a chain running from the Tamil Kalyana Parisu to the Hindi film Nazrana and on… Read more →

• As the Crow Flies (Kuş Uçuşu)

  Created and written by Meriç Acemi, Kuş Uçuşu is one of the productions that sidestep the usual length problem of Turkish series through… Read more →

• Pandora's Box (Pandora'nın Kutusu)

  Pandora'nın Kutusu is a mature link in the cinema Yeşim Ustaoğlu built with Güneşe Yolculuk and Bulutları Beklerken. Co-written with Sema… Read more →

• Hidden Faces (Saklı Yüzler)

  Written and directed by Handan İpekçi, Saklı Yüzler took a long time to complete because of financial difficulties, and that persistence… Read more →

• Un témoin dans la ville

  Un témoin dans la ville shows just how stylish French noir can be. The story, drawn from a Boileau-Narcejac novel, takes Lino Ventura out… Read more →

• Wildflower (Vahşi Çiçek)

  Akad is one of the filmmakers who shaped Turkish cinema's directing language most deliberately, yet the script he wrote for Vahşi Çiçek… Read more →

• Yousof va Zolaykha

  Assessing Yusuf ile Züleyha first means untangling its credits: Iranian records name Mehdi Reisfirooz as director and date it to 1968… Read more →

• Love, Bitter (Acı Aşk)

  Onur Ünlü's script is, as one critic put it, a black comedy full of absurdities, while A. Taner Elhan seems to have shaped the film more as… Read more →

• The Nameless Knight (Adsız Cengaver)

  Written and directed by Halit Refiğ, the film builds a hybrid structure that joins the motif of the baby set adrift on a river, from the… Read more →

• Love Resembles You (Aşk Sana Benzer)

  Aşk Sana Benzer assembles every familiar piece of the genre: the inherited restaurant, the mysterious woman fleeing her past, love at first… Read more →

• Balalaika (Balalayka)

  In Balalayka, Ali Özgentürk sets up the classic road-movie machinery: brothers of opposite temperaments, an old bus as a closed space, and… Read more →

• Mr. E (Bay E)

  Written and directed by Sinan Çetin, who also shared the cinematography, Bay E is an unconventional, experimental fantasy road comedy from… Read more →

• Nausea (Bulantı)

  Nausea is a film Zeki Demirkubuz wrote, directed and stars in, and which he considers his most personal work; Sartre's name in the credits… Read more →

• Busra

  Turning a weekly humour-magazine character into a feature-length tragedy is a bold choice, and Alper Çağlar and Bahadır Boysal deserve… Read more →

• Cool School Camp (Çılgın Dersane Kampta)

  As a sequel, Çılgın Dersane Kampta rarely does more than replay the first film's winning formula in a new location. The camp could have… Read more →

• Dialogue with the Carmelites (Le Dialogue des carmélites)

  Co-direction by a former cinematographer and a priest sums up the film's character: Philippe Agostini's visual precision sits beside… Read more →

• Between the World and Us (Dünyayla Benim Aramda)

  The show's starting point, a woman staging a game to measure her partner's feelings, is a manipulation motif romantic comedy loves, and the… Read more →

• Rhino Season (Gergedan Mevsimi)

  Bahman Ghobadi's first film after leaving his country, presented by Martin Scorsese and premiered at San Sebastián, is an ambitious piece… Read more →

• Don't Fear Life (Hayattan Korkma)

  The first cinema film by Berrin Dağçınar, who came from television, wears its good intentions in every frame but follows a very familiar… Read more →

• Two Young Girls (İki Genç Kız)

  In adapting Perihan Mağden's novel, Kutluğ Ataman manages to keep the book's raw, realistic voice. The film's great strength is its acting… Read more →

• A Woman Is a Woman (Une femme est une femme)

  Godard's first encounter with colour and widescreen is an experiment that winks at American musicals with both admiration and mischief. He… Read more →

• Kızılırmak

  Watching Kızılırmak today means seeing both the strengths and the limits of Turkish cinema of its time. The acting is theatrical in the… Read more →

• The Little Apocalypse (Küçük Kıyamet)

  Shot by the Taylan Brothers from a script by Doğu Yücel, Küçük Kıyamet attempts something rarely tried in Turkish cinema at the time… Read more →

• Valley of the Wolves: Palestine (Kurtlar Vadisi Filistin)

  Technically this is the most ambitious entry in the series: you can see on screen that it was one of the most expensive Turkish productions… Read more →

• Meryem

  Atalay Taşdiken's second feature carries the traces of his debut, Kız Kardeşim Mommo: a plain, slow-burning provincial drama. It tries to… Read more →

• Jolly Life (Neşeli Hayat)

  Written and directed by Yılmaz Erdoğan, who also plays the lead, Neşeli Hayat brings a rarely attempted subgenre in Turkey, the… Read more →

• Boss Wants a Happy Ending (Patron Mutlu Son İstiyor)

  Patron Mutlu Son İstiyor is a film that writes its own formula into its title: the funny script, love story and happy ending the producer… Read more →

• Peau d'Âne

  Demy's Perrault adaptation stands out for staying faithful to the tale's familiar course while dressing it in a 1960s pop look; the bold… Read more →

• Little Big Heart (Taçsız Prenses)

  Adapted from Shinji Nojima's 1994 Japanese series, Taçsız Prenses rightly makes the clash between its child heroine's fairy-tale inner… Read more →

• The Oldest Profession (Le Plus Vieux Métier du monde)

  An anthology in which six directors each take one sketch on the same subject across the ages is an inviting playground on paper. Seeing… Read more →

• To Each His Own Cinema (Chacun son cinéma)

  Made for the 60th anniversary of Cannes, this anthology is a tribute to the movie theatre in 34 short films. Squeezing styles as different… Read more →

• And Then What? (Ya Sonra)

  Written and directed by Özcan Deniz, who also plays the male lead, And Then What? sets out with a universal question: does marriage dull… Read more →

• Unforgiven (Affedilmeyen)

  Directed and produced by Türker İnanoğlu, Affedilmeyen applies the era's industrial melodrama formula with care: nightclub, prison, piano… Read more →

• In Between (Arada)

  Mu Tunç's feature debut Arada is built with the density you would expect from a two-week shoot and a roughly 87-minute running time: one… Read more →

• Not Knowing (Bilmemek)

  In Bilmemek, Leyla Yılmaz writes a script that centres the state of questioning without reducing identity to a debate over labels. The real… Read more →

• A Love Story (Lyubov moya, pechal moya)

  Bir Aşk Masalı is a rare case in film history: a Turkish-Soviet co-production by Mosfilm with Tuğra Film and Duru Film, reading the Ferhat… Read more →

• Saturn in Opposition (Saturno contro)

  In Bir Ömür Yetmez, Özpetek opts for an ensemble structure: not one hero but a community of couples of different temperaments and recent… Read more →

• Our Grand Despair (Bizim Büyük Çaresizliğimiz)

  In adapting Barış Bıçakçı's novel, Seyfi Teoman chose the hardest route: a narrative that moves through small gestures, silences and… Read more →

• Darling (Canikom)

  Directed by Orhan Aksoy and produced by Türker İnanoğlu, Canikom applies the Yeşilçam romantic-comedy formula with flawless discipline: a… Read more →

• CSI: Miami

  CSI: Miami, the first spin-off to carry the parent show's formula from Las Vegas to Florida, shows both the strength and the limits of that… Read more →

• Eagle of the Mountains (Dağların Kartalı)

  Written and directed by Feyzi Tuna, Dağların Kartalı rests on a classic adventure skeleton of betrayal and revenge: lots are drawn, one man… Read more →

• In Disarray (Darmaduman)

  Darmaduman's real test is the adaptation question: how do you move an American youth series like Beverly Hills, 90210 to Turkey? Bringing… Read more →

• Crazy Dumrul (Deli Dumrul)

  Burak Aksak, who both wrote and directed this BKM production, chose his source well: the Deli Dumrul tale from Dede Korkut offers a strong… Read more →

• Günce

  Günce is a melodrama that puts the father-daughter bond and the fear of loss at its centre and plays openly for emotion. Squeezing a story… Read more →

• Dark Night (Karanlık Gece)

  Özcan Alper's Karanlık Gece, which won Best Film at the Antalya Golden Orange, is a film that deliberately disarms its crime and thriller… Read more →

• Koroglu

  Shot in 1945, Köroğlu is interesting as an early link in Turkish cinema's effort to adapt epic and folk storytelling for the screen. The… Read more →

• The Lamb

  In Kuzu, Kutluğ Ataman builds a story not around a big dramatic event but around a small wish: a mother's struggle to find a lamb for her… Read more →

• La Scoumoune

  What makes La Scoumoune interesting is that José Giovanni brings his own novel to the screen for the second time, returning to the material… Read more →

• The Masked Gang (Maskeli Beşler İntikam Peşinde)

  Maskeli Beşler İntikam Peşinde arrives as a remake of a 1968 film, but owes its identity more to a cast familiar from Hababam Sınıfı Üç… Read more →

• Mayrig

  Mayrig is a semi-autobiographical family chronicle that Henri Verneuil wrote and directed from his own life, and that personal link gives… Read more →

• Out 1 (Out 1 : Noli me tangere)

  Out 1 is one of the rare works that turns cinema's sense of duration into a field of experiment. Drawing on Balzac's La Comédie humaine… Read more →

• Hi (Selam)

  Selam's biggest ambition is its scale of production: a story spread across three continents, shot in Türkiye, Afghanistan, Senegal and… Read more →

• Water Also Burns (Su da Yanar)

  Because it follows a director trying to make a film, Su da Yanar builds a self-reflexive structure: the idealistic hero hunting for money… Read more →

• The Goddess of Fortune (La dea fortuna)

  In The Goddess of Fortune, Ferzan Özpetek takes on families built beyond biological ties and the shapes love takes over time. Opening up… Read more →

• Three Thousand Years of Longing

  Starting from A. S. Byatt's short story, George Miller has built a film about storytelling itself: a conversation in a hotel room… Read more →

• The Road (Yol)

  Yol is one of those rare films remembered as much for how it was made as for what is on screen: Yılmaz Güney wrote it in prison, Şerif… Read more →

• Someone Completely Different (Bambaşka Biri)

  Bambaşka Biri is an ambitious genre blend that tries to hold drama, crime and romantic thriller together. Ethem Özışık's story uses the… Read more →

• Pierrot le Fou

  Pierrot le Fou is Godard's tenth feature and one of the moments when the French New Wave let itself run freest. Loosely adapted from Lionel… Read more →

• The Children Are Entrusted to You (Çocuklar Sana Emanet)

  Çağan Irmak builds Çocuklar Sana Emanet on a single question: what if we could see our own wickedness through someone else's eyes? The idea… Read more →

• Crazy Heart (Deli Gönül)

  Deli Gönül's most notable feature is telling its love story through a teacher's eyes, a point of view that sets up a contrast between the… Read more →

• The Man Who Saved the World (Dünyayı Kurtaran Adam)

  Judging Dünyayı Kurtaran Adam by conventional standards is almost pointless; critics panned it, and there is little to defend in terms of… Read more →

• Oh No, Oh Dear 3 (Eyyvah Eyvah 3)

  By its third instalment, Eyyvah Eyvah is a series that knows its own formula by heart. Hakan Algül handles the settled story structure and… Read more →

• One Day in the Future (Gelecekten Bir Gün)

  Boğaçhan Dündar's first feature is, as one critic noted, a local variation on the formula of Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life, in which… Read more →

• The Remaining (Geriye Kalan)

  Çiğdem Vitrinel's first feature chooses to tell its story of infidelity through three people rather than locking it into one point of view… Read more →

• Qeysar

  Gheysar is a noir-toned revenge story where drama meets crime, and Masoud Kimiai is said to have created with it what would later be called… Read more →

• Everything's Gonna Be Great (Her Şey Çok Güzel Olacak)

  The script by Cem Yılmaz and Hakan Haksun uses the classic skeleton of a comedy about two brothers built on two opposite characters, and… Read more →

• Hitman: Agent 47

  Hitman: Agent 47, Aleksander Bach's first feature, repeats the familiar problems of video-game adaptations. Skip Woods and Michael Finch's… Read more →

• Climates (İklimler)

  Climates is Nuri Bilge Ceylan's first feature shot on high-definition video, and that choice shapes its texture: the contrast between the… Read more →

• Short Sharp Shock (Kurz und schmerzlos)

  Kısa ve Acısız is Fatih Akın's feature debut, and it carries both the energy and the rough edges of a first film. Akın's own script weaves… Read more →

• Simmer for 15 Minutes (Kısık Ateşte 15 Dakika)

  Simmer for 15 Minutes makes its boldest choice in its structure: everything takes place in a French restaurant called Le Chic between 9:00… Read more →

• Cosmos (Kosmos)

  In Kosmos, Reha Erdem chooses the rhythm of a folk tale over a conventional plot. The snowbound border town filmed in Kars becomes an… Read more →

• The Cousins (Les Cousins)

  Les Cousins shows how controlled a storyteller Chabrol already was while the French New Wave was still proving itself. The script, written… Read more →

• The Phantom of Liberty (Le Fantôme de la liberté)

  Buñuel's penultimate film deliberately refuses a straight plot: fourteen chapters, each handed on to the next as a character moves into a… Read more →

• Le Viager

  Le Viager takes a single legal arrangement, the lifetime annuity paid as long as the seller lives, and turns it into a black comedy… Read more →

• The Masked Gang: Iraq (Maskeli Beşler: Irak)

  Written and directed by Murat Aslan, this sequel rarely does more than enlarge the first film's formula. The premise of an oil installation… Read more →

• Death Mission (Ölüm Görevi)

  Ölüm Görevi is an interesting case as one of the films Cüneyt Arkın both directed and starred in. A star building his own image with his… Read more →

• Prison Break: The Final Break

  The Final Break is a television film made to fill the gap left at the end of the fourth season, and that functional identity seeps into… Read more →

• Safe and Sound (Sağ Salim)

  Ersoy Güler's road comedy starts from a solid idea: a man afraid of death and the dead is forced to carry a body from Mersin to Sivas. The… Read more →

• What's Left of You (Senden Bana Kalan)

  A remake of the South Korean A Millionaire's First Love, What's Left of You takes a premise that works well, a will with conditions… Read more →

• Journey of Hope

  Written by Xavier Koller with Feride Çiçekoğlu, Umuda Yolculuk avoids melodrama's easy routes and opts for a spare, almost documentary… Read more →

• Vice and Virtue (Le Vice et la Vertu)

  Roger Vadim's loose adaptation of Sade's Justine attempts a bold transposition, moving two morally opposed sisters into France under German… Read more →

• Somewhere in Between (Araf)

  Written, directed and produced by Yeşim Ustaoğlu, Somewhere in Between turns a huge highway gas station into a kind of in-between zone. A… Read more →

• The Three Superboys in the Snow (Babanın Evlatları)

  Natuk Baytan's Turkish-Italian co-production is a textbook case of the period's adventure-comedy formula with one eye on foreign markets… Read more →

• The Mystery of Beyoğlu (Beyoğlu Esrarı)

  Beyoğlu Esrarı is a nearly scene-for-scene Yeşilçam remake of Phil Karlson's 99 River Street, and that fact is hard to put out of your mind… Read more →

• Crazy Cram School 3 (Çılgın Dersane 3)

  Çılgın Dersane 3 follows Çılgın Dersane Kampta by moving the series formula to a hotel and an inter-school music contest. A new talent… Read more →

• Deep Waters (Derin Sular)

  A telenovela format that put out 116 episodes in under six months imposes very different conditions on direction and writing. Sharing the… Read more →

• Elena and Her Men (Elena et les Hommes)

  Seen as the last part of Renoir's "trilogy of spectacle", the film's artificiality makes sense: the sets are deliberately left stage-like… Read more →

• Manly (Erkekçe)

  Erkekçe is one of the many Arkın collaborations that Çetin İnanç both wrote and directed, and it tries to hold adventure, crime and comedy… Read more →

• Fantômas contre Scotland Yard

  The last film in the Fantômas trilogy makes it plain that the series is tiring. Hunebelle moves away from Bond-style modernity toward the… Read more →

• Fay Grim

  Hal Hartley's sequel to Henry Fool sticks in the mind for one formal decision: nearly every shot is tilted, framed at a Dutch angle. It is… Read more →

• My Only Sunshine (Hayat Var)

  In Hayat Var, Reha Erdem turns the title's double meaning, both 'there is life' and the heroine's own name, into the film's entire… Read more →

• How to Keep the Red Lamp Burning (Les Bons Vivants)

  A three-part portmanteau with two directors: the first two episodes, La Fermeture and Le Procès, are by Gilles Grangier, while Les Bons… Read more →

• Il disco volante

  Told with a mock-documentary touch, Tinto Brass's science fiction parody sends up the 1960s craze for space and visitors from other worlds.… Read more →

• First Kiss (İlk Öpücük)

  A loose adaptation of 50 First Dates, İlk Öpücük carries a ready-made formula over into a local seaside-town comedy. The premise is solid… Read more →

• La Terrazza

  Ettore Scola's La terrazza is a melancholy satire about a circle of intellectuals who once held lofty ideals and have watched their lives… Read more →

• Les Biches

  Les Biches, which Chabrol wrote with Paul Gégauff, is a tight chamber drama of about a hundred minutes. What holds the balance between its… Read more →

• The Prisoner (Mahkûm)

  Mahkûm, which Osman F. Seden wrote, directed and produced, follows the seventies melodrama recipe to the letter: fatal illness, a second… Read more →

• The Blue Exile (Mavi Sürgün)

  Erden Kıral builds on Kabaağaçlı's memoir with a structure that breaks the exile journey up with flashbacks. On paper it's a fertile… Read more →

• Where Are These Men Looking? (Nereye Bakıyor Bu Adamlar)

  Ahmet Üstel's script follows a template common in comedies of the period, two provincials adrift in the big city, and barely pushes against… Read more →

• Nihavend Miracle (Nihavend Mucize)

  Nihavend Mucize, from Zeynep Avcı's script, has an intriguing idea in fusing the lost-mother motif with fantasy comedy. Suzan returning at… Read more →

• There (Orada)

  Written and directed by Hakkı Kurtuluş and Melik Saraçoğlu, Orada is a compressed-time drama that spends twenty-four hours with a scattered… Read more →

• The Bride Wore Black (La mariée était en noir)

  There's a reason it is called Truffaut's most openly Hitchcockian film: made while he was deep in his interview book with Hitchcock, it… Read more →

• King of Hearts

  The way into Soltane Ghalbha is to see it as a star vehicle: Fardin directs, co-writes and leads, and the whole film is built around his… Read more →

• The Pursuit (Takip)

  Remzi Jöntürk's Takip leans on one of genre cinema's barest templates: the hunted and the hunter. Its real trump card is location. The… Read more →

• Testament of Orpheus (Le Testament d'Orphée)

  Closing Cocteau's "Orphic Trilogy", this film is a treasure for anyone not expecting a classical narrative. Chronology is scattered on… Read more →

• The Sleeping Car Murders (Compartiment tueurs)

  Costa-Gavras's first feature, made before the political cinema he would become known for, is a train-murder mystery adapted from Sébastien… Read more →

• Turquoise (Turquaze)

  Written and directed by Kadir Balcı, Turquaze uses a classic family-drama structure that splits three brothers into three storylines: Ediz… Read more →

• Three Monkeys (Üç Maymun)

  Three Monkeys keeps Nuri Bilge Ceylan's observational calm but gives it a much tighter dramatic frame than his earlier films. The knot of a… Read more →

• A Slightly Pregnant Man (L'Événement le plus important depuis que l'homme a marché sur la Lune)

  Written and directed by Jacques Demy, this satirical farce rests on a single absurd idea: a man who becomes pregnant. An original title… Read more →

• As Abdulhamid Falls (Abdülhamid Düşerken)

  Remembered as the most expensive Turkish film of its time, at more than a million dollars, Abdülhamid Düşerken knows how to put its budget… Read more →

• Blood for a Silver Dollar (Un dollaro bucato)

  Giorgio Ferroni's film comes from the early days when the Italian western was still writing its own rules, which makes it an interesting… Read more →

• Cirkus Columbia

  In Cirkus Columbia, Danis Tanović does not show the war directly; he places its approaching shadow inside the everyday bustle of a small… Read more →

• The Mill Horse (Dolap Beygiri)

  The script by Atıf Yılmaz and Suphi Tekniker tries to combine comedy, political content and drama in a single character's journey. The… Read more →

• Fantômas se déchaîne

  The second film of Hunebelle's trilogy, France's answer to the James Bond craze, sends up both old adventure novels and Bond conventions.… Read more →

• Fear Over the City (Peur sur la ville)

  Henri Verneuil's Fear Over the City is a police thriller built around Jean-Paul Belmondo's star image. In his first screen role as a… Read more →

• Due Date (Git Başımdan)

  Git Başımdan is, by most accounts, an adaptation of a 2010 American film, and it follows a familiar road-comedy template: a man fleeing a… Read more →

• The Law of the Border (Hudutların Kanunu)

  Hudutların Kanunu is one of Ömer Lütfi Akad's first turns toward social realism and his first collaboration with Yılmaz Güney, a meeting… Read more →

• Ironmaster (La guerra del ferro - Ironmaster)

  Umberto Lenzi's Ironmaster is openly derivative, blending the prehistoric premise of La Guerre du feu with the heroic fantasy of Conan the… Read more →

• Travelers of Destiny

  Kader Yolcuları sparks historical curiosity as one of Yeşilçam's co-production ventures of the 1970s, and Berker İnanoğlu as producer and… Read more →

• Brothers (Kardeşler)

  Ömür Atay wrote and directed, and a world premiere at Karlovy Vary signals a film close to the language of festival cinema. The core of the… Read more →

• La Cage aux Folles

  La Cage aux Folles is a comedy that does not hide its stage origins yet carries them into cinema with real success. Michel Serrault… Read more →

• La Reine Margot

  Patrice Chéreau turns Dumas's novel, through a screenplay co-written with Danièle Thompson, into an ambitious period film. The Jury Prize… Read more →

• La Tour, prends garde !

  Georges Lampin's film is a typical example of the cape-and-sword genre popular in 1950s European cinema, which is both its strength and its… Read more →

• The Lord of the Seagull (Martıların Efendisi)

  Martıların Efendisi is built less as a realist drama than as a fable or allegory: a man living in his own innocent world by the sea, and a… Read more →

• The Mad Adventures of Rabbi Jacob (Les Aventures de Rabbi Jacob)

  Gérard Oury harnesses Louis de Funès's explosive comic energy inside a tightly controlled chase structure. A road crash, a power struggle… Read more →

• The Fourth State (Die vierte Macht)

  In The Fourth State, Dennis Gansel frames an outsider's view of Moscow in two distinct tones: first a glossy society world of fashion… Read more →

• The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Notre-Dame de Paris)

  Jean Delannoy makes good use of the wide CinemaScope frame to stage the crowded carnival of fifteenth-century Paris, and colour, in the… Read more →

• The Seventh Juror (Le Septième Juré)

  Georges Lautner's The Seventh Juror has a clever premise that turns the courtroom film inside out: the real killer sits on the jury at the… Read more →

• The Unfaithful Wife (La Femme infidèle)

  La Femme infidèle is counted among the typical examples of Chabrol scratching beneath the orderly surface of bourgeois life, and its… Read more →

• Time You Change (Zeiten ändern dich)

  Directed by Uli Edel and written by Bernd Eichinger from Bushido's 2008 autobiography, the film promises a strong team on paper. Shooting… Read more →

• Paradise Now (Vaat Edilen Cennet)

  In Paradise Now, Hany Abu-Assad tackles one of the hardest subjects imaginable, the last 48 hours of two childhood friends prepared for a… Read more →

• For the Sake of Duty (Vazife Uğruna)

  Vazife Uğruna carries every convention of the eighties Turkish cop film: the honest inspector near retirement, the gang boss back from the… Read more →

• The 80th Step (80. Adım)

  In terms of production values, 80. Adım is an ambitious TRT production: shooting on 35 mm, Yavuz Türkeri's cinematography and the use of… Read more →

• Bitter Life (Acı Hayat)

  Made as Metin Erksan was moving from village films to big-city stories, Acı Hayat builds a structure that feeds the melodrama template with… Read more →

• Love and Grudge (Aşk ve Kin)

  Directed, written and produced by Turgut Demirağ, Aşk ve Kin sets out to stretch a one-sentence premise into a ninety-minute drama. That… Read more →

• The Horse (At)

  Ali Özgentürk stages Işıl Özgentürk's screenplay with an unshowy realism. Kenan Ormanlar's camera catches the crowds and poverty around… Read more →

• Atatürk (Atatürk 1881-1919)

  The production's most defining feature is actually a decision made behind the camera: material designed as a six-episode series for Disney+… Read more →

• Lady Ayhan (Ayhan Hanım)

  Semerci's second feature after Nefes: Vatan Sağolsun takes a far riskier road. Writing, shooting and partly editing it himself explains why… Read more →

• Twist of Fate (Baht Oyunu)

  Baht Oyunu follows the Turkish summer-series template quite faithfully: a heroine who believes in fate, a man she takes for her first love… Read more →

• Classe tous risques

  Overshadowed by the New Wave on release, Claude Sautet's gangster film now looks like one of the genre's most mature works. Its strength… Read more →

• Dear Caroline (Caroline chérie)

  As a remake of a 1951 adaptation, Dear Caroline is a typical example of the historical costume drama made on the European co-production… Read more →

• Dilber's Eight Days (Dilber'in Sekiz Günü)

  The middle panel of Cemal Şan's Love Trilogy, Dilber's Eight Days carries the personal stamp of a project in which one person wrote… Read more →

• Five Years (5 Jahre Leben)

  Stefan Schaller's first feature, Five Years builds a biographical prison drama around the pressure of the interrogation room. The narrow… Read more →

• My Aunt Came (Halam Geldi)

  Erhan Kozan's film rests on a tonal shift, opening in humour and sliding steadily into tragedy. Handled well, that slide could have a… Read more →

• Le Pacha

  Le Pacha pairs Georges Lautner's flair for gangster cinema with a script he co-wrote with Michel Audiard and Albert Simonin. Jean Gabin's… Read more →

• Les Uns et les Autres

  Here Lelouch sets out to tell fifty years of European history through the crossing fates of four families, and the ambition of the… Read more →

• Possible Love (Muhtemel Aşk)

  Muhtemel Aşk rests on a familiar template: a successful, controlled, lonely heroine, two men who are each other's opposites, and… Read more →

• The Great Beauty (La grande bellezza)

  Paolo Sorrentino's The Great Beauty is an ambitious film that makes no secret of its kinship with Fellini's La dolce vita. Rather than a… Read more →

• Nights Without Dawn (Sabahsız Geceler)

  Working from Safa Önal's script, Ertem Göreç moves Peyami Safa's psychological novel into a structure built on flashbacks. The choice suits… Read more →

• Hair (Saç)

  In Hair, Tayfun Pirselimoğlu squeezes almost an entire world into the window of a wig shop and turns that narrow space into a disciplined… Read more →

• The Voice (Ses)

  Directed by Ümit Ünal from a script by film critic and novelist Uygar Şirin, Ses is a notable attempt in Turkish horror. The premise is… Read more →

• Beyond the Hill (Tepenin Ardı)

  Emin Alper's feature debut builds a family story almost like a Western: harsh terrain, an unseen enemy and men on constant alert. The… Read more →

• The Big Restaurant (Le Grand Restaurant)

  Le Grand Restaurant rests its comedy entirely on Louis de Funès's body and timing; it feels more like the star's work than director Jacques… Read more →

• The Longest Hunt (Spara, Gringo, spara)

  As Bruno Corbucci's first western, and apart from a parody his only one, The Longest Hunt is an intriguing footnote in film history: the… Read more →

• The Stranger (Lo straniero)

  Visconti's Camus adaptation faces the hardest question in literary adaptation: how do you put inner indifference on screen? Mastroianni… Read more →

• Trivial (La Disparue de Deauville)

  Sophie Marceau's second feature as director makes her ambitions behind the camera plain: she co-wrote it and acts in it too. A widowed… Read more →

• Three Angry Warriors (Üç Kızgın Cengaver)

  Written, produced and directed by Turgut Demirağ, the film applies the conventions of the period's swashbuckler cinema to the letter: a… Read more →

• Body of Lies

  Scott's visual signature is all over this one: the Middle Eastern settings, the distance between the agent on the ground and the boss far… Read more →

• Homeland Hotel (Anayurt Oteli)

  Anayurt Oteli is perhaps the boldest attempt in Turkish cinema to make an inner world visible. Adapting Yusuf Atılgan's novel himself, Ömer… Read more →

• Animal (L'Animal)

  Claude Zidi builds his film on his star's public image: he casts Belmondo, known for doing his own dangerous scenes, as a stuntman, and in… Read more →

• Separate Worlds (Ayrı Dünyalar)

  Orhan Aksoy's film is built on the contrast its title promises: on one side the shady air of the nightclub and casino, on the other the… Read more →

• Stolen Kisses (Baisers volés)

  The third link in Truffaut's Antoine Doinel cycle turns the pain of The 400 Blows into a light, almost scattered-looking grace. The film… Read more →

• Celal and Ceren (Celal ile Ceren)

  Celal ile Ceren was billed as the Gökbakar brothers' move from the Recep İvedik line into romantic comedy, so it is no surprise that… Read more →

• The Woman Who Drives You Crazy (Çıldırtan Kadın)

  Bearing Çetin İnanç's name, Çıldırtan Kadın is a typical late-seventies picture that tries to boil thriller, drama and eroticism in one… Read more →

• These Are Very Movie-like Moves (Çok Filim Hareketler Bunlar)

  Gathering nine separate summer stories into one film is a bold structural choice, and it carries its own risk. The sketch logic the Mutfak… Read more →

• September (Eylül)

  Cemil Ağacıkoğlu's first feature is a spare, inward-looking drama that carries traces of his background in short films. Illness, a marriage… Read more →

• Find a Place to Die (Joe... cercati un posto per morire!)

  Find a Place to Die is a remake that carries the 1954 Garden of Evil into the Italian western tradition, which invites comparison from the… Read more →

• You Are Everywhere (Her Yerde Sen)

  Her Yerde Sen is a loose adaptation of the Taiwanese series Just You, and it has no intention of pushing the genre's limits. Two opposites… Read more →

• Two Angry Men

  Two old friends ending up on opposite sides of the law is one of the oldest formulas in crime drama, and Erdoğan Tünaş's script rarely… Read more →

• Diploma of Craziness (Kaçıklık Diploması)

  Graduate of Insanity, adapted from Ayşe Nil Tahralı's book, builds a structure that moves the story of Nur, who has bipolar disorder with… Read more →

• Law Breakers (Les Assassins de l'ordre)

  Marcel Carné's 1971 courtroom drama takes aim at police violence and the system that covers it up. Adapted from Jean Laborde's novel based… Read more →

• Innocence (Masumiyet)

  Though shot in only nineteen days, Masumiyet bears one of the firmest directorial signatures of nineties Turkish cinema. Zeki Demirkubuz… Read more →

• The Letter (Mektup)

  Written and directed by Ali Özgentürk, Mektup (The Letter) places the story of a man tracing a lost father somewhere between detective… Read more →

• Moscow Code: Temel (Moskova'nın Şifresi: Temel)

  The classic sequel problem is plain here too: the character world built in Sümela'nın Şifresi is freshened up by moving it somewhere new… Read more →

• The Great Vagabond (Muhteşem Serseri)

  The Great Vagabond leans hard on the ready-made moulds of 1960s Turkish comedy: switched identities, a substituted princess, a hero who… Read more →

• Papy fait de la résistance

  As a parody, Papy fait de la résistance takes aim at the star-packed ensemble tradition of Second World War films; the nod to The Longest… Read more →

• I Never Like Sundays (Pazarları Hiç Sevmem)

  Written and directed by Rezzan Tanyeli, the film fits a familiar premise, two lonely people meeting by chance, into a tidy running time of… Read more →

• The Sultan's Secret (Sultanın Sırrı)

  The Sultan's Secret transplants the familiar skeleton of international treasure-hunt films to Istanbul: a foreign professor, a mysterious… Read more →

• That Night in Varennes (La Nuit de Varennes)

  In telling the story of Louis XVI's flight towards Varennes, Ettore Scola puts the real weight on an imagined journey in a coach a few… Read more →

• Violette Nozière

  Claude Chabrol builds a real 1933 French case not as a whodunit but as a character portrait, and that choice is both the film's strength… Read more →

• Blockade (Abluka)

  In his second feature after Tepenin Ardı, Emin Alper makes paranoia not just the subject but the very form of the storytelling. Seen… Read more →

• Any Number Can Win (Mélodie en sous-sol)

  Verneuil makes the genre's favourite material, the plan itself, the spine of the story. A script shared by Michel Audiard, Albert Simonin… Read more →

• Tears of Love (Aşkın Gözyaşları)

  Written and directed by Nejat Saydam, Aşkın Gözyaşları is a melodrama that pushes the rules of the genre to their limit. Its structure… Read more →

• Stuck Apart (Azizler)

  The Taylan Brothers reuniting with Engin Günaydın made it inevitable that critics would compare the film with Vavien. Berkun Oya's share in… Read more →

• Cherchez l'idole

  Cherchez l'idole uses its story as little more than a pretext: the jewel hidden in a guitar gives Michel Boisrond the chance to bring the… Read more →

• City of Women (La città delle donne)

  City of Women is a textbook case of Fellini's way of blending dream and reality. An ordinary exchange of glances on a train draws Snàporaz… Read more →

• Face (Visage)

  Commissioned by the Louvre, Tsai Ming-liang treats the museum not as a backdrop but almost as a character. The story of a director trying… Read more →

• Phosphorescent Cevriye (Fosforlu Cevriyem)

  Directed by Nejat Saydam, the film is a typical example of Yeşilçam's colour, 35 mm melodramas: a tight 85 minutes, a crowded supporting… Read more →

• Shadows and Faces (Gölgeler ve Suretler)

  Derviş Zaim's trilogy on traditional arts, after miniature painting in Waiting for Heaven and calligraphy in Dot, closes with shadow play.… Read more →

• Goodbye Emmanuelle

  Goodbye Emmanuelle carries the typical problems of sequels made in the wake of a successful original. The screenplay François Leterrier… Read more →

• High Crime (La polizia incrimina, la legge assolve)

  High Crime is a key example from the years when the Italian police thriller found its feet. The script Castellari co-wrote with Tito Carpi… Read more →

• Hostage

  Konstantinos Giannaris both wrote and directed, and rather than squeezing a real event into genre moulds he turns it into a character… Read more →

• Lawless Street (Kanunsuz Sokak)

  Kanunsuz Sokak reads as a typical product of Yeşilçam's fast production system: Melih Gülgen handled both script and direction, the film… Read more →

• Ant Trap (Karınca Kapanı)

  Fırat Tanış signs Karınca Kapanı as director, lead actor and co-writer with Cüneyt Uzunlar, and it is a debut that aims to give the crime… Read more →

• Mold (Küf)

  A bold start for Ali Aydın's first feature: writing and directing it himself, he dares to stretch a wait that looks uneventful from the… Read more →

• Lemon Tree

  Eran Riklis makes a smart choice of scale by fitting a politically loaded subject into a lemon grove. The script is at its best when it… Read more →

• Lemonade (Limonata)

  Ali Atay's directing debut Limonata pairs the road-movie template with the story of two brothers who start as total strangers. That Atay… Read more →

• Munich

  Munich puts the tools of genre filmmaking, tracking, covert operations and suspense editing, at the service of a moral inquiry. Tony… Read more →

• Nelly and Mr. Arnaud (Nelly et Monsieur Arnaud)

  Claude Sautet's last film can be read as a master's parting sentence. The relationship between young Nelly, going through a troubled… Read more →

• The Things You Kill

  Because Alireza Khatami wrote the screenplay as well as directing, the film feels like the product of a single vision. A university… Read more →

• Solino

  Being the first film Fatih Akın did not write himself gives Solino a place of its own in his body of work. Ruth Toma's script splits twenty… Read more →

• Somuncu Baba: The Secret of Love (Somuncu Baba Aşkın Sırrı)

  Directed by Kürşat Kızbaz and Müge Kıraner, the film tries to shape a mystic's inner journey as a road story, a structure that on paper… Read more →

• The New Barbarians (I nuovi barbari)

  Directed by Enzo G. Castellari and co-written with Tito Carpi, The New Barbarians exemplifies a common habit of early-eighties Italian… Read more →

• The Shrewd Brothers (Uyanık Kardeşler)

  With Hulki Saner wearing three hats as producer, director and writer, Uyanık Kardeşler opens on a solid, economical setup: the fake office… Read more →

• The Lonely Ones' Quay (Yalnızlar Rıhtımı)

  An intriguing detour in Akad's filmography. The film leans on the Poetic Realism line that Marcel Carné's Le Quai des Brumes brings to… Read more →

• Side by Side (Yan Yana)

  An adaptation of Intouchables, Yan Yana stays loyal to the original's proven formula, a choice that is both safe and limiting. The contrast… Read more →

• Day for Night (La Nuit américaine)

  Truffaut's Day for Night is one of the most endearing films in which cinema reflects on itself. While it follows the shoot of a melodrama… Read more →

• Once Upon a Time in the West

  Leone turns the Western into something close to opera here. The fight over land in the railroad's path takes on the tone of a lament for… Read more →

• Rogue Brothers (Bitirim Kardeşler)

  Bitirim Kardeşler is a textbook product of seventies Yeşilçam's assembly-line approach: two popular leading men, a familiar sibling feud, a… Read more →

• Delusions of Grandeur (La Folie des grandeurs)

  Adapting Hugo's Ruy Blas very freely, Gérard Oury turns the machinery of intrigue into an engine for comedy. It's an interesting choice… Read more →

• Cliente

  Josiane Balasko writes, directs and also steps in front of the camera as Judith's older sister Irene, and that triple role sets the film's… Read more →

• Le Gendarme en balade

  The fourth instalment of the Gendarme of Saint-Tropez series runs Jean Girault's familiar formula once more: Louis de Funès's explosive… Read more →

• Shadow (Gölge)

  For the first feature by a musician and painter, Gölge is remarkably ambitious, trying to house film noir, crime and psychological thriller… Read more →

• Hababam Class Three and a Half (Hababam Sınıfı Üç Buçuk)

  In trying to push a beloved series into the horror-comedy mould, Hababam Sınıfı Üç Buçuk meets the demands of neither genre, as I see it.… Read more →

• Wound of Heartbreak (Hicran Yarası)

  Writing about a lost film begins with accepting the limits of criticism: nobody today can directly assess the editing of Hicran Yarası… Read more →

• When Fate Connects (Kader Bağlayınca)

  Orhan Aksoy's film is a typical Yeşilçam product leaning on the star system of its day: the script is content to line up situations that… Read more →

• Bloodsport

  Bloodsport is a textbook case of the low-budget eighties martial-arts formula: a thin narrative skeleton, scenes that serve as bridges… Read more →

• King David

  Bruce Beresford tries to turn David's life into a broad, serious-minded epic, but squeezing a whole life into about 114 minutes, from… Read more →

• Mississippi Mermaid (La Sirène du Mississipi)

  Truffaut's adaptation of Cornell Woolrich brings romantic drama and crime story together in a neo-noir mood, and is more interested in the… Read more →

• My Best Enemy (Mein bester Feind)

  Working from Paul Hengge's novel, Wolfgang Murnberger tries to strike a difficult balance between war drama and comedy. The interplay… Read more →

• Nikita

  Besson's first action film, made before Léon, tries to fuse genre conventions with a character study. The script's real strength is its… Read more →

• Brother’s Keeper (Okul Tıraşı)

  Ferit Karahan uses his 85 minutes with tight dramaturgy: a single emergency, one pupil's effort to get his sick friend to a doctor, forms… Read more →

• Private Lesson (Özel Ders)

  Özel Ders starts from the Turkish proverb about the tailor who can't mend his own seam, a promising irony for a romantic comedy: a woman… Read more →

• Haze (Pus)

  Pus, which premiered in Berlin, wears its auteur ambitions openly: taciturn characters, a slow, quiet pace and a wish to capture the rhythm… Read more →

• Hot Hours (Sıcak Saatler)

  The production story of Sıcak Saatler is as interesting as the one on screen. Starting under Osman Sınav, the series passes after thirteen… Read more →

• Stavisky

  Alain Resnais treats Stavisky not as a routine rise-and-fall story but as something set inside the atmosphere of an era. By focusing on the… Read more →

• The Caiman (Il caimano)

  Rather than portray Berlusconi head-on, Nanni Moretti sets him inside the story of Bruno Bonomo, a failing producer trying to make a script… Read more →

• The Common Man (Dupont Lajoie)

  Yves Boisset's Dupont Lajoie is a tough drama that plays on the ordinariness its international title stresses. With Jean Carmet in the lead… Read more →

• The Marchers (La Marche)

  Written and directed by Nabil Ben Yadir, the film fits a real march into a road-movie mould, a sensible way to gather a large group into a… Read more →

• Traffic Jam (L'ingorgo)

  Comencini turns a single location, a jammed motorway, into a stage for an international cast. Seeing Alberto Sordi, Marcello Mastroianni… Read more →

• And the Band Played On

  Arnold Schulman spent years rewriting the script, and the strain of fitting a sprawling investigative book into one story shows throughout.… Read more →

• Poison Detective (Zehir Hafiye)

  Directed by Orhan Aksoy and co-written with Osman F. Seden, Zehir Hafiye rests on a single idea: an ordinary man who daydreams about… Read more →

• 1½ Knights – In Search of the Ravishing Princess Herzelinde (1½ Ritter – Auf der Suche nach der hinreißenden Herzelinde)

  Co-directed by Til Schweiger and Christof Wahl, the film rests on the idea of turning the medieval knight's tale into parody, and bringing… Read more →

• Baarìa

  In Baarìa, Tornatore follows one town and one family across the twentieth century, trying to fit Italy's social transformation into a… Read more →

• Bad Man's River

  Bad Man's River shows that a big star cast cannot carry a film on its own. Eugenio Martín and Philip Yordan's script sets out to blend the… Read more →

• Be Sick... It's Free (Il medico della mutua)

  Written by Luigi Zampa, Sergio Amidei and Sordi together, the script uses the sharpest weapon of commedia all'italiana: make an unpleasant… Read more →

• Troublemakers (Belalılar)

  Belalılar is a local adaptation of 1973's The Sting, and that closeness is both its luck and its trap. Bülent Oran localises the con story… Read more →

• A Sack of Money (Bir Çuval Para)

  Written and directed by Yücel Uçanoğlu, Bir Çuval Para plainly reflects how the homegrown westerns of the day were made: 16 mm… Read more →

• The Great War (La grande guerra)

  Monicelli's The Great War is an early argument for taking commedia all'italiana seriously. It builds the dodges of two rogue soldiers on… Read more →

• The Day of the Jackal (Chacal)

  Fred Zinnemann brings Frederick Forsyth's novel to the screen with almost documentary rigour, building suspense not through speed but… Read more →

• Cibali Police Station (Cibali Karakolu)

  Cibali Karakolu is an adaptation that makes little effort to hide its stage origins. The story rests on a chain of misunderstandings that… Read more →

• Devil in the Flesh (Le Diable au corps)

  Bringing Raymond Radiguet's novel to the screen, Le Diable au corps opts for a restrained, classical style. The script by Autant-Lara, Jean… Read more →

• Diary of a Chambermaid (Le Journal d'une femme de chambre)

  The first collaboration between Buñuel and Jean-Claude Carrière, this film reads like a herald of the Belle de Jour and The Discreet Charm… Read more →

• The Enemy (Düşman)

  Written by Yılmaz Güney in prison and co-directed with Zeki Ökten, Düşman is an unadorned, patient example of social realism. The film… Read more →

• Exodus: Gods and Kings

  Ridley Scott builds the story of the departure from Egypt as a large-scale epic, and visually he delivers on that ambition; as the critics… Read more →

• September Storm (Eylül Fırtınası)

  Eylül Fırtınası stands out for filtering a major political rupture through a child's point of view. Gaye Boralıoğlu's script builds Habib… Read more →

• Secrets from the Past (Geçmişteki Sır)

  Co-directed by Raşit Görgülü and Vedat Demir, the film builds a familiar but productive structure that joins a personal secret to a… Read more →

• Is Paris Burning? (Paris brûle-t-il ?)

  René Clément's film is a giant production conceived as Europe's answer to The Longest Day, and that identity is both its strength and its… Read more →

• Valley of the Wolves: Gladio (Kurtlar Vadisi Gladio)

  Gladio makes an interesting formal choice for the franchise: it builds the story around courtroom testimony, with every statement sparking… Read more →

• Ladyhawke

  Richard Donner's Ladyhawke failed to recoup its budget at the box office but grew into a cult classic over time, and it's easy to see why.… Read more →

• Children of Paradise (Les Enfants du Paradis)

  The partnership of Carné and Prévert is perhaps poetic realism at its most mature. The two-part structure stages the Boulevard du Crime of… Read more →

• Mayerling

  Terence Young returns to an incident Anatole Litvak had already filmed in 1936, and the earlier film's shadow never quite lifts. The script… Read more →

• Napoleon

  Guitry's Napoléon rests less on telling a life in depth than on staging a parade of stars. Having Guitry himself play Talleyrand, narrating… Read more →

• Confidentially Yours (Vivement dimanche !)

  Being Truffaut's last film gives Confidentially Yours an unavoidable air of farewell, yet it is no solemn testament but a playful exercise.… Read more →

• Other Angels (Teslimiyet)

  Emre Yalgın's Teslimiyet chooses to tell the story of four trans women sharing a house in Tarlabaşı from the inside rather than from the… Read more →

• The Powder Puff Gang (Trop jolies pour être honnêtes)

  Richard Balducci's film is a heist comedy turned inside out: four flatmates who rob the robbers. The idea is witty, and the… Read more →

• Time Regained (Le Temps retrouvé)

  Rather than turning Proust's final volume into a straight narrative, Raúl Ruiz chose to build a film on the logic of memory itself. The… Read more →

• Triple Cross

  Shot in Eastman Color by Terence Young, this British-French co-production sets out to tell a real double agent's story with a big star… Read more →

• Vallanzasca - Angels of Evil (Vallanzasca - Gli angeli del male)

  Michele Placido tells the story of Renato Vallanzasca, Milan's notorious bank robber, along a line where crime, drama and thriller meet.… Read more →

• 180°

  In his first feature Cihan İnan attempts something hard: weaving, in episodic form, the stories of strangers whose lives touch over a… Read more →

• 40 Square Meters of Germany (40 qm Deutschland)

  With its eighty-minute running time and a story squeezed into a cramped flat, 40 Square Meters of Germany shows that minimalism can be a… Read more →

• Alleluja & Sartana are Sons... Sons of God (Alleluja e Sartana figli di... Dio)

  The film lays bare the marketing reflex of the early-1970s Italian western industry: the names Alleluja and Sartana were put on the poster… Read more →

• Atomized (Elementarteilchen)

  Oskar Roehler moves Houellebecq's controversial novel from Paris to Germany, pushes the book's cultural pessimism into the background and… Read more →

• Debt (Borç)

  Vuslat Saraçoğlu's first feature, winner of Best Film in the National Competition at the 37th Istanbul Film Festival, is a small-scale but… Read more →

• Mud (Çamur)

  Derviş Zaim's third feature continues the symbolic storytelling of his first two films, and does so boldly. A soldier who loses the power… Read more →

• Code Name: Tiger (Le Tigre aime la chair fraîche)

  A Eurospy picture signed by Claude Chabrol looks like an unexpected pairing at first glance. The film came out of an attempt to build a… Read more →

• Downfall (Der Untergang)

  Oliver Hirschbiegel's smartest choice is to confine the film largely to the cramped spaces of the bunker. While Berlin falls outside, time… Read more →

• Comedy of Power (L’Ivresse du pouvoir)

  Claude Chabrol approaches the Elf Aquitaine scandal not with documentary rigour but with an ironic distance that earns the word comedy in… Read more →

• Cyrano de Bergerac

  In bringing the stage text to the screen, Rappeneau pulls off the hardest part: he keeps Rostand's verse dialogue while giving the story a… Read more →

• Uncle (Dayı)

  Directed and produced by Melih Gülgen, Dayı is an adventure drama with an interesting premise it never fully develops. Nurettin Erişen's… Read more →

• Don't Take God's Children for Wild Geese (Faut pas prendre les enfants du bon Dieu pour des canards sauvages)

  Michel Audiard's first feature as a director lets you feel the writer in every frame: an ornate, colourful, almost musical style of… Read more →

• The Shadow Play (Gölge Oyunu)

  Gölge Oyunu is a bold experiment that sits apart in Yavuz Turgul's filmography, blending drama and comedy with fantastical elements. It is… Read more →

• Belle de Jour

  There is good reason it counts among Buñuel's most famous works. The screenplay, adapted from Joseph Kessel's novel with Jean-Claude… Read more →

• Just Before Nightfall (Juste avant la nuit)

  Here Claude Chabrol turns the classic crime film inside out: the death is treated not as a mystery but as a matter of conscience. What… Read more →

• The Sulky Flower (Küskün Çiçek)

  With Cüneyt Arkın behind the camera, this romantic drama is an interesting hybrid in structure: it opens as an insurance investigation and… Read more →

• La Femme et le Pantin

  Directed by Julien Duvivier, this is the fourth screen adaptation of Pierre Louÿs's novel, and it inevitably competes with the shadow of… Read more →

• Les Anges gardiens

  Made by Poiré between Les Visiteurs and its sequel, this film visibly carries the weight of being France's most expensive production of its… Read more →

• Malevil

  That Christian de Chalonge had worked mainly in documentaries seems to be Malevil's clearest signature: a sober mise-en-scène that tells a… Read more →

• Meeting with Pol Pot (Rendez-vous avec Pol Pot)

  The script's most compelling idea is to put the gap between staged reality and what stays unseen at its centre: the shop window the regime… Read more →

• Monsieur Klein

  Joseph Losey's film treats mistaken identity not as a suspense game but as a Kafkaesque nightmare. Mistaken for a Jewish man who shares his… Read more →

• Plot (L'Attentat)

  Yves Boisset's film is a textbook case of the 1970s European political thriller: rooted in a real scandal, star-studded and openly… Read more →

• It Was Cold and Drizzling (Soğuktu ve Yağmur Çiseliyordu)

  Engin Ayça's second feature starts with a death and chooses to tell the relationship non-linearly, filtered through Leyla's memory. That… Read more →

• Tell No One (Ne le dis à personne)

  In his second feature Guillaume Canet brings Harlan Coben's novel to the screen with solid craft. It is telling that two of its four Césars… Read more →

• The Fire Within (Le Feu follet)

  Louis Malle strips Drieu La Rochelle's novel down to a spare structure: one man, his last days, a series of encounters in Paris. The… Read more →

• The Musketeer

  Having Peter Hyams serve as both director and cinematographer may have given the film a consistent visual identity, but the screenplay, a… Read more →

• Wild Blood (Sanguepazzo)

  Marco Tullio Giordana chooses to tell a story whose ending we know from the start by looking back, a structure that shifts our curiosity… Read more →

• Fire (Yangın)

  Atıf Yılmaz's name alone sparks curiosity, but Yangın does not look like one of his more personal works. It is adapted from an episode of… Read more →

• Island (Ada)

  Ada sets the reckoning of two people who split up ten years ago on Burgazada and makes the place part of the narrative: the island becomes… Read more →

• Adiós, Sabata (Indio Black, sai che ti dico: Sei un gran figlio di...)

  The most interesting thing about Adiós, Sabata may be its identity confusion behind the scenes. In the original version the hero is Indio… Read more →

• Album

  Mehmet Can Mertoğlu's first feature opens with a confident voice. Album follows the tragicomic efforts of a couple who make a retrospective… Read more →

• Mother (Ana)

  Ömer Lütfi Akad's Ana deserves to be read as a forerunner of the master's later major work. Cengiz Tacer's black-and-white camera renders… Read more →

• Backfire (Échappement libre)

  The most striking thing about Échappement libre is that it reunites Belmondo and Seberg four years after Breathless, yet Jean Becker's film… Read more →

• A Touch of Spice (Bir Tutam Baharat)

  Writing his own script, Tassos Boulmetis has built a memory film with a distinctly personal tone. Turning food into the language of the… Read more →

• Bob le flambeur

  In Bob le flambeur, Melville thinks of the heist film less as a plot than as a study in atmosphere. The generous space given to the… Read more →

• Gang (Çete)

  Writing his own script, Çetin Karamanbey tries to fit adventure, war, drama and history into the same 90 minutes, which brings the risk of… Read more →

• Dark Eyes (Oci ciornie)

  Mikhalkov doesn't merely adapt Chekhov's The Lady with the Dog; by gathering motifs from The Name-Day Party, The Wife and Anna on the Neck… Read more →

• The Bread Seller Woman (Ekmekçi Kadın)

  Osman F. Seden's script inherits the whole machinery of the French serial novel intact: a frame-up, a life sentence, scattered children, a… Read more →

• Frankenstein

  Moving Mary Shelley's novel to present-day New Orleans and fitting it into a police-procedural mould is a bold move, and making the… Read more →

• Passed by Censor (Görülmüştür)

  In Görülmüştür, Serhat Karaaslan builds a story of surveillance almost entirely through one man's gaze. Zakir's routine of reading letters… Read more →

• I nuovi mostri

  Anthology films are uneven by nature, and I nuovi mostri does not escape the rule. The commedia all'italiana knack for holding pain and… Read more →

• A Most Wanted Man

  Anton Corbijn's take on John le Carré deliberately leaves out the noisy side of the spy genre. Andrew Bovell's script is built not on… Read more →

• Revenge Is Mine (İntikam Benim)

  Written by Çetin İnanç together with Cüneyt Arkın, who also produced it, İntikam Benim is interesting as a genre piece shaped by its own… Read more →

• A Tale of Three Sisters (Kız Kardeşler)

  In his third feature, Emin Alper turns his camera on a father's house in a village and the tense silence between three sisters. It is easy… Read more →

• Love Me Strangely (Un beau monstre)

  A Franco-Italian psychological thriller adapted from Dominique Fabre's prize-winning novel, with Sergio Gobbi both directing and… Read more →

• On the Path (Na putu)

  Its selection for the Golden Bear competition in Berlin is no surprise: rather than big events, Žbanić builds a careful narrative that… Read more →

• Morning Star (Sabah Yıldızı)

  Sabah Yıldızı is an almost textbook example of the period's melodrama mould, which is both its strength and its limit. Türker İnanoğlu… Read more →

• Diabolique (Les Diaboliques)

  Clouzot builds suspense out of patience rather than flourish. The stifling routine of the boarding school, an uneasy partnership born of… Read more →

• Sign of the Lion (Le Signe du Lion)

  Rohmer's first feature clearly bears the marks of the early New Wave: real Parisian locations, black-and-white photography and a narrative… Read more →

• The Tenant (Le Locataire)

  Closing Polanski's Apartment Trilogy, The Tenant pushes the closed-room dread of Repulsion and Rosemary's Baby to its limit. Having the… Read more →

• The Master (Usta)

  Karataş builds a realistic drama out of small observations rather than big statements. Yetkin Dikinciler plays Doğan, a man losing those… Read more →

• Wild Blood (Vahşi Kan)

  Judging Vahşi Kan means separating two things: the film itself and the cult reputation it acquired later. It is built on a skeleton… Read more →

• War Machine

  Michôd's biggest problem is tone. On one side the film wants to be a black comedy built around Pitt's exaggerated, almost cartoonish… Read more →

• Wondrous Boccaccio (Maraviglioso Boccaccio)

  The Taviani brothers take a free hand with The Decameron and build each tale like a separate room. The frame-narrative structure is… Read more →

• 3 Turks and a Baby (3 Türken und ein Baby)

  Written and directed by Akkuş, the film is a familiar take on the "clueless men and a baby" template; you need not have seen many films to… Read more →

• A Man and a Woman: 20 Years Later (Un homme et une femme : Vingt ans déjà)

  Lelouch going back to his own classic after twenty years is a bold move, but every sequel faces the same question: is there anything new to… Read more →

• And Now My Love (Toute une vie)

  And Now My Love looks like one of Lelouch's most ambitious narrative experiments: it tells the story of a woman and a man through earlier… Read more →

• Come on, Shaban! (Atla Gel Şaban)

  Aydemir Akbaş's script rests on a neat comic idea: Niyazi's horse-racing predictions only come true when his minibus setting is recreated… Read more →

• The Hunt (Av)

  Safa Önal's screenplay builds the familiar blood-feud narrative from an interesting angle: the hero's real conflict is as much with his own… Read more →

• Dark Cloud (Bahtı Kara)

  Shot by Theron Patterson through improvisation, without handing the actors a fixed script, Bahtı Kara carries both the strength and the… Read more →

• Blueberry

  Jan Kounen takes little more than the name and the hero from Charlier and Moebius's comic and turns the Western into a psychedelic inner… Read more →

• Le gendarme se marie

  In the series' third film Jean Girault tries a new colour without really breaking the formula: the script gives de Funès room to try… Read more →

• Coriolanus

  Fiennes's first outing as a director keeps Shakespeare's text but moves the action into a contemporary Balkan war, building a daring… Read more →

• Dissolutions (Çözülmeler)

  Yusuf Kurçenli chose to scale great political ruptures down to a single story, and that choice gives the film an intense sincerity. The… Read more →

• Don't Touch the White Woman! (Touche pas à la femme blanche !)

  Marco Ferreri's film is a daring parody that drops the Western into the middle of Paris and mocks both cinema and politics. Staging the… Read more →

• Game of Thrones

  Benioff and Weiss's biggest achievement is splitting George R. R. Martin's many-layered novels into three parallel narrative lines and… Read more →

• Joan Lui (Joan Lui - Ma un giorno nel paese arrivo io di lunedì)

  Written, directed, edited, scored and headlined by Adriano Celentano, Joan Lui carries both the courage and the danger of one-man creative… Read more →

• La Boum 2

  Pinoteau and Danièle Thompson chose to carry on the winning formula of the 1980 original without tampering with it: the thrill of first… Read more →

• Marie Antoinette Queen of France (Marie-Antoinette reine de France)

  Delannoy's classical, rule-bound staging is both the film's strength and its limit. As Richard Todd later recalled, the director fixed… Read more →

• Marvelous Angelique (Merveilleuse Angélique)

  In production terms Marvelous Angelique is a fine example of the European co-productions of its day: the Billancourt and Cinecittà studios… Read more →

• Monsieur Gangster (Les Tontons flingueurs)

  Georges Lautner's film turns Albert Simonin's dark, bloody novel into comedy and offers a textbook example of a shift in tone. Being the… Read more →

• Murmur of the Heart (Le Souffle au cœur)

  Louis Malle's semi-autobiographical coming-of-age story stands out for the delicate balance it keeps while approaching a controversial… Read more →

• Our Story (Notre histoire)

  Blier's absurdist drama may well wrong-foot anyone expecting a realistic portrait of alcoholism. Rather than telling the tug-of-war between… Read more →

• Operation Corned Beef (L'Opération Corned-Beef)

  The fifth collaboration between Jean-Marie Poiré and Christian Clavier, L'Opération Corned-Beef is a commercial Gaumont production that… Read more →

• Recep İvedik 3

  Recep İvedik 3 moves forward through strung-together sketches rather than a dramatic spine. Jogging, karate, the theatre and dozens of side… Read more →

• Satyricon (Fellini Satyricon)

  Perhaps Fellini's strangest film. Satyricon, which he described as a mysterious, suggestive fairy tale, turns Petronius's text, surviving… Read more →

• Solas

  Benito Zambrano's first feature carries a surprising maturity inside what looks like a modest chamber drama. Rather than big events, the… Read more →

• The Last Kiss (L'ultimo bacio)

  Gabriele Muccino's L'ultimo bacio tells the crisis of a group of friends nearing thirty through interlocking stories, and it largely pulls… Read more →

• The Family (La famiglia)

  The formal constraint Ettore Scola sets himself is as interesting as the film itself: telling decades of family history in nine episodes… Read more →

• Those Happy Days (Nos jours heureux)

  Toledano and Nakache's second feature grew out of their 2002 short, and it shows: the film moves more as a string of sketches than along a… Read more →

• A Bad Son (Un mauvais fils)

  Claude Sautet's tenth feature is regarded as the start of a new phase in his work, and the shift is palpable: he turns to social milieus… Read more →

• Web of Passion (À double tour)

  À double tour is Claude Chabrol's first colour film and his first thriller, which gives it special weight as the opening step into a genre… Read more →

• Ankara Summer: Farewell Letter (Ankara Yazı Veda Mektubu)

  Working from Deniz Aydenk's screenplay, Kemal Uzun builds this story set in the 12 September era less as a political thriller than as a… Read more →

• The Gap (Ara)

  Ümit Ünal's Ara is a bold experiment that turns unity of place from a constraint into the main engine of the story. A tale spanning ten… Read more →

• Love No More (Aşka Tövbe)

  Türker İnanoğlu tells Kerime Nadir's story in the familiar mould of Yeşilçam melodrama, with quick, functional storytelling. Squeezing a… Read more →

• Where the Fire Burns (Ateşin Düştüğü Yer)

  Closing İsmail Güneş's trilogy, this film reached an international showcase when it was chosen as Turkey's Oscar submission. The calm… Read more →

• The Bathroom (Banyo)

  The most interesting thing about Banyo is its formal idea on paper: confining the whole story to three bathrooms and setting up one of them… Read more →

• Barabbas

  Barabbas is an intriguing hybrid: cast in the mould of the sword-and-sandal films of its day, yet trying to carry a more contemplative… Read more →

• Once Upon a Time (Bir Varmış Bir Yokmuş)

  İlksen Başarır wrote the screenplay with leading man Mert Fırat, and the partnership shows in the weight given to the characters' inner… Read more →

• The Neverending Song (Bitmeyen Şarkı)

  Written and directed by Orhan Elmas, Bitmeyen Şarkı tries to fit drama, sentimental melodrama, musical and a mafia thriller into a brisk 76… Read more →

• Caroline Chérie

  With a screenplay by a writer of Jean Anouilh's stature, Caroline Chérie is a historical comedy that deserves attention. Working at the… Read more →

• Lady Cazibe's Daydreams (Cazibe Hanımın Gündüz Düşleri)

  İrfan Tözüm sets out to build a story that blurs the line between reality and dream, and largely succeeds. Macit Koper's script uses… Read more →

• Goodnight, Ladies and Gentlemen (Signore e signori, buonanotte)

  Twelve segments, several directors and one shared signature: "Cooperativa 15 Maggio". Bringing together names such as Comencini, Loy… Read more →

• Grey's Anatomy

  Shonda Rhimes's formula looks simple at first: weave the case of the week into ongoing relationship drama within a single episode. Even the… Read more →

• Migrant Birds (Gurbet Kuşları)

  Halit Refiğ's film has the ambition that makes its double win at Antalya, Best Film and Best Director, easy to understand. The Haydarpaşa… Read more →

• Lines of Wellington (Linhas de Wellington)

  Valeria Sarmiento completing a project left unfinished when Raúl Ruiz died in pre-production gives the film an air of farewell all on its… Read more →

• Luxury Life (Lüküs Hayat)

  The real test of any stage-to-screen adaptation is translating theatre's logic of space and performance into the language of cinema. Akad… Read more →

• Masculin Féminin

  Godard is less interested in telling a story here than in taking an X-ray of a generation. Paul's search, swinging between love and… Read more →

• Death Sentence

  The most interesting thing about Ölüm Fermanı is less the film itself than how it was made: two separate films were cut from the same… Read more →

• Let's Part with Love (Severek Ayrılalım)

  Shot in colour and Cinemascope, Orhan Aksoy's film shows the technical ambition of early-1970s Yeşilçam. İlhan Arakon's camerawork handles… Read more →

• Last Meeting (Son Bulusma)

  Nesli Çölgeçen's documentary sits almost beyond criticism by virtue of its subject: bringing three veterans over a hundred years old into… Read more →

• The Other Side of the Water (Suyun Öte Yanı)

  In this 88-minute film Tomris Giritlioğlu builds a structure that moves back and forth between two periods, and that choice is both its… Read more →

• The Dead Don't Die

  Jim Jarmusch uses the zombie genre not to scare but to play with the genre itself. This is an absurd, self-aware story packed with film… Read more →

• The Stone Council (Le Concile de pierre)

  Jean-Christophe Grangé adaptations sit in a familiar vein of French thriller cinema: a crime plot, a mystical secret and a far-off… Read more →

• The Visitors II: The Corridors of Time (Les Couloirs du temps : Les Visiteurs 2)

  Jean-Marie Poiré plays it safe by picking up exactly where the first film ended, and walks straight into the familiar sequel trap. Time… Read more →

• A Self Made Hero (Un héros très discret)

  Jacques Audiard's second feature stands out for its structure. Cutting the elderly Dehousse's account with interviews of historians and… Read more →

• Zweiohrküken

  Zweiohrküken, which Til Schweiger wrote, directed, produced and stars in, carries both the advantages and the risks of a project resting so… Read more →

• A Cursed Monarchy (Les Rois maudits)

  The boldest decision in Josée Dayan's adaptation is to lean deliberately on a theatrical language in sets, costumes and makeup. Refusing… Read more →

• A Man and His Dog (Un homme et son chien)

  Remaking a film as established as Vittorio De Sica's Umberto D. is a big risk from the outset. Huster turns Zavattini's story into the… Read more →

• Ayşecik and the Magical Dwarves in the Land of Dreams (Ayşecik ve Sihirli Cüceler Rüyalar Ülkesinde)

  Tunç Başaran's film is an uncredited, very close adaptation of L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, which makes it both intriguing… Read more →

• The Trial (Dava)

  Orson Welles's Kafka adaptation is a daring work that builds bureaucracy's absurdity through space and image more than through plot.… Read more →

• Faccia a faccia (Cara a cara)

  Sergio Sollima uses the conventions of the Spaghetti Western for a moral experiment: a New England professor and a wounded outlaw… Read more →

• The Innocent (Günahsızlar)

  The pairing of Atıf Yılmaz and Selim İleri sets this film apart from the routine nightclub dramas of its day. The script's centre of… Read more →

• Kiss of Life (Hayat Öpücüğü)

  A critic's description of Şenol Sönmez's film as 'somewhere in the middle, a sweet comedy' is spot on. Saygın Delibaş and Fethi Kantarcı's… Read more →

• Hep Yek

  Hep Yek is a local take on the familiar comedy built around a package that falls into the wrong hands. The script's skeleton is solid… Read more →

• Homoti

  Written, directed and produced by Gezen, who also takes the lead, Homoti feels less like a one-man auteur statement than a game played… Read more →

• Au revoir les enfants

  Malle's return to French cinema after a decade in Hollywood is a tightly controlled narrative drawn from his own childhood. The film shuns… Read more →

• The Organizer (I compagni)

  Monicelli wrote this strike drama with the duo Age & Scarpelli, and the script earned a Best Original Screenplay nomination at the 37th… Read more →

• Il bell'Antonio

  Bolognini, working from Pasolini and Visentini's script, moves Brancati's novel from the fascist years into the present day of the shoot… Read more →

• Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles

  With its static camera and long takes, Akerman's film insists on showing the moments mainstream editing usually cuts: chores such as… Read more →

• Kung Fu on the Bosporus (Karateciler İstanbul'da)

  Karateciler İstanbul'da is a curious document of how the mid-seventies martial-arts wave reached Yeşilçam. Shot in Turkish and Cantonese… Read more →

• La Cité de l'indicible peur

  Jean-Pierre Mocky's film is a bold genre blend that mixes crime farce with touches of horror. Moving the Scottish story of Jean Ray's novel… Read more →

• La Cité de la peur

  Les Nuls' move to the big screen is a bold attempt to fuse parody with a festival satire. Setting it at Cannes and its publicity machine is… Read more →

• La Masseria Delle Allodole

  The Taviani brothers' eighteenth feature sets a great historical wound inside the frame of a family drama. Giuseppe Lanci's cinematography… Read more →

• Mado

  In Mado, Claude Sautet portrays the seventies business world not as a thriller but through one lonely man's moral unravelling. The chess… Read more →

• The Last Step Towards Death (Ölüme Son Adım)

  Ölüme Son Adım is an adventure written and directed by Çetin İnanç that leans on the exaggerated, fast language of the popular cinema of… Read more →

• Ten Women (On Kadın)

  The episodic structure is both On Kadın's strength and its weakness. Because each segment centres on a different woman's life, the film can… Read more →

• In the Fade (Aus dem Nichts)

  Fatih Akin's film shifts between grief melodrama, courtroom drama and revenge thriller, and that structure is both its most interesting and… Read more →

• Salih Without Fingers (Parmaksız Salih)

  In bringing Kısakürek's play to the screen, Faruk Kenç seems to keep much of its stage structure; the narrative relies less on cinematic… Read more →

• Loose Cannons (Mine vaganti)

  Özpetek and Ivan Cotroneo's script cleverly flips the classic homecoming-and-confession set-up: Antonio getting in first with the very… Read more →

• Snow and the Bear

  Written by Selcen Ergün with Yeşim Aslan, the film sets out to turn snow and rumours of bears into a metaphor for a provincial town's… Read more →

• Alone (Tek Başına)

  The most striking thing about Tek Başına is that Cüneyt Arkın both directs and plays the lead. The character he picks also looks like a… Read more →

• The Miracle

  Created, written and directed by Niccolò Ammaniti, this is one of those rare television works with an unmistakable author's signature. The… Read more →

• Trans-Europ-Express

  Alain Robbe-Grillet's film is an experiment that puts the building of a story up for debate right in front of the viewer. Cutting between a… Read more →

• Germany, the Bitter Homeland (Almanya Acı Vatan)

  Şerif Gören builds the theme of emigration on the economic basis of a relationship, without handing it over to melodrama's easy solutions.… Read more →

• The Lovers (Les Amants)

  Shot by Louis Malle at just 25, this second feature deserves its place in film history as one of the early works of the New Wave. Moving… Read more →

• Love, Spells and All That (Aşk, Büyü vs.)

  Ümit Ünal ties a seemingly simple reunion story to a clever question: is the feeling revived after twenty years real, or the work of a… Read more →

• The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (Les Parapluies de Cherbourg)

  In The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Jacques Demy makes a risky formal choice: every line of dialogue, down to the most ordinary small talk, is… Read more →

• Dancing Arabs - A Borrowed Identity

  Eran Riklis places a politically heavy subject inside a coming-of-age mould, a choice that makes the film accessible and, at times, too… Read more →

• F Type (F Tipi Film)

  Turning nine short films into a single feature is hard, and F Type does not fully overcome the difficulty. When segments by directors as… Read more →

• Germany 09 (Deutschland 09)

  Thirteen short films, thirteen different hands: Germany 09 is uneven by nature and doesn't try to hide it. When styles as different as… Read more →

• Not Worth a Fig (İncir Çekirdeği)

  Selda Çiçek's first feature, which she both wrote and directed, stands out for its decision to compress events into a single day. That… Read more →

• Dancer in the Dark

  Lars von Trier sets up a daring clash of forms, pairing Dogme 95-inspired shaky handheld camerawork with the style of 1950s American… Read more →

• Madame Bovary

  Chabrol said he staged the film as Flaubert would have shot it with a camera in place of a pen, and that claim is both the film's strength… Read more →

• Manderlay

  In Manderlay Lars von Trier returns to the bare stage of Dogville: a studio resembling a black box theatre, its set pared to the minimum… Read more →

• Now Where Did the 7th Company Get to? (Mais où est donc passée la septième compagnie ?)

  Robert Lamoureux wrote, directed and appears in this war comedy, which rests on a simple but workable structure: three soldiers cut off… Read more →

• Sabit Kanca

  Sabit Kanca has the usual problems of films that bring an overnight phenomenon to the big screen. The promotional promise of 'the most… Read more →

• Delicatessen

  Though it is Jeunet and Caro's first feature, Delicatessen feels like the work of directors whose style was fully formed from the start.… Read more →

• Seven Blood-Stained Orchids (Sette orchidee macchiate di rosso)

  Umberto Lenzi's giallo assembles the genre's standard ingredients, a serial killer with a signature, a mysterious object and a heroine… Read more →

• Autumn (Sonbahar)

  Özcan Alper's first feature is remembered for its melancholic mood and striking images, and winning best film in the national competition… Read more →

• The Story of Piera (Storia di Piera)

  Marco Ferreri handles Piera Degli Esposti's autobiography not along the straight line of a classic biopic but through the fraught dynamics… Read more →

• To Kill a Cop (Pour la peau d'un flic)

  Alain Delon's first turn in the director's chair is an exercise that shows how well a star understands his own image. His adaptation of… Read more →

• Three Colours: Red (Trois couleurs: Rouge)

  Kieślowski's trilogy closer thinks about fraternity not through grand words but through lives tied together by invisible threads. The… Read more →

• The Third Page (Üçüncü Sayfa)

  Zeki Demirkubuz's The Third Page is one of those films that showed, at the end of the nineties, how strong an independent voice in Turkish… Read more →

• The Hopeless Ones (Umutsuzlar)

  In Umutsuzlar Yılmaz Güney wears three hats at once, as writer, director and lead, which invites you to read Fırat at the centre almost as… Read more →

• Unfair World

  In Unfair World Filippos Tsitos nods openly to film noir but filters the genre's conventions through a dry, dark humour. An interrogation… Read more →

• Up to His Ears (Les Tribulations d'un Chinois en Chine)

  Because it reunited much of the team behind L'Homme de Rio, released a year earlier, Philippe de Broca's film is regarded as an indirect… Read more →

• The Book to Be Burned (Yakılacak Kitap)

  Directed by Süreyya Duru from a script by Remzi Jöntürk, Yakılacak Kitap gathers the genre's stock devices into a single film: lost… Read more →

• Wounded Wolf (Yaralı Kurt)

  Akad's Wounded Wolf is one of the interesting examples of how Yeşilçam localised a foreign novel. Selim İleri adapted Graham Greene's dark… Read more →

• Aaahh Belinda

  Atıf Yılmaz and Barış Pirhasan turn a shampoo commercial into a doorway to lost identity, a kind of daring rarely seen in Turkish cinema of… Read more →

• Colonel Redl (Oberst Redl)

  In the middle film of the trilogy he began with Mefisto, István Szabó asks his familiar question again: how much can someone who wants to… Read more →

• The Golden Glove (Der Goldene Handschuh)

  Fatih Akin heads into the darkest, most divisive corner of his work here. Adapted from Heinz Strunk's novel, the film portrays the real… Read more →

• Carousel (Atlıkarınca)

  Merry-Go-Round chooses to approach incest, a subject our cinema rarely tackles head-on, without leaning on sensationalism, and turns the… Read more →

• Farewell Song (Ayrılık Şarkısı)

  Ülkü Erakalın's film applies the period's melodrama template almost to the letter: a rapid rise, a love that poisons a life, and a… Read more →

• Bodrum Judge (Bodrum Hakimi)

  As one of the four films Şoray directed, The Judge of Bodrum is an interesting case of a star shaping her own image from behind the camera.… Read more →

• C'est la vie (La Baule-les-Pins)

  In C'est la vie Diane Kurys returns to the theme of divorce she had already explored in Peppermint Soda, Cocktail Molotov and Entre Nous… Read more →

• Challenge of the Tiger

  Challenge of the Tiger is an instructive example for anyone wanting to understand the Bruceploitation wave that spread after Bruce Lee's… Read more →

• D@bbe (Dabbe)

  Karacadağ's debut feature makes no secret of adapting Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Kairo, and the influence of Japanese horror is plain in its… Read more →

• Don't Touch My Şaban! (Dokunmayın Şabanıma)

  Written and directed by Osman F. Seden, the film puts every piece of a classic swapped-places comedy in its proper place: two men, a young… Read more →

• Dragged Across Concrete

  Zahler's third feature, after Bone Tomahawk and Brawl in Cell Block 99, is a neo-noir that makes no secret of its slow pace. The 158-minute… Read more →

• Emmanuelle 2 (Emmanuelle l'antivierge)

  Emmanuelle 2 is a typical sequel to the 1974 original; Francis Giacobetti's direction cares about surface polish but is weak at building a… Read more →

• Fantozzi against everyone (Fantozzi contro tutti)

  Fantozzi contro tutti marks a threshold: it is the last instalment adapted from Villaggio's books and the film where directing passed from… Read more →

• Ridicule

  Patrice Leconte stages Versailles as a drawing-room battlefield where the weapon is wit, not the sword. Rémi Waterhouse's script uses… Read more →

• Hercules

  Luigi Cozzi's Hercules blends the sword-and-sandal tradition with elements borrowed from his own science-fiction outing Starcrash… Read more →

• The Law Is the Law (Kanun Kanundur)

  Kanun Kanundur is a typical product of eighties Turkish crime cinema: a tidy, roughly 90-minute Sun Film picture, written and produced by… Read more →

• Facing Windows

  Facing Windows deserves its reputation as the work of Özpetek's maturity, marrying the tradition of classical melodrama to a modern economy… Read more →

• Laila in Haifa

  In Laila in Haifa, Amos Gitai drops conventional plot in favour of brief encounters that brush against one another over a single night in a… Read more →

• Le Doulos

  Jean-Pierre Melville stays largely faithful to the plot of Pierre Lesou's novel but lays his own bleak mood and ambiguity over it, and that… Read more →

• Les Creatures

  In Les Créatures, Agnès Varda attempts a bold experiment, blending psychological drama, parable and fantasy with touches of science… Read more →

• Manuale d'amore

  Giovanni Veronesi links four separate stories in a chain where one encounter opens the door to the next, and in doing so partly overcomes… Read more →

• Paris, je t'aime

  An anthology in which twenty-two directors tour the districts of Paris through eighteen shorts of about five minutes each is bound to be… Read more →

• Le Concert

  Radu Mihăileanu chooses to build the fake orchestra's Paris adventure as both farce and a reckoning with the past, and that double tone is… Read more →

• Scene of the Crime (Le Lieu du crime)

  The title promises a thriller, but suspense isn't André Téchiné's concern; Le Lieu du crime is really a study in family psychology. Having… Read more →

• The Salamander

  That this was Peter Zinner's first film as director after a long career as an editor makes The Salamander intriguing. The Robert Katz and… Read more →

• We Have a Pope (Habemus Papam)

  Nanni Moretti sets the grand ritual of a papal election against the inner world of a man who panics under the weight of the office. The… Read more →

• The Unbreakable Man (Yıkılmayan Adam)

  The final film of Remzi Jöntürk's Adam Trilogy builds a structure that moves freely between genres: adventure, political film and epic… Read more →

• Leyla Everlasting (9 Kere Leyla)

  Eleven years after 7 Kocalı Hürmüz, Ezel Akay keeps his colourful, fairy-tale tone in this feature too. Inspired by Tayfun Türkili's play 9… Read more →

• A Sky Full of Stars for a Roof (...e per tetto un cielo di stelle)

  Giulio Petroni's second western leans on the genre's ironic side. The opening, which most critics call one of the best in all of spaghetti… Read more →

• Amreeka

  Cherien Dabis's first feature moves with the plain language typical of character-driven independent drama. Its greatest strength is Nisreen… Read more →

• Father Eagle (Baba Kartal)

  With Cüneyt Arkın behind the camera, the film builds a classic rise-and-fall narrative on Safa Önal's screenplay. The structure is… Read more →

• I'm Not Him (Ben O Değilim)

  In Ben O Değilim Tayfun Pirselimoğlu handles the doppelgänger theme with a calm, patient style, without handing it over to the tricks of… Read more →

• Beyoğlu Beauty (Beyoğlu Güzeli)

  In Beyoğlu Güzeli Ertem Eğilmez and Sadık Şendil apply the melodrama conventions of the period to the letter: love in the shadow of class… Read more →

• The Wheel (Çark)

  Muzaffer Hiçdurmaz's only film as director is built station by station: each new workplace is another face of exploitation. That structure… Read more →

• Choice of Arms (Le Choix des armes)

  In Le Choix des armes Alain Corneau takes the gangster-film template and shifts its weight from events to people. Bringing Yves Montand… Read more →

• De l'autre côté du lit

  The film loads everything onto one comic idea: a couple ten years into their marriage swapping lives for a year. The problem with role-swap… Read more →

• Hallelujah for Django (La più grande rapina del West)

  Maurizio Lucidi's film sits at an interesting threshold in the genre's history. Being counted among the first spaghetti westerns to work… Read more →

• Everyone's Sweetheart (Herkesin Sevgilisi)

  Nejat Saydam and Bülent Oran's script rests on the disguise, one of Yeşilçam's most frequently used devices: society beauty Zeynep… Read more →

• I Knew Her Well (Io la conoscevo bene)

  Io la conoscevo bene is a film in which Pietrangeli uses an episodic structure as a deliberate choice. Adriana's drift from one job to the… Read more →

• Il giovane favoloso

  Mario Martone's portrait of Leopardi resists the typical trap of the biopic, lining up a life stop by stop, by making place the subject of… Read more →

• Suffering (Istırap)

  Written and directed by Nejat Saydam, Istırap applies the melodrama template of its day almost to the letter: the cruel stepfather, the… Read more →

• It's Hard to Be Nice (Teško je biti fin)

  Srđan Vuletić's second feature rests on a solid dramatic premise: a man who decides to be good must face what that decision costs. The… Read more →

• The Killer (Katil)

  What makes Katil valuable is Akad's nerve in taking the camera out to real locations, onto the street and the road. The crew driving to… Read more →

• Kommissar X – Drei grüne Hunde

  As the fourth of seven films, Drei grüne Hunde was made at a stage when the formula had fully set, and it shows. The Eurospy template is… Read more →

• The Conformist (Il conformista)

  The Conformist has one of the most studied visual languages in modern cinema, and much of the credit goes to Vittorio Storaro, who in his… Read more →

• Le Magnifique

  In Le Magnifique, Philippe de Broca targets less the genre itself than the mind that churns it out: the cuts between a broke writer of… Read more →

• The Son's Room (La stanza del figlio)

  In The Son's Room Moretti tells grief not through big scenes but through the small details of routines falling apart. The first part… Read more →

• Septembers of Shiraz

  Wayne Blair's film, working from Hanna Weg's screenplay, splits its narrative along two axes: Isaac in prison and Farnez outside, trying to… Read more →

• Transporter 3 (Le Transporteur 3)

  Olivier Megaton's first outing as a director in the series, Transporter 3 faithfully repeats the familiar template of the Luc Besson and… Read more →

• The Band's Visit

  Eran Kolirin's first feature turns a small misunderstanding, musicians who cannot pronounce the letter "p" ending up in the wrong town… Read more →

• The Return of Martin Guerre (Le Retour de Martin Guerre)

  Daniel Vigne's film builds a sober courtroom suspense without getting lost in costume-drama ornament. The script, co-written by Jean-Claude… Read more →

• The Virtuous Bigamist (Sous le ciel de Provence)

  Mario Soldati's film rebuilds Blasetti's Quattro passi fra le nuvole as a French-Italian co-production and, by handing the lead from Gino… Read more →

• They Called Him Bulldozer (Lo chiamavano Bulldozer)

  They Called Him Bulldozer sees Michele Lupo apply the comedy template built around Bud Spencer's imposing frame skilfully but without… Read more →

• Un Paso Adelante

  Un paso adelante is a musical dramedy walking the road Fame opened, and it makes no secret of it. The arts-school frame is ideal for… Read more →

• We All Loved Each Other So Much (C'eravamo tanto amati)

  A mature example of the commedia all'italiana tradition. In the script he wrote with Age and Scarpelli, Scola builds a flashback spanning… Read more →

• Yellow Hair and the Pecos Kid

  Though Matt Cimber's film was pitched as a female Indiana Jones, from its opening credits on it tips its hat to the western serials of the… Read more →

• 1990: The Bronx Warriors (1990: i guerrieri del Bronx)

  Castellari's film was conceived as an Italian answer to Walter Hill's The Warriors and John Carpenter's darker Escape from New York, and it… Read more →

• Flirtatious Girl (Cilveli Kız)

  Cilveli Kız is almost a textbook case of the Yeşilçam mistaken-identity comedy: the plot moves step by step towards the moment when the… Read more →

• Dawn of the World (L'Aube du monde)

  Placing a war drama inside a single love story is Fahdel's boldest and riskiest choice. When it works, the structure makes an abstract… Read more →

• The Decameron (Il Decameron)

  Pasolini's most interesting decision is to move Boccaccio's Florence to Naples and tell the tales in Neapolitan dialect. That single move… Read more →

• Detective School Dropouts

  Made under The Cannon Group with Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus producing, the film looks like a textbook example of the international… Read more →

• Diaz – Don't Clean Up This Blood

  Vicari's defining choice is to build that night from the point of view of both the protesters and the police. This multiple perspective… Read more →

• The Dreamers

  There's good reason it's called Bertolucci's love letter to cinema. The re-enacted scenes, from Queen Christina to Scarface, are a clever… Read more →

• Sucker (Enayi)

  Enayi's defining trait is that it is an adaptation: a Turkish version of the Indian film Anari. Yeşilçam's practice of localising foreign… Read more →

• Old Gun (Eski Silah)

  Melih Gülgen directed, produced and edited the film and co-wrote the script with Cüneyt Arkın, which may signal a consistent vision as much… Read more →

• Happiness Never Comes Alone (Un bonheur n'arrive jamais seul)

  James Huth has said he drew on Frank Capra for this story of opposites attracting, and that ambitious reference sets both the film's bar… Read more →

• Il Marchese del Grillo

  Monicelli's Silver Bear for Best Director in Berlin is no accident: this is one of the rare films that marries the heavy visual weight of a… Read more →

• Mole Family (Köstebekgiller)

  Putting live actors and animated characters in the same story is a technically ambitious choice, which is why the series' standing as the… Read more →

• Love and Anger (Amore e rabbia)

  Bringing Lizzani, Bertolucci, Pasolini, Godard and Bellocchio together in one film is, on paper, a summit of art cinema. But the lack of… Read more →

• The Lovers of Montparnasse (Montparnasse 19)

  The film's most interesting story is behind the camera: Max Ophüls began the project and, after his death, his friend Jacques Becker… Read more →

• Paparazzi

  Paparazzi has an interesting irony within reach: an action star who starts behaving in real life the way he does in his films. The idea… Read more →

• Place Vendôme

  Nicole Garcia's film uses a story of jewels and swindling as a frame for what is really a character study, leaving the crime plot in second… Read more →

• Il Postino: The Postman

  Radford's smartest decision is to move Skármeta's Chilean story to 1950s Italy and to the islands of Procida and Salina. The change places… Read more →

• Rana's Wedding

  Shot in Jerusalem by Hany Abu-Assad, the film builds a simple but effective tension from a timeframe squeezed into a single day: the goal… Read more →

• Section spéciale

  Costa-Gavras, with co-writer Jorge Semprún, turns the courtroom into a space of suspense, and the best director prize he shared at Cannes… Read more →

• There's a Celebration / Honey Girl (Şenlik Var / Bal Kız)

  Nejat Saydam's film builds itself a strong centre of gravity by giving Türkân Şoray two roles in the same picture, but double-role setups… Read more →

• The Last Train (Der letzte Zug)

  Vilsmaier and Vávrová choose not to soften the brutality of the deportation journey, and that hard, unflinching realism is what sets the… Read more →

• Summer Book (Tatil Kitabı)

  In his debut, Seyfi Teoman rests the family drama on the gaze of the character who speaks least, Ali, the shy younger son. That choice… Read more →

• The Fascist (Il federale)

  Luciano Salce's film comes from a time when commedia all'italiana was still writing its own rules, and that pioneering status is both its… Read more →

• The Limits of Control

  Jarmusch's tenth feature takes the skeleton of the crime genre and deliberately hollows it out: there is a job and a stranger who trusts no… Read more →

• The Two Faces of January

  Hossein Amini's first feature as a director carries both the strengths and the limits of his background as a screenwriter. In Patricia… Read more →

• Wrong Rosary (Uzak İhtimal)

  Mahmut Fazıl Coşkun's debut trusts a structure that brings three worlds with nothing in common together in one neighbourhood: a muezzin… Read more →

• Unfinished Happiness (Yarım Kalan Saadet)

  The film's most interesting feature is its family tree: it remakes the Indian film Saathi, which itself was adapted from the Tamil Palum… Read more →

• The Man Without a Tomorrow (Yarınsız Adam)

  A problem common to Jöntürk's political films shows up here as well: the thesis overrides the dramaturgy. The characters often stand for… Read more →

• Agries Melisses

  For anyone who looks with a film eye, the daily format is a warning sign from the start: in a 421-episode production, staging, editing… Read more →

• Augustine

  Winocour's first feature is a tightly controlled film that frames the doctor-patient relationship as a regime of looking. By centring the… Read more →

• The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (Le Charme discret de la bourgeoisie)

  Buñuel's mastery lies in systematically postponing the most basic promise of narrative: reaching a goal. A group of bourgeois friends who… Read more →

• Stolen Eyes (Çalıntı Gözler)

  Bulgaria's submission for the 78th Academy Awards also won critical recognition through Vesela Kazakova's Best Actress award at the Moscow… Read more →

• Confessions of a Police Captain (Confessione di un commissario di polizia al procuratore della repubblica)

  Damiani builds the film on a thesis more than on a clash of characters: prosecutor Traini, who insists on staying within the law, against… Read more →

• Conversation Piece (Gruppo di famiglia in un interno)

  Visconti's second-to-last film is, as its original title suggests, an interior story; it unfolds in a closed world where old and new… Read more →

• Push

  David Bourla's script builds an ambitious mythology: secret government programmes running since World War II, a range of psychic abilities… Read more →

• Delirious

  DiCillo's script lays two familiar patterns on top of each other: a male friendship that bears traces of Midnight Cowboy and the Cinderella… Read more →

• Das Experiment

  Hirschbiegel's real achievement is turning a closed set-up into tension that climbs step by step: the experiment's collapse comes across… Read more →

• Dobermann

  Jan Kounen's film brings out the most interesting structural choice in the script Joël Houssin wrote from his own crime novels: making… Read more →

• Emma Hamilton (Lady Hamilton - Zwischen Schmach und Liebe)

  The typical equation of sixties European co-productions is here too: Italian, West German and French money, an English-language shoot and a… Read more →

• Confessions of a Lady Cop (La poliziotta fa carriera)

  The film sits where two genres cross: the loose shape of the commedia sexy all'italiana on one side, a parody of the hard-edged Italian… Read more →

• Backstabbing for Beginners (Komplo)

  Per Fly, writing with Daniel Pyne, follows a well-worn political thriller template: an innocent idealist enters the system and discovers… Read more →

• Scary Movie 5

  A spoof is only as sharp as its grasp of the film it targets. Scary Movie 5 tries to fit a list running from Mama to Black Swan and from… Read more →

• The Insider

  Mann's real achievement is shooting an unarmed story as a thriller. There are no chases here; there are meetings, phone calls, threats and… Read more →

• The Kingdom (Operation: Kingdom)

  Peter Berg gives a story drawn from real attacks a hard, direct action language, and that is the film's most consistent choice. The problem… Read more →

• Las 13 rosas

  Four wins from fourteen Goya nominations: cinematography, costume design, original score and best supporting actor. That spread sums up the… Read more →

• Le Diable et les Dix Commandements

  In an anthology film the measure is not only whether each segment works but whether the whole keeps a rhythm. At about 143 minutes, this… Read more →

• Lili Marleen

  Fassbinder makes a song the engine of the story: the same tune being heard by soldiers on both sides of the front binds a love story to the… Read more →

• Offroad

  Offroad leans on a familiar set-up that mixes road movie and crime comedy: an ordinary woman, an unexpected cargo, the police and the real… Read more →

• Last Tango in Paris (Ultimo tango a Parigi)

  The film's dramatic engine is a simple but radical rule: the two lovers will never tell each other their names or anything about their… Read more →

• Sex Quartet (Le fate)

  Monicelli, Bolognini, Pietrangeli and Salce: gathering four directors of Italian comedy in one anthology is very tempting on paper. A… Read more →

• Shirli-Myrli

  Menshov's approach to farce is bold but uneven. Having Garkalin and Alentova each play four roles is a clever device that carries the… Read more →

• The Players (Les Infidèles)

  Sketch films share a fate: even when the segments share a theme, tone and rhythm shift from director to director. A line-up running from… Read more →

• The Seven Deadly Sins (Les Sept Péchés capitaux)

  The unavoidable problem of the sketch film applies here too: since each chapter was entrusted to a different director, tone and quality… Read more →

• Train of Life (Train de vie)

  Telling the Holocaust through an allegory that is almost funny is one of the riskiest tonal choices cinema can make. Mihaileanu's premise… Read more →

• Trop c'est trop

  Kaminka appearing both behind the camera and on screen as one of the three leads gives the film the feel of a personal comedy. Structurally… Read more →

• We Are All Murderers (Nous sommes tous des assassins)

  Turning the courtroom film into a thesis film is a risky move, and Cayatte collects both its reward and its price. The screenplay, written… Read more →

• What a Man

  Schweighöfer's directing debut knows the rules of the commercial romantic comedy well but never pushes them. A cheated-on teacher… Read more →

• 8½ (Otto e mezzo)

  8½ builds a daring structure that turns a director's inability to make a film into the film itself. Shifts between reality, memory and… Read more →

• The Mother and the Whore (La Maman et la Putain)

  A black-and-white film that runs three hours and forty minutes and rests almost entirely on talk is not an easy recommendation. That is… Read more →

• Augustine: The Decline of the Roman Empire (Sant'Agostino)

  Christian Duguay and screenwriter Francesco Arlanch face an obvious structural problem: turning a thinker's inner life, his doubt… Read more →

• Beyond the Sea (Beyond the Sea – Musik war sein Leben)

  Here Kevin Spacey is director, co-writer, producer and star. That concentration turns the film into a passion project, but it also exposes… Read more →

• Blutzbrudaz

  Casting real rappers in the leads is a familiar move in this genre: you gain authenticity, but the weight of the dramatic scenes rests on… Read more →

• Borgia

  Created by Tom Fontana, Borgia shows both the strength and the limits of European co-productions. Sharing episodes among different… Read more →

• The Grand Budapest Hotel

  Wes Anderson's style reaches its most refined form here: meticulously arranged, postcard-like frames and Alexandre Desplat's playful score… Read more →

• The Misfortunates (De helaasheid der dingen)

  Van Groeningen's real achievement is that he neither prettifies the squalor nor milks it for pity. The coarse merriment of the Strobbe… Read more →

• Colours of Time (La Venue de l'avenir)

  Klapisch, writing with Santiago Amigorena, works two timelines in parallel: four cousins today and Adèle in 1895. The strength of the… Read more →

• Europa

  Closing von Trier's Europa trilogy, this is a film remembered more for its form than its story. As the journey that begins on a train… Read more →

• The Night of the Generals (La Nuit des généraux)

  The Night of the Generals is a bold hybrid that tries to fuse the war film with neo-noir. Starting loosely from only the opening of Kirst's… Read more →

• Jupiter's Moon (Jupiter holdja)

  Mundruczó takes a risky path by combining a realistic refugee story with a supernatural premise. A young man who can levitate is a visually… Read more →

• Le Samouraï

  Melville takes every tool of the genre, the hitman, the police, the witnesses, and pares them down to an almost abstract form. The film's… Read more →

• L'homme orchestre

  Serge Korber's film is a star vehicle built on the skeleton of a musical comedy. Its short running time of about 75 minutes is an… Read more →

• Let Joy Reign Supreme (Que la fête commence)

  Tavernier's film is one of those that refuse to reduce the costume drama to a display of sets and costumes. The screenplay he wrote with… Read more →

• Liberation (Osvobozhdeniye)

  Ozerov's project is an interesting case study in how to structure an epic: five films, each built around a separate operation, move along a… Read more →

• November (Noviembre)

  Achero Mañas's smartest decision is to tell the story of a street theatre troupe as a mockumentary. Stretching the timeline from 1997 to… Read more →

• Resident Evil: Retribution

  The fifth instalment, written and directed by Paul W. S. Anderson, lays bare one limit of franchise filmmaking: it starts where the… Read more →

• The Anarchist's Wife (Die Frau des Anarchisten)

  The shared direction and the screenplay by Ray Loriga and Marie Noëlle give the film a consistent but cautious language. The problem lies… Read more →

• The Blood of Others (Le Sang des autres)

  The defining thing about this production is that it is split between two forms. A film conceived for HBO as a three-hour English-language… Read more →

• The Charterhouse of Parma (La Chartreuse de Parme)

  Christian-Jaque's adaptation shows clearly how hard it is to bring a novelist like Stendhal, who leans on his characters' inner lives, to… Read more →

• The Marseille Contract

  Drawing partly on the French Connection affair that came to light in the early 1970s gives the film a realistic footing; heroin from the… Read more →

• The Promise

  Terry George's film deliberately adopts the mould of the classic Hollywood epic: broad scale, big frames built by Javier Aguirresarobe's… Read more →

• The Return of Monte Cristo (Sous le signe de Monte-Cristo)

  The most interesting thing here is the adaptation strategy. Hunebelle and his co-writers Michel Lebrun and Jean Halain take only a skeleton… Read more →

• The Three Brothers (Les Trois Frères)

  The television sketch background of Les Inconnus is both the film's strength and its weakness. The trio's ensemble rapport and comic timing… Read more →

• Themroc

  Themroc's boldest decision is to strip out almost all dialogue and leave it to grunts and screams. This works less like a limit imposed by… Read more →

• Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train (Ceux qui m'aiment prendront le train)

  By squeezing a large cast into a single day and a single journey, Chéreau's film is almost a work of choreography. Each of its fifteen or… Read more →

• War and Peace

  King Vidor's adaptation shows both the strength and the limits of Hollywood's large-scale epic approach. Passed through many writers'… Read more →

• Women Are Like That (Comment qu'elle est ?)

  Bernard Borderie is directing a series product here, and the film makes no secret of it. The Peter Cheyney adaptations had become a formula… Read more →

• A Long Ride from Hell (Vivo per la tua morte)

  Based on a Gordon D. Shirreffs novel counted as pulp fiction, this is a western that accepts the limits of its material from the start.… Read more →

• Afife Jale

  You can tell this is a photographer's first film as a director, both in its strengths and its weaknesses. The framing, colour and period… Read more →

• Alexandre le bienheureux

  Yves Robert's film rests on almost a single idea: a farmer who loses his domineering wife lets his animals loose and takes to his bed.… Read more →

• Baskin

  Expanding Can Evrenol's award-winning short into a feature brings a familiar risk: an idea that works in short form can wear structurally… Read more →

• Betty Blue (37°2 le matin)

  Betty Blue bears the signature of the Cinéma du Look: image, colour and atmosphere matter as much as the events of the story. Beineix's… Read more →

• Let the Instruments Play, Let the Girls Dance (Çalsın Sazlar, Oynasın Kızlar)

  The production circumstances explain the form: a two-week shoot on a very small budget. Under those conditions the narrative becomes a thin… Read more →

• The Wound of the Tongue (Dil Yarası)

  The script leaves its central knot largely to chance: after a long, fruitless search, the hero just happens to cross paths with the enemy's… Read more →

• The Döngel Workshop (Döngel Karhanesi)

  The film's cleverest move is the chain of seizures at the start: a brothel that can't repay its loan passes to a bank, and when the bank… Read more →

• Elaha

  In her first feature, Milena Aboyan turns a difficult subject into neither a cheap scandal nor a sermon; opening in Berlin's Perspektive… Read more →

• Emanet

  You cannot assess Emanet without looking at how it was made: stretching a single premise across more than eight hundred episodes inevitably… Read more →

• The Nut Job

  The Nut Job bears the marks of a short animation stretched to feature length. A squirrel robbing a shop to find food is a clever idea that… Read more →

• School for Love (Futures Vedettes)

  Futures Vedettes is a film where names who would later leave their mark on French cinema cross paths: Marc Allégret directing, Roger Vadim… Read more →

• The Truth (Gerçek)

  Erdoğan Tünaş's script opens with a good hook: a mysterious phone call, a dying woman's last wish and a wife forced to dig into her… Read more →

• The Shadowless (Gölgesizler)

  Adapting Hasan Ali Toptaş's novel is hard by definition, and Ümit Ünal writing the script himself shows he took ownership of it. The… Read more →

• Four Women in the Harem (Haremde Dört Kadın)

  The screenplay Halit Refiğ wrote with Kemal Tahir turns the mansion into a closed stage, and the narrowness of the space becomes a dramatic… Read more →

• This Is My Story (İşte Bu Benim Masalım)

  The musical is a form Turkish television is hardly used to, so on paper this series was a bold attempt. But a musical needs songs that grow… Read more →

• The Broken Disk (Kırık Plak)

  Bülent Oran's script uses every mechanism of melodrama in plain sight: vocal cords destroyed out of jealousy, a murder pinned on the hero… Read more →

• Liaison

  Described as Apple's first French-language original, Liaison is an interesting case of co-production, with dialogue that switches between… Read more →

• Lucifer

  Lucifer attempts a risky tonal blend: fantasy mythology, weekly procedural and light comedy under one roof. What holds the mix together, in… Read more →

• Tarzan of Manisa (Manisa Tarzanı)

  Orhan Oğuz serving as both director and cinematographer gives the film a coherent visual design: the contrast between a burned city and… Read more →

• Marienhof

  Judging Marienhof by cinema standards would be unfair; the daily soap is a mode of production with its own rules. In a studio-shot show… Read more →

• The Season Has Blossomed (Mevsim Çiçek Açtı)

  Written and directed by A. Levent Üngör, this is an issue film with a clear cause. The test for such films is keeping the message from… Read more →

• Recep İvedik

  Recep İvedik is the shortest possible answer to the question of how to stretch a TV sketch to feature length. The road trip to Antalya and… Read more →

• Ruhun Duymaz

  Episodes of around two hours make a familiar problem of Turkish television visible even in this short series: a story that could be told… Read more →

• Return of Sabata (È tornato Sabata... hai chiuso un'altra volta)

  Sabata Returns is a third instalment trying to run the series formula one more time. Parolini both directing and editing means the rhythm… Read more →

• A Magnificent Haunting (Magnifica presenza)

  What Ferzan Özpetek attempts in Magnifica presenza is a ghost story built not on fear but on loneliness and the search for belonging.… Read more →

• Cologne P.D. (SOKO Köln)

  SOKO Köln is best read not on its own but as the city branch of a brand that began in 1978 with SOKO 5113. The franchise grew by carrying… Read more →

• The Intruder (L'Intrus)

  Claire Denis almost entirely abandons linear storytelling here; the film builds an impressionistic structure that drifts between waking and… Read more →

• Tricycle (Üç Tekerlekli Bisiklet)

  The film's backstory shows on screen. Akad walked away with two days of shooting left, and the street chases, shootouts and big closing… Read more →

• The Wild One (Yaban)

  The film's strongest suit is its images. The Best Cinematography award at the 33rd Golden Orange for Tevfik Şenol and Yusuf Güven is no… Read more →

• Family Woman (Aile Kadını)

  The script builds its tension economically: first silent phone calls and a vague unease, then the threat acquiring a face. That gradual… Read more →

• Anatomy of a Marriage: My Days with Françoise (Françoise ou la Vie conjugale)

  Cayatte's idea is bold and structural: tell five key moments of one marriage in two separate films, each from one partner's point of view.… Read more →

• Attila

  What makes Attila interesting today is less what is on screen than the production logic behind it. The producers were aiming at the… Read more →

• Battle of the Brave (Nouvelle-France)

  Being Quebec's most expensive film to that date, with English and French versions shot at the same time, shows a production designed from… Read more →

• Contraband (Luca il contrabbandiere)

  What Fulci does here is cross the mafia-centred poliziottesco with the splatter trend of the day, and that genre crossover is the film's… Read more →

• Les Dalton

  The real difficulty in bringing a comic strip to the screen with live actors is how cartoon gestures hold up in a real place. Les Dalton… Read more →

• Love of the Giants (Devlerin Aşkı)

  Love of the Giants blends Yeşilçam's beloved love-triangle formula with action elements: a life saved, a grateful boss and a woman caught… Read more →

• Men (Erkekler)

  Faruk Aksoy turning to a small-scale relationship comedy after a large historical production like Fetih 1453 is an interesting change of… Read more →

• The Wedding Singer

  Every stop on the romantic-comedy route is here: two people engaged to others, a closeness that dawns slowly, and an untrustworthy fiancé… Read more →

• Fear City

  That Abel Ferrara counted it a disappointment in his own career does not make it easy to judge, because the neo-noir atmosphere and the… Read more →

• Japanese Work (Japon İşi)

  Japon İşi solves a science-fiction idea with the means of a Yeşilçam comedy and deliberately keeps it modest: in Erdoğan Tünaş's script the… Read more →

• U.S. Marshals

  As a follow-up to The Fugitive, the film takes an interesting gamble: Richard Kimble is gone, and the whole load rests on Tommy Lee Jones's… Read more →

• Kerr

  Because Pirselimoğlu adapted his own novel, the film keeps the source's strange logic intact: when a man who witnessed a killing is asked… Read more →

• Knockin' on Heaven's Door

  In combining road movie and crime tragicomedy, the film leans on the most familiar patterns of both genres: heroes with nothing to lose… Read more →

• Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials (Labirent: Alev Deneyleri)

  The Scorch Trials has the typical problems of a trilogy's middle chapter: the intrigue of the beginning is behind it and the resolution is… Read more →

• Billionaire (Milyarder)

  Ümit Ünal's name sitting beside Ertem Eğilmez's on the script is telling: Milyarder is built less as a character comedy than as a situation… Read more →

• Muriel (Muriel ou le Temps d'un retour)

  Muriel is the third link in Resnais's inquiry into memory after Hiroshima mon amour and Last Year at Marienbad, and in my view the most… Read more →

• Pardon Mon Affaire (Un éléphant ça trompe énormément)

  Yves Robert and Jean-Loup Dabadie's script spreads a single adultery story across a group portrait of four friends, and that ensemble… Read more →

• Peppermint Soda (Diabolo menthe)

  For a debut, this is a surprisingly assured piece of work. Drawing on her own experience gives Kurys the kind of small, precise details an… Read more →

• Prince Valiant

  Using some of Hal Foster's panels as they are is a smart choice, an open nod to the source that makes the link between the strip and the… Read more →

• Quantum of Solace

  The critics who placed it below its predecessor had a point, in my view. Casino Royale built its hero gradually and let its scenes breathe… Read more →

• Rebel

  The directing duo's boldest move is to put war drama and thriller inside the story of a young rapper. A narrative that slides between three… Read more →

• Reclaim Your Brain (Free Rainer – Dein Fernseher lügt)

  The biggest trap for a film attacking trashy television is preaching, and Weingartner walks along its edge. What works is that the critique… Read more →

• Remember Me, My Love (Ricordati di me)

  The American Beauty comparison is understandable but, in my view, misleading: Muccino's film is less a suburban satire than a melodrama of… Read more →

• Breathless (À bout de souffle)

  Judging Breathless on its story alone misses the point; the real subject is form. The jump cuts, unusual at the time, combine with a method… Read more →

• Soldier of Fortune (Il soldato di ventura)

  The film is designed from start to finish as a star vehicle, and that is both its strength and its limit. Fitting Bud Spencer's settled… Read more →

• Last Action Hero

  It is not hard to see why it disappointed on release. The film wants to be three things at once: a big-budget action spectacle, a parody in… Read more →

• Dry Summer (Susuz Yaz)

  Erksan's surest decision is to tie the drama to a single concrete thing: water. Once water drives both the economic conflict and desire… Read more →

• La Dolce Vita

  The daring of La Dolce Vita lies less in its subject than in its form. Instead of a classical plot, a prologue, seven long episodes broken… Read more →

• Upside-Down World (Tersine Dünya)

  Tersine Dünya's strength and weakness both lie in its one-sentence premise. A world where women and men have swapped places is a perfect… Read more →

• That Most Important Thing: Love (L'important c'est d'aimer)

  The story's skeleton, a tragic triangle between an actress, her husband and the photographer who falls for her, leans on familiar melodrama… Read more →

• The Brand New Testament (Le Tout Nouveau Testament)

  As an idea, this is one of the most inventive premises of recent years: a grumpy God running human lives from his computer at whim, and a… Read more →

• The Crime of Monsieur Lange (Le Crime de monsieur Lange)

  Being the only collaboration between Renoir and Prévert makes the film a meeting point in itself. A tone that moves easily between drama… Read more →

• The Five Man Army (Un esercito di 5 uomini)

  The credits are almost more intriguing than the film: a young Dario Argento on the script, Enzo Barboni behind the camera, Ennio Morricone… Read more →

• The Sorrow of Mrs. Schneider (Trishtimi i zonjës Shnajder)

  A film about a student shooting his graduation film, drawn from the director's own student years, sets up a neat mirror effect: the camera… Read more →

• Until the End of the World (Bis ans Ende der Welt)

  Wenders's ambition to make the ultimate road movie is both the film's strength and its weakness. A structure that stretches across the… Read more →

• Z

  Z is something of a lesson in how cinema can turn a real political murder into a thriller structure. Costa-Gavras makes the investigation… Read more →

• A Man in Love (Un homme amoureux)

  Being Kurys's first English-language film makes A Man in Love an interesting experiment. The mix of English, French and Italian lets you… Read more →

• My Mother (Mia madre)

  Moretti's smartest choice is to use the film-within-a-film structure not as a game but as a mirror of his heroine's inner life. Margherita… Read more →

• Armageddon

  Armageddon is an almost pure specimen of the big studio blockbuster: a huge budget, an Aerosmith song, a cast full of famous faces and the… Read more →

• Asterix & Obelix: Mission Cleopatra (Astérix et Obélix : Mission Cléopâtre)

  Alain Chabat wrote it, directed it and plays Caesar too, and that gives the film a clear authorial stamp; in my view he translates the… Read more →

• When Father Was Away on Business (Otac na službenom putu)

  The film's real achievement is its point of view. Filtering political repression through a child's half-understanding lets Kusturica tell a… Read more →

• Barfuss

  Barfuss is Til Schweiger's film from start to finish: he plays the lead and is also director, co-producer and co-writer. That concentration… Read more →

• BloodRayne

  Uwe Boll's third game adaptation catches the eye with its cast: Ben Kingsley, Michael Madsen, Michelle Rodriguez, Udo Kier. But assembling… Read more →

• Bobby Deerfield

  Pollack and screenwriter Alvin Sargent choose to turn Remarque's novel not into a flashy racing film but into the slow thaw of a closed-off… Read more →

• Breaking the Waves

  A film steeped in the style and spirit of Dogme 95 that nonetheless breaks many of the manifesto's rules; the contradiction suggests von… Read more →

• Elsa & Fred (Elsa y Fred)

  Carnevale takes romantic comedy's best-known device, the meeting sparked by an everyday incident, from a genre usually reserved for the… Read more →

• Playing House (Evcilik Oyunu)

  The film is close to a textbook case of a template Yeşilçam used again and again in those years: a forced betrothal, a game of false… Read more →

• Flatfoot in Africa (Piedone l'africano)

  Piedone l'africano neatly sums up the series logic of European co-productions. The Italian-West German partnership, Rainer Brandt's place… Read more →

• The Gendarme of Saint-Tropez (Le Gendarme de Saint-Tropez)

  The film was built around a star from the outset, which is both its strength and its limit: whenever Louis de Funès's Cruchot is on screen… Read more →

• Black Sea

  The real test of a single-setting thriller is turning claustrophobia from scenery into the engine of the story. Kevin Macdonald, with the… Read more →

• A Funny Love Story (Komik Bir Aşk Hikayesi)

  Aydoğan Temel writing the script and taking a lead role gives the film the feel of a personal project. On paper the idea is clever: a blind… Read more →

• La Boum

  Pinoteau and Danièle Thompson's script manages to portray a teenage girl's world without condescension; the tone is light but it takes her… Read more →

• Life Is Tough (La vita, a volte, è molto dura, vero Provvidenza?)

  The film marries the spaghetti western tradition to comedy and shares the usual problem of such hybrids: when suspense and gags jostle for… Read more →

• Madame Sans-Gêne

  The Sardou-Moreau play is material already tried on stage, in silent cinema and in opera, so the real question for this adaptation is… Read more →

• Murtaza

  The risk in bringing a character defined by a single passion like Murtaza's to the screen is obvious: he can easily turn into a caricature… Read more →

• My Mother's Castle (Le Château de ma mère)

  The second of Yves Robert's two Pagnol adaptations stands out for its faithfulness to the source. Jérôme Tonnerre's screenplay stays close… Read more →

• My New Partner (Les Ripoux)

  Claude Zidi builds the buddy-film formula in reverse: instead of the familiar pattern in which the honest cop straightens out his crooked… Read more →

• Nine

  Nine pays the price of adapting Fellini's 8½ second-hand, by way of Broadway. The source's inward-looking crisis of a director risks… Read more →

• Rang De Basanti

  Mehra's boldest choice is structural: the film-within-a-film device puts past and present side by side in the same flow, and the young… Read more →

• Roma

  Roma refuses to tell a story in the classic sense and embraces that not as a lack but as a method. With the city as the only real… Read more →

• The Milky Way (La Voie lactée)

  Buñuel deliberately takes classical narrative apart here: the two wanderers' journey to Santiago de Compostela serves as a skeleton, but… Read more →

• Santa Claus Is a Stinker (Le père Noël est une ordure)

  The film's stage origins show in every frame: a setting centred on a helpline flat, chaos that rises with each new character through the… Read more →

• Chauffeur (Şoför)

  Orhan Aksoy knows the rules of arabesk well, and Şoför has little intention of stepping outside them. The script's main problem is that it… Read more →

• The Albanian (Shqiptari)

  Naber's film is a drama that takes care not to turn poverty into a spectacle of suffering. The hero's path, from shuttling between Greece… Read more →

• The Cop (Un condé)

  Un condé is a French polar that tries to turn a revenge story into a portrait of an institution. Boisset's target is not a single villain… Read more →

• The Tattoo (Le Tatoué)

  The film is built less on a script than on a casting idea: putting Jean Gabin and Louis de Funès side by side as a comic duo for the first… Read more →

• The Young Girls of Rochefort (Les Demoiselles de Rochefort)

  Demy doesn't imitate golden-age Hollywood musicals here; he rebuilds them in the streets of a French provincial town. The vivid colour… Read more →

• Flightplan (Flightplan – Ohne jede Spur)

  The premise openly recalls Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes: someone disappears on a journey and nobody around believes it. Once Billy Ray's… Read more →

• A Christmas Tale (Un conte de Noël)

  Rather than tying a crowded family film to a single dramatic axis, Desplechin builds it like a mosaic: illness, the search for a donor, an… Read more →

• A Difficult Life (Una vita difficile)

  In tying the laughter of commedia all'italiana to a historical narrative, Risi strikes a difficult balance: telling sixteen years through… Read more →

• Agent 3S3: Massacre in the Sun (Agente 3S3, massacro al sole)

  This sequel, which Sergio Sollima directed as Simon Sterling, bears the marks of being shot back to back with the first film: the same… Read more →

• Oh Beautiful Istanbul (Ah Güzel İstanbul)

  Being a black-comedy experiment within a Yeşilçam output dominated by melodrama and broad comedy makes the film interesting in itself. Atıf… Read more →

• The Baader Meinhof Complex (Der Baader Meinhof Komplex)

  Bernd Eichinger's script makes a deliberate choice: no hero to identify with and no continuous plotline. The film proceeds like a… Read more →

• For a Few Beautiful Days (Birkaç Güzel Gün İçin)

  The script runs on coincidence. Finding the long-lost daughter at the very moment of witnessing a murder, taking the blame, the death… Read more →

• Christine

  With Max Ophüls's adaptation of the same play already on record, Christine's real test is to justify a remake. Pierre Gaspard-Huit doesn't… Read more →

• De Gaulle: Tilting Iron (La Bataille de Gaulle : L'Âge de fer)

  As the first half of a two-part historical epic, De Gaulle: Tilting Iron takes a large structural risk: it has to end without finishing its… Read more →

• Dogville

  Dogville's boldest decision is reducing the town to outlines on a floor with no walls. This stage-play aesthetic pulls the viewer out of… Read more →

• The Grifters

  When Donald E. Westlake's adaptation of Jim Thompson's novel meets Frears's cool-headed direction, the result is a neo-noir that knows the… Read more →

• Anxiety (Endişe)

  It is hard to judge Endişe without considering how it was made: Güney started the shoot and Şerif Gören finished it, so the film comes from… Read more →

• Fack ju Göhte 2

  The familiar sequel recipe: take characters who worked the first time and move them to a more exotic location. The relocation to Thailand… Read more →

• Flatfoot in Egypt (Piedone d’Egitto)

  Being the fourth and final instalment of the series also explains why the film is a long way from the freshness of the earlier ones. The… Read more →

• Free Men (Les Hommes libres)

  Ismaël Ferroukhi's second feature carries the weight of its subject without sliding into propaganda; as one Turkish review pointed out, it… Read more →

• Heroes

  The most interesting thing about Heroes is how it brought the look of American comic books, and their logic of story arcs spread over… Read more →

• I Am Sartana, Trade Your Guns for a Coffin (C'è Sartana... vendi la pistola e comprati la bara!)

  This film is an interesting test of how far a hero can survive as a brand independent of the actor. George Hilton, taking over from Gianni… Read more →

• Elevator to the Gallows (Ascenseur pour l'échafaud)

  Louis Malle's first fiction feature has a confidence that earns its reputation as a forerunner of the French New Wave. Henri Decaë's… Read more →

• If You Meet Sartana Pray for Your Death (...Se incontri Sartana prega per la tua morte)

  The first Sartana film lays bare the genre's commercial logic: a successful figure is created, then come official sequels and unofficial… Read more →

• Iznogoud

  Goscinny and Tabary's comic rests on a single mechanism: the vizier's plan is set up and backfires every time. Stretching that into a… Read more →

• Boats Out of Watermelon Rinds (Karpuz Kabuğundan Gemiler Yapmak)

  Ahmet Uluçay's first feature is one of Turkish cinema's most sincere examples of poetic realism built with a cast of unknown faces and… Read more →

• Unknown

  Collet-Serra builds the idea of lost identity on the legacy of the classic paranoia thriller: a world in which the hero doubts his own… Read more →

• Lady L

  Written and directed by Peter Ustinov, the film uses a classic framing device: an old woman telling her life to a young admirer. The… Read more →

• Musallat 2 (Musallat 2: Lanet)

  Written and directed by Alper Mestçi, the sequel leaves the first film's focus on a couple and turns to one woman's past that she cannot… Read more →

• New York, I Love You

  Unevenness is the built-in problem of anthology films, and New York, I Love You doesn't escape it. The shorts by eleven directors differ… Read more →

• Nirvana

  Moving into cyberpunk, a genre European cinema rarely tackles, Gabriele Salvatores puts the idea first in Nirvana instead of joining… Read more →

• Not Here to Be Loved (Je ne suis pas là pour être aimé)

  Brizé turns the film's understated tone from a weakness into a method: the shifts between drama, comedy and romance happen through small… Read more →

• Odds and Evens (Pari e dispari)

  Sergio Corbucci builds less a narrative here than a run of set pieces resting on the duo's proven formula. The script's real engine isn't… Read more →

• Rina

  Rina sets out the likeness between an island's solitude and the loneliness a person carries as its thesis from the start. The risk with a… Read more →

• Round Midnight

  Tavernier's boldest decision is to give the lead not to an actor but to a real jazz legend, Dexter Gordon. The choice deliberately blurs… Read more →

• Stranger in the House (L'inconnu dans la maison)

  Bringing Simenon's novel to the screen a second time means inevitably inviting comparison with Decoin's 1942 adaptation; Lautner's choice… Read more →

• The Patriots (Les Patriotes)

  Éric Rochant writing his own script gives the film a consistent, cool gaze: espionage is treated not as a romantic adventure but as a… Read more →

• The Poppy Is Also a Flower (Opération Opium)

  Being conceived as a UN-backed television special shapes the whole film: this is a structure built for an institutional message rather than… Read more →

• The Stendhal Syndrome (La sindrome di Stendhal)

  Here Argento turns his own giallo formula inside out: the killer's identity is known from the start, so curiosity gives way to… Read more →

• Velvet

  What makes Velvet formally interesting is how much of the story is concentrated inside the store. Shot at the Atresmedia facilities, the… Read more →

• Rising Sun

  Having Kaufman, Crichton and Michael Backes adapt Crichton's novel together seems to explain why the film tries to carry three genres at… Read more →

• The Wedding Night (Zifaf)

  Erdoğan Tünaş's script applies Yeşilçam's love-triangle template almost by the textbook: a chance meeting, a powerful and wealthy rival, a… Read more →

• 125 (125, rue Montmartre)

  What makes Grangier's film interesting is how it brings film noir down to the everyday face of Paris: at its centre is not a detective or a… Read more →

• Buffalo Soldiers (Army Go Home!)

  Gregor Jordan's film walks a difficult line for military satire: it sets its black comedy on ground that is not funny at all, drug dealing… Read more →

• Trees Die Standing (Ağaçlar Ayakta Ölür)

  Adapted from Alejandro Casona's play, the film makes no secret of its stage origins: the story is built inside an old waterside mansion… Read more →

• Ablaze (Alev Alev)

  Alev Alev is the Turkish version of the French miniseries Le Bazar de la Charité, and the conversion itself is an interesting case. Once a… Read more →

• Ali and Nino (Ali ve Nino)

  Christopher Hampton's script fits the novel's broad world of ideas onto the skeleton of a classic thwarted-love drama. That keeps the story… Read more →

• American Gangster

  Ridley Scott runs two classic figures of crime cinema side by side: a rising drug lord and the honest cop on his trail. The contrast… Read more →

• Andaz Apna Apna

  Films that flop at the box office and become cult favourites over the years have often arrived a little ahead of their time, and Andaz Apna… Read more →

• Asterix and Obelix: God Save Britannia (Astérix et Obélix : Au service de Sa Majesté)

  For a series reaching its fourth instalment, the biggest risk is fatigue, and this one does not seem to escape it. The script blends two… Read more →

• The Sister-in-Law (Baldız)

  The script leans on a classic mistaken-identity setup that multiplies the confusion rather than resolving it. It is a pattern found in many… Read more →

• Beyond Dreams (Dröm vidare)

  Sekersöz's first feature is built on leaving its heroine between two loyalties: the friends she has had all her life and the family that is… Read more →

• Big Sur

  Portraying a writer with an inner life as dense as Kerouac's is the real test for Michael Polish. The wide Cinemascope frame tries to turn… Read more →

• Black Belly of the Tarantula (La tarantola dal ventre nero)

  Taking its cue from Argento's hit of the year before explains why the film follows such a familiar template: it stays faithful to the known… Read more →

• The Expendables (Cehennem Melekleri)

  Stallone frames the film as a tribute, and that is exactly where its limit shows: the cast is bigger than the script can carry. Trying to… Read more →

• Coup de tête

  Coup de tête's boldest decision is taking Francis Veber's François Perrin away from the series' familiar face and handing him to Patrick… Read more →

• The Danish Girl

  Tom Hooper's direction is so eager to turn every frame into a painting that the film at times freezes inside its own elegance. The 1920s… Read more →

• Der Schuh des Manitu

  Michael Herbig shows both the advantages and the traps of turning a TV sketch into a feature at once. The advantage is that the target of… Read more →

• The Big Blue (Le Grand Bleu)

  Le Grand Bleu is a textbook case of critics and audiences parting ways: the press was cool at its Cannes opening, yet the film drew more… Read more →

• The Longest Day

  The production's most interesting decision is language: the different fronts were shot by Ken Annakin, Andrew Marton and Bernhard Wicki in… Read more →

• Fabiola

  Blasetti's film heads in the opposite direction from the neorealism that defined post-war Italian cinema, towards a large-scale historical… Read more →

• Far Cry

  Far Cry adapts the 2004 game very loosely, and the result is a standard island adventure with no identity drawn from its source. The script… Read more →

• The Sob (Hıçkırık)

  Written and directed by Atıf Yılmaz, this first adaptation of Hıçkırık plays more like a summary of the novel than a film in its own right.… Read more →

• Hotel Mondial

  Hotel Mondial was designed for a public broadcaster's early-evening slot, and that format sets both its identity and its limits. Slot… Read more →

• Kolpaçino 3. Devre

  With Şafak Sezer writing, directing and starring, this third instalment never gets beyond repeating the series' own formula. An envelope… Read more →

• The Leopard (Le Guépard)

  Visconti's film is held up as an example of how a large-scale period drama can be made with an art-house sensibility, and the Palme d'Or at… Read more →

• Man of the East (...E poi lo chiamarono il Magnifico)

  Enzo Barboni's third collaboration with Terence Hill tries to step out of the Trinity films' shadow while also leaning on their success.… Read more →

• Miral

  The film builds a two-axis structure split between Hind Husseini and Miral. That makes the idea of a handover between generations visible… Read more →

• My American Uncle (Mon oncle d'Amérique)

  Resnais builds a structure cinema has rarely tried: three fictional lives run side by side with Henri Laborit's ideas on behavioural… Read more →

• NCIS

  NCIS is a textbook example of one of television's most durable formulas: a new case every week, a settled team and humour scattered through… Read more →

• One Thousand Dollars on the Black (1000 dollari sul nero)

  The film's place in cinema history comes less from itself than from the character it gave birth to. Gianni Garko's Sartana is a villain… Read more →

• Recep İvedik 4

  The bond with the audience clearly hasn't frayed by the fourth film; Recep is still a strong magnet. In terms of film language, though, it… Read more →

• Rocco and His Brothers (Rocco e i suoi fratelli)

  Visconti's film marries neorealism's street-level truth to a family tragedy on an operatic scale. The five-part structure, one part per… Read more →

• RocknRolla

  RocknRolla was seen as a return to the line of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch, which is both its appeal and its problem.… Read more →

• The Yellow Rolls-Royce

  The anthology format is both the film's strength and its weakness. Rattigan's script ties three stories together through one car, but the… Read more →

• Flower of Love (Sevda Çiçeği)

  Sevda Çiçeği is a textbook case of the summer-series formula: a heroine who truly falls in love while trying to make someone fall for her… Read more →

• Street Girl (Sokak Kızı)

  Sokak Kızı uses Yeşilçam melodrama's busiest template: the rich young man who hides his identity and mingles with the poor. With such a… Read more →

• Spartacus

  Spartacus sits oddly in Kubrick's filmography: it is the only film where he lacked full artistic control. With Anthony Mann removed soon… Read more →

• Let's Hope It's a Girl (Speriamo che sia femmina)

  Monicelli gathers a large star cast into a single villa and directs it almost like a chorus; just seeing Liv Ullmann, Catherine Deneuve and… Read more →

• Star Trek Beyond (Star Trek: Más allá)

  The third film of the reboot shifts noticeably in tone as the director's chair passes from J. J. Abrams to Justin Lin. Lin is skilled at… Read more →

• Storm Rider

  That Giancarlo Santi had been assistant director on Leone's The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and Once Upon a Time in the West before this… Read more →

• Stromberg

  Stromberg is one of the first international adaptations of The Office; airing a year before the American version and sparking a copyright… Read more →

• The Gendarme and the Gendarmettes (Le Gendarme et les Gendarmettes)

  By the series' sixth film, the formula's fatigue is inevitably felt. Women gendarmes joining the brigade promises a fresh source of… Read more →

• Tarkan Versus the Vikings (Tarkan: Viking Kanı)

  Tarkan Versus the Vikings is an interesting example of Turkish popular cinema's comic-strip-based genre experiments. The script, which… Read more →

• Gendarme in New York (Le Gendarme à New York)

  The classic problem of sequels is that they cannot repeat the surprise of the first film; De Funès's suggestion to take the story abroad is… Read more →

• The First Beautiful Thing (La prima cosa bella)

  Virzì's film tries to fit some four decades into the story of a single family, and the biggest test for this kind of structure is keeping… Read more →

• The Flower of Evil (La Fleur du mal)

  Chabrol's fiftieth feature returns to ground he had long worked: the rot beneath the polished surface of the bourgeois family. Familiar… Read more →

• The Gunman

  The Gunman is pulled in two directions at once. On one side is a dark story of conscience drawn from a French crime novel, in which… Read more →

• The Judge and the Assassin (Le Juge et l'Assassin)

  Tavernier's film resists genre labels: it moves between drama, crime and historical courtroom picture, and some sources even call it a… Read more →

• The Killer Likes Candy (Un killer per sua maestà)

  The Killer Likes Candy is a textbook product of the Eurospy wave that followed the success of the Bond films, and that typicality is both… Read more →

• The Little Bather (Le Petit Baigneur)

  Robert Dhéry is both director and, as the designer Castagnier, in front of the camera, and the film leans on the contrast between a highly… Read more →

• The Promise (Das Versprechen)

  Von Trotta tells the story of a divided Berlin not through grand political set pieces but through a couple's separated lives, and that… Read more →

• The Shortest Day (Il giorno più corto)

  The cleverness of the parody lies in copying the structure of its target: just as The Longest Day is famous for its huge star ensemble, The… Read more →

• The Wise Guys (Les Grandes Gueules)

  Robert Enrico co-writing the screenplay with the novel's author, José Giovanni, positions the film as an adaptation that stays close to its… Read more →

• The Woman in Gold

  Simon Curtis's film applies the safe conventions of the biographical courtroom drama with care: a stubborn older woman and a young… Read more →

• Thor: Love and Thunder (Thor : Amour et tonnerre)

  Waititi's aim of a 1980s-flavoured romantic adventure, unlike Ragnarok, is on paper an interesting move to keep the series from repeating… Read more →

• Tripoli, Beautiful Land of Love

  The script opens with a solid set-up borrowed from The Three Musketeers: a newcomer clashes with three overbearing comrades and in time… Read more →

• Tristana

  Tristana is one of the mature examples of Buñuel's skill at slipping symbols into a realistic narrative. The story could have been told as… Read more →

• Turbo

  Turbo's origins explain its character: the project began in DreamWorks' one-page pitch contest with the idea of "Fast and Furious with… Read more →

• Turkish for Beginners (Türkisch für Anfänger)

  The most common mistake when bringing a TV series to the cinema is to shoot a long bonus episode that winks at loyal viewers. Dağtekin does… Read more →

• Venuto al mondo

  Castellitto co-writing the screenplay with the novelist, Margaret Mazzantini, secures fidelity to the Campiello-winning source, but… Read more →

• Twin Peaks

  Lynch directing all eighteen episodes makes it possible to read this season less as a TV series than as one long film bearing a single… Read more →

• Ulysses (Ulisse)

  Ulysses tries to squeeze Homer's sprawling, episodic epic into roughly a hundred minutes of sword-and-sandal spectacle, and the cost shows… Read more →

• Hope (Umut)

  Umut matters because it brought a realist film language into Turkish cinema with a determination never seen before. Kaya Ererez's… Read more →

• Woman Times Seven

  The anthology format is both this film's strength and its weakness. Casting Shirley MacLaine as seven different women builds a wide… Read more →

• Young Sinners (Les Tricheurs)

  Made after Carné had turned fifty, this film is an interesting threshold work for the way its subject anticipates the New Wave. But there… Read more →

• A Very Private Affair (Vie privée)

  The film's real daring lies in nearly superimposing actor and role: Bardot plays a world-famous actress in a semi-autobiographical script… Read more →

• Oh, Beautiful Istanbul! (Ah Güzel İstanbul)

  In an adaptation, having the author co-write the screenplay is not always an advantage, but here the partnership of Füruzan and Ömer Kavur… Read more →

• Avengers: Age of Ultron

  The film's most interesting idea is that the villain doesn't come from outside: Ultron is an AI Stark and Banner secretly built to protect… Read more →

• Behold a Pale Horse

  Working from Pressburger's novel, Zinnemann chooses a heavy, dark reckoning between two men over a showy war picture. The black-and-white… Read more →

• The Back Side of Beyoğlu (Beyoğlu'nun Arka Yakası)

  Şerif Gören uses the template of discovering nightlife through an innocent's eyes; it is one of the most effective ways to carry an… Read more →

• Goodbye Again (Aimez-vous Brahms…)

  Litvak stages Sagan's bestseller as an elegant romantic drama: costumes by Dior, a Georges Auric score drawn from Brahms's symphonies and a… Read more →

• Alexander (Alexandre)

  Oliver Stone's Alexander carries both the strength and the cost of trying to fit an enormous life into a single film. Rodrigo Prieto's… Read more →

• I Would Give My Life for You (Canım Sana Feda)

  The script lays down the familiar stones of Yeşilçam melodrama one by one: the orphaned heroine, the self-sacrificing sister, the lover who… Read more →

• Crazy Friends

  Third instalments often reveal not a franchise's strength but its habit of carrying on, and Çılgın Dostlar does not escape that pattern.… Read more →

• Destruction Force (La banda del trucido)

  The most interesting thing about the film is the deal behind it: Monnezza, conceived as a guest part, was enlarged to make Milian look like… Read more →

• The World Is Not Enough

  The nineteenth entry shows the formula's strength and its fatigue at the same time. After the opening assassination, the script strains to… Read more →

• The Greatest Shaban (En Büyük Şaban)

  Suphi Tekniker's script keeps the two main veins of City Lights, the man who only knows his friend when drunk and the blind flower seller… Read more →

• Female Agents (Les Femmes de l'ombre)

  Jean-Paul Salomé's film is built on a classic "assemble the team" structure, and the script carries out the pattern's requirements… Read more →

• Frantic

  Polanski brings Hitchcock's ordinary-man-in-the-wrong-place template to Paris, and Morricone's Bernard Herrmann-style score underlines the… Read more →

• French Cancan

  Renoir's previous film, The Golden Coach, had turned to commedia dell'arte; French Cancan carries the same passion for the stage into the… Read more →

• Furia à Bahia pour OSS 117

  Hunebelle's third film in the OSS 117 series shows both the appeal and the limits of the Eurospy wave. Paul-Louis Boutié's production… Read more →

• The Night, Angel and Our Children (Gece, Melek ve Bizim Çocuklar)

  Yıldırım Türker's script centres the story on Serap but does not confine the camera to her, drawing a broad panorama of trans women, sex… Read more →

• Genius

  Genius is the television version of the prestige biopic: Brian Grazer and Ron Howard among its producers, big stars and a wide… Read more →

• Gente di Roma

  Ettore Scola's mix of amateurs and professionals, fiction and documentary elements is a bold formal choice. Leading with the amateurs'… Read more →

• When Will the Sun Rise? (Güneş Ne Zaman Doğacak)

  The film is a typical example of 1970s political melodrama: the message walks ahead of the story, the agents of the oppressive regime serve… Read more →

• I Would Give My Life for You (Hayatım Sana Feda)

  The script, co-written by Bülent Oran, assembles the familiar parts of Yeşilçam melodrama: an accident, guilt, a hidden identity and an… Read more →

• Welcome

  Philippe Lioret's smartest decision is to tie a social drama to a concrete, physical goal: swimming across the English Channel. That goal… Read more →

• Hôtel du Nord

  What makes Hôtel du Nord one of the cited examples of poetic realism is its skill at turning a modest boarding house in a working-class… Read more →

• Big Deal on Madonna Street (I soliti ignoti)

  Monicelli's brilliant idea is to turn the heist-film mechanism inside out: he takes the template of a perfectly planned job like Rififi and… Read more →

• Il coltello di ghiaccio (Detrás del silencio)

  A protagonist who cannot speak is a powerful formal device in suspense cinema: when testimony cannot be put into words, the weight falls on… Read more →

• In the Land of Blood and Honey

  Angelina Jolie's first commercially released film as a director shows in every frame its intention to treat a serious subject seriously.… Read more →

• Equilibrium

  Equilibrium's cult status is understandable, but the critics' first reaction was not unfair either. The script barely hides what it borrows… Read more →

• The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo)

  Leone's style reaches its purest form here: setting wide desert shots against extreme close-ups that go right down to the eyes makes the… Read more →

• Kokowääh

  Til Schweiger is director, co-writer and lead here, and according to sources producer too. A commercial comedy made so single-handedly has… Read more →

• Empire of the Wolves (L'Empire des loups)

  In Grangé's world an ordinary investigation is usually tied to a dark puzzle about identity and memory, and here the most original idea is… Read more →

• Le Corps de mon ennemi

  Henri Verneuil's film takes a familiar revenge pattern, the return of a man wrongly imprisoned, and tries to carry it somewhere more… Read more →

• Le Roi danse

  For a period film that combines musical and biographical elements, the biggest test is weaving music and dance into the story, and… Read more →

• Le Rouge et le Noir

  Autant-Lara builds Stendhal's novel inside the Saint-Maurice Studios, among Max Douy's sets, and that choice gives the film both elegance… Read more →

• Lindenstraße

  The limits of the soap format apply here as everywhere: a street built in a studio, the hurried pace of weekly production, and storylines… Read more →

• Mannaja

  Sergio Martino's film tries to keep the rules of the spaghetti western in its late period while giving them a new surface. The most… Read more →

• Massacre in Rome

  Cosmatos's film has a clear tension between its documentary style and its star cast. The structure that follows the reprisal through its… Read more →

• Mr. Muhsin (Muhsin Bey)

  Turgul's script sets two opposite characters side by side and makes the friction between them the engine of both the comedy and the drama.… Read more →

• Isolated (Münferit)

  Turkish cinema rarely attempts film noir, which alone makes Münferit worth attention. Moving back in time through an interrogation, it… Read more →

• Nicholas on Holiday (Les Vacances du petit Nicolas)

  Goscinny and Sempé's books are made of short, self-contained episodes, and that structure is exactly the problem Laurent Tirard faces in… Read more →

• Night Flight from Moscow (Le serpent)

  Henri Verneuil's Cold War thriller is a typical product of the 1970s international co-production model: Yul Brynner, Henry Fonda, Dirk… Read more →

• Niyazi Gul, the Galloping Vet (Niyazi Gül Dörtnala)

  Carrying a character born in Korsan TV sketches into a feature is always risky: exaggeration that works in a sketch needs a solid story… Read more →

• Only the Wind Knows the Answer (Die Antwort kennt nur der Wind)

  Adapting Simmel's bestseller, Alfred Vohrer keeps the easy flow of popular fiction. The yacht explosion at the start is a strong hook, and… Read more →

• Our Kind of Traitor

  Hossein Amini's screenplay tries to keep le Carré's trademark moral murk: neither the mob nor the secret service is a side you can trust.… Read more →

• Phantom Pain (Phantomschmerz)

  Matthias Emcke's film uses a familiar dramatic template: the irresponsible but charming man shaken by an accident and forced to face… Read more →

• Quiet Chaos (Caos calmo)

  Quiet Chaos's bold move is to tie grief not to a plot but to a place: the park opposite the school becomes the film's stage, and the world… Read more →

• Romanzo Criminale

  Romanzo Criminale is a strong candidate for Italy's answer to the rise-and-fall gangster epic. Placido's smartest decision is to keep a… Read more →

• La Grande Vadrouille

  Gérard Oury's film takes a formula already proven in Le Corniaud, the contrast between Bourvil and Louis de Funès, and carries it into a… Read more →

• Sheitan

  Kim Chapiron's first feature is a grotesque, at times surreal experiment that throws black comedy, sex and horror into the same pot. The… Read more →

• Shooting Stars (Trois Zéros)

  The film has solid ground for satirising the money-and-agents side of football: transfer bargaining, club interests and overnight fame… Read more →

• Royal Affairs in Versailles (Si Versailles m'était conté...)

  Guitry's ambitious late work chooses to tell the story of a palace, from its beginnings to the present, as a string of portraits, and that… Read more →

• Sorry to Bother You

  Boots Riley's first feature stands out for its daring. Mixing absurdist black comedy with science fiction, it starts as a realistic… Read more →

• Suspiria

  Suspiria is one of those rare films that builds fear out of form more than story. The saturated colour palette, stylised images and the… Read more →

• The Battle of El Alamein

  Rather than tie itself to one hero, Ferroni's film opts for a many-voiced structure spanning headquarters and front line. It is a clever… Read more →

• The Confessions (Le confessioni)

  Andò's set-up is attractive on paper: a sealed-off luxury hotel, economists about to decide the world's fate, and a monk placed in the… Read more →

• The Facts of Murder (Un maledetto imbroglio)

  Pietro Germi's film rests on an interesting double role: Germi both directs and plays the commissioner leading the investigation, so the… Read more →

• The Mentalist

  The critics' Sherlock Holmes comparison fits: the show turns back to the classic detective story built on observation and deduction rather… Read more →

• The President (Le Président)

  Starting from Simenon's novel and changing its ending announces from the outset that the adaptation will look for its own voice. Michel… Read more →

• The Swindle (Rien ne va plus)

  Chabrol's pair of con artists show the director's ironic eye at its most relaxed. The original title, taken from the croupier's call that… Read more →

• The Truth (La Vérité)

  Clouzot's smartest choice is to set the story in the courtroom and open up the past through flashbacks tied to the testimony. The film thus… Read more →

• The Two Gladiators (I due gladiatori)

  The screenplay's most interesting choice is grafting a succession thriller onto peplum's usual muscle-and-arena template. The senator who… Read more →

• Tourist Ömer the Bullfighter (Turist Ömer Boğa Güreşçisi)

  The film bears every mark of being the ninth link in a series. The plot is a chain of excuses for moving the character somewhere new: the… Read more →

• Swann in Love (Un amour de Swann)

  Adapting Proust is hard because the novel's power lies not in events but in the narrator's memory and inner voice. Jean-Claude Carrière and… Read more →

• Under Ten Flags

  That the screenplay rests on the memoirs of the ship's actual commander, Bernhard Rogge, and is credited to him as well, is both the film's… Read more →

• Story of Women (Une affaire de femmes)

  Chabrol makes no attempt to either clear or condemn his heroine; the camera watches Marie's choices from a cool, almost detached distance.… Read more →

• Vacanze di Natale

  The Vanzina brothers' film looks like the first rehearsal of a formula that would be repeated every Christmas, and that is where its… Read more →

• Vengeance (Joko - Invoca Dio... e muori)

  What lifts this above an ordinary spaghetti western is its urge to carry Gothic darkness into the genre's dusty world. Leon Hunt's… Read more →

• You Burned Me (Yaktın Beni)

  The film language one critic found solid for a debut is genuinely there: the storytelling is tidy and the images are handsome. The real… Read more →

• Gravitational Loves (Yer Çekimli Aşklar)

  Five directors, five screenwriters, three cinematographers and a single editor: Yer Çekimli Aşklar is a rarely tried anthology model in… Read more →

• 7 Dwarves – Men Alone in the Wood (7 Zwerge – Männer allein im Wald)

  A project conceived by and starring Otto Waalkes naturally leans heavily on his comic persona. Fairy-tale parody is a flexible formula… Read more →

• Amateur Flirt (Acemi Çapkın)

  That Nejat Saydam is counted among Yeşilçam's most prolific directors is worth keeping in mind here: fast production usually means solid… Read more →

• Adiós gringo

  Adiós gringo is interesting as a record of an in-between period when the Italian western had not yet found its own identity. Working from… Read more →

• Agora

  Amenábar's choice is bold: building a large-scale historical production around astronomy rather than battlefields. Turning a thinker… Read more →

• Bamako

  Sissako's form stands out for its hybrid of documentary and fiction. Setting the trial in a house's courtyard is a strong staging idea that… Read more →

• Bang Boom Bang (Bang Boom Bang – Ein todsicheres Ding)

  Peter Thorwarth's breakthrough as a director is a debut that tries to manage a large ensemble within a small-town comedy. Using Unna not as… Read more →

• Banzo

  Margarida Cardoso's most interesting choice is to approach colonialism through a failed diagnosis. The "pathological nostalgia" the doctor… Read more →

• Belgica

  Belgica's real engine is the music rather than the script. Soulwax's wall-to-wall score turns the bar's rise into an editing rhythm and… Read more →

• White Nights (Le notti bianche)

  Visconti's move away from neorealism shows most clearly in the atmosphere here: the setting feels less like a real city than a state of… Read more →

• A Woman's Enemy (Bir Kadın Düşmanı)

  Fitting a novel into eighty minutes forces hard choices in adaptation. Past mistakes, a forbidden passion, a death and a fresh start in a… Read more →

• Boot Hill (La collina degli stivali)

  The most interesting thing about Boot Hill is less the film itself than what happened to it. As the last part of the Colizzi trilogy that… Read more →

• Four Steps in the Clouds (4 passi fra le nuvole)

  Blasetti's film stands on a threshold in film history: a comedy shot at the Cinecittà studios, yet with its exteriors on real locations and… Read more →

• Loft

  Five keys, five suspects and one secret flat: Loft sets up the most basic arithmetic of the closed-room mystery and generates its tension… Read more →

• Chicken with Vinegar (Poulet au vinaigre)

  Chabrol opens the crime-film skeleton up to a mix of genres here: mystery, romance, comedy and drama under one roof. The best summary of… Read more →

• Cites

  When adapting a British format, lengthening the episodes and fitting two dates into each one is a clever structural choice. Cutting the two… Read more →

• Death is serving (La muerte cumple condena)

  Historically, the interest here lies less in the film than in the names around it: Sergio Donati on the script, Alberto Grimaldi producing… Read more →

• Dog Day (Canicule)

  Boisset wrote the script with the novel's author Jean Herman, Michel Audiard, Dominique Roulet and Serge Korber, and a text with five… Read more →

• The Ninth Surgical Ward (Dokuzuncu Hariciye Koğuşu)

  What an adaptation chooses to foreground defines the film. Nejat Saydam pushes back the hospital atmosphere and the inner world shaped by… Read more →

• Don Camillo's Last Round (Don Camillo e l'onorevole Peppone)

  In a film series the third instalment is often where the formula starts to tire, and this one does not fully escape that risk. Carmine… Read more →

• Elementary

  Arriving right after the BBC's modern Sherlock counted against the series before it aired, yet putting the two side by side shows how… Read more →

• Everything Calls for Salvation (Tutto chiede salvezza)

  Putting drama and comedy in the same psychiatric ward is a risky choice: the tone can slide into a cuteness that trivialises illness or… Read more →

• Fort Saganne

  Corneau's film is a big-budget attempt by French cinema at a Hollywood-style epic, and the ambition pays off most in the images: Bruno… Read more →

• French Connection II

  Sequels usually try to repeat the first film's success; Frankenheimer instead chooses to move away from Friedkin's Oscar winner rather than… Read more →

• Hearts and Armour (I paladini: storia d'armi e d'amori)

  Hearts and Armour is close to a textbook case of how visuals alone cannot carry a narrative. The production and costume design are… Read more →

• I See Naked (Vedo nudo)

  Vedo nudo shows both the strength and the limit of the anthology format. Each episode is a self-contained story, which lets Dino Risi try… Read more →

• In Prison Awaiting Trial (Detenuto in attesa di giudizio)

  The great strength of commedia all'italiana is using laughter as a defence that makes the pain beneath it more visible, and Nanni Loy's… Read more →

• Jappeloup

  Guillaume Canet writing the script and playing the lead suggests a strong sense of ownership, but such projects often fall into a familiar… Read more →

• Je suis timide mais je me soigne

  A comedy that Pierre Richard directed and stars in, co-writing the script with Jean-Jacques Annaud and Alain Godard, so the tone is set… Read more →

• The Bait (L'Appât)

  Tavernier takes on the hardest test for a crime film drawn from a real case: telling it without turning it into thrills. The summary… Read more →

• La Révolution française

  The real test for a production on this scale is coherence. The two parts' titles, the years of light and the terrible years, announce a… Read more →

• La Totale!

  The real cleverness in Zidi's film is how it turns the tools of the spy genre on the dullness of married life. A man leading a double life… Read more →

• The First Day of the Rest of Your Life (Le premier jour du reste de ta vie)

  Rémi Bezançon's film escapes the most dangerous trap of the family drama, the tedium of telling everything in a chronological flow, through… Read more →

• Le Radeau de la Méduse

  Azimi's boldest idea is to run a disaster and the painting born from it as two tracks in one film. The structure is fertile ground for… Read more →

• The Witches (Le streghe)

  Five directors, one star: Le streghe carries both the appeal and the risk of the anthology film. Seeing Visconti, Pasolini, De Sica… Read more →

• Loro

  Returning to political culture after Il divo, Sorrentino pushes his style even further. He builds a glittering, excessive and deliberately… Read more →

• Lost Command (Les Centurions)

  Directed and produced by Mark Robson, the film bears the marks of a Franco-American co-production in every frame: a French subject, a… Read more →

• Mademoiselle

  Mademoiselle is one of those films that split critics on release and was rediscovered in later years. Marguerite Duras's script, adapted… Read more →

• Mary Magdalene

  Garth Davis chooses to tell a familiar story not from the usual viewpoint but through Mary's eyes, and that is the script's boldest… Read more →

• Blue Night (Mavi Gece)

  The body swap is one of cinema's most worn comedy templates; what Mavi Gece adds is pushing its two characters to opposite extremes of… Read more →

• May Fools (Milou en mai)

  Jean-Claude Carrière's hand on the script explains the fine balance between satire and farce. Malle makes the wait for a burial that cannot… Read more →

• Mister Scarface (l Padroni della città)

  Di Leo blends the poliziottesco's toughness with a noir mood here. He builds a classic crime story from familiar elements: the small man on… Read more →

• Othello

  With Oliver Parker as both director and screenwriter, the approach to the text comes from a single hand. When bringing a stage play to the… Read more →

• Game Over (Oyun Bitti)

  The script's starting point is genuinely fertile: a mechanic who introduces himself as an engineer, and a singer who knows he takes her for… Read more →

• Prepare a Coffin! (Preparati la bara!)

  Preparati la bara! is a typical example of how a character turns into a brand after a successful film. The producer of Corbucci's Django… Read more →

• Prom Night

  A loose remake of the 1980 film, Prom Night never comes up with an idea that could carry the weight of the name it borrows. The script… Read more →

• RED 2

  The usual sequel problem is felt here too: the first film's surprise, the idea that old, retired agents can still be lethal, cannot land… Read more →

• Reservoir Dogs

  Tarantino's feature debut puts everything that would later count as his signature on the table at once: nonlinear structure, pop culture… Read more →

• Fixed Hook 2 (Sabit Kanca 2)

  Sabit Kanca 2 follows the most familiar pattern of sequels: take the first film's character and drop him into the middle of a new mess.… Read more →

• Sabrina

  Remaking Billy Wilder's 1954 film means inviting comparison from the start, and Pollack's version was weighed down by exactly that burden… Read more →

• Samson and the Slave Queen

  The most interesting thing about the film is its uncertainty about what it is: shot in Italy as a Maciste picture, redubbed in America into… Read more →

• Shoot the Piano Player (Tirez sur le pianiste)

  Coming after Truffaut's first feature, this may be the freest example of the New Wave's delight in playing with genres. The script, drawn… Read more →

• Sivas

  The most striking choice in Müjdeci's debut is putting professionals, first-time performers and a dog in the same frame. The result sits… Read more →

• The Gendarme and the Extra-Terrestrials (Le Gendarme et les Extra-terrestres)

  Turning to science fiction after a nine-year break reads like an attempt to catch the late-1970s sci-fi wave, but here the genre feels less… Read more →

• The Tailor (Süslü Korkuluk)

  That The Tailor is described as a drama by some sources and a thriller by others sums up its uncertainty of tone. A successful tailor… Read more →

• Repair Part (Tamirci Parçası)

  Ohnet's The Ironmaster is a melodrama template that pits class against pride and lends itself readily to adaptation; Fuat Özlüer's script… Read more →

• Tara Road

  The house swap is a handy structural device for running two strangers' stories side by side; the trouble is that it strains when asked to… Read more →

• Battle for Terra

  The most instructive thing about the project is its journey from short to feature: a story first conceived as hard live-action backed by… Read more →

• The Easy Way Out (L'Art de la fugue)

  Cauvin's film moves the three brothers' stories forward in parallel, which is both the strength and the weak point of this novel… Read more →

• The Indian Tomb (Das indische Grabmal)

  Shooting the interiors on designed sets at the Spandau studios defines both the film's strength and its limit: the India on screen is less… Read more →

• The Last Judgement (Il giudizio universale)

  This De Sica and Zavattini experiment is structurally bold but scattered. Spreading a star-packed cast across short episodes built around… Read more →

• The Scientific Cardplayer (Lo scopone scientifico)

  Comencini draws a whole worldview out of a single recurring situation: a card table set up again every year. Rodolfo Sonego's script builds… Read more →

• The Third Generation (Die dritte Generation)

  Fassbinder does not just write the script here; he also serves as his own cinematographer, and the film's deliberately scattered, layered… Read more →

• The Tiger of Eschnapur (Der Tiger von Eschnapur)

  This film should be thought of not on its own but as one half of a two-part whole with Das indische Grabmal; as the first part, its main… Read more →

• The Truce (La tregua)

  Rosi's last film faces the difficulty of bringing a source with the literary weight of Primo Levi to the screen. Levi's account of his… Read more →

• The White Princess

  A political marriage that begins in hostility is a highly productive dramatic core for a costume drama: the conflict is built in, and the… Read more →

• Ömer the Tourist in Star Trek (Turist Ömer Uzay Yolunda)

  It is easy either to take Turist Ömer Uzay Yolunda seriously or to sneer at it; the interesting thing is to stand between the two. As a… Read more →

• Hope (Umut)

  With Murat Aslan as director and sole writer, the film has the potential for a personal coherence. But the structure of the story is… Read more →

• My Prostitute Love (Vesikalı Yarim)

  Vesikalı Yarim became a classic because it uses the conventions of Yeşilçam melodrama while transforming them through film language. In my… Read more →

• Violent Rome (Roma violenta)

  Marino Girolami doesn't invent the genre's rules, but he applies them tightly: a hard, realism-minded atmosphere of violence and a… Read more →

• The Double Life of Véronique (La Double Vie de Véronique)

  Kieślowski's daring is in the structure: the first third of the film belongs to one woman, then the story starts again almost from scratch… Read more →

• War of the Buttons (La Guerre des boutons)

  Yves Robert's most striking decision is to cast the children's roles largely with inexperienced young actors. Avoiding the artificial… Read more →

• Watch Out, We're Mad! (...altrimenti ci arrabbiamo!)

  Fondato's film shows the Spencer and Hill formula in almost pure form: a small injustice, a threat that boils down to "or else we'll get… Read more →

• What to do in case of fire? (Was tun, wenn’s brennt?)

  Gregor Schnitzler tries to fit comedy, action and drama into one film, and the real test is whether that mix holds its balance. The time… Read more →

• Heart Wound (Yürek Yarası)

  Yürek Yarası lines up the familiar building blocks of Yeşilçam melodrama, the abducted girl, the indebted father and the love triangle with… Read more →

• 35 Shots of Rum (35 rhums)

  You can feel how strongly Claire Denis draws on Ozu, and that is both the film's strength and its limit. The moment a father and daughter… Read more →

• A Bullet for the General (Quién sabe?)

  Quién sabe? is one of the early films that turned spaghetti-western conventions into a political argument, and its strength lies in how the… Read more →

• A View of Love (Un balcon sur la mer)

  Nicole Garcia builds her romantic mystery out of flashbacks to childhood and sets the children's play Iphigénie inside the story like a… Read more →

• Alphonse

  Written and directed by Nicolas Bedos, Alphonse stands apart from most platform series by carrying a single creator's voice. Its ambition… Read more →

• An Average Little Man (Un borghese piccolo piccolo)

  Monicelli's achievement here is bringing the wry language of commedia all'italiana together with the dark tone of psychological drama and… Read more →

• Black Sunday

  Black Sunday is a typical product of the plot-driven political thriller tradition of the 1970s; that co-writer Kenneth Ross had previously… Read more →

• Bye Bye Germany (Es war einmal in Deutschland...)

  Garbarski tries to hold drama and dark comedy in the same frame, and that balance is, to my mind, both the film's appeal and its weak spot.… Read more →

• Block C (C Blok)

  Written, directed and produced by Demirkubuz himself, this debut rests its dramatic structure on a single breaking point: Tülay finding her… Read more →

• Callas Forever

  Zeffirelli's last film reads like a tribute to a friend he worked with on stage, and that defines both its sincerity and its limits.… Read more →

• A Matter of Life and Death (Can Pazarı)

  Carrying two directors' names and two countries' backing seems to partly explain Can Pazarı's scattered structure. Erdoğan Tünaş's script… Read more →

• Can Tertip

  The film combines three parts of a familiar formula: two characters with nothing in common, a road-movie structure and an angry commanding… Read more →

• Paradise (Cennet)

  Cennet chooses to tell a psychological drama largely through dream and fantasy sequences, and therefore through visual effects, an… Read more →

• Chouchou

  Chouchou uses every tool of popular French comedy and draws most of its strength from its lead. Gad Elmaleh co-wrote the part that earned… Read more →

• Crimen

  Crimen brings commedia all'italiana players such as Alberto Sordi, Vittorio Gassman and Nino Manfredi together in a single murder farce… Read more →

• Dabbe (Dab6e) (Dabbe 6)

  For a series on its sixth entry, the real question is how to refresh the formula. Karacadağ's answer is an approach critics described as… Read more →

• Reyhan (Dağlar Kızı Reyhan)

  Erksan made far more ambitious films, but Reyhan is an interesting case for seeing how he handled popular melodrama. The script by Bülent… Read more →

• Detective

  Détective uses the crime-film template as a skeleton and piles literary, musical and cinematic quotations on top of it, layer by layer.… Read more →

• Don't Look Back (Ne te retourne pas)

  Marina de Van's boldest move is splitting Jeanne between two actresses, Sophie Marceau and Monica Bellucci. In a story about identity and… Read more →

• The Jinn (El-Cin)

  With El-Cin, Hasan Karacadağ, known for home-grown horror like Dabbe and Semum, continues that line through the world of the jinn, bringing… Read more →

• My Favourite Fabric (Mon tissu préféré)

  Gaya Jiji's debut feature tries to render a woman's inner world in Damascus on the brink of war in a surreal register, and its selection… Read more →

• Eşrefpaşalılar

  Bringing to the screen Burak Tarık's play, drawn from his own life and long performed on stage, holds a trap as well as an advantage. The… Read more →

• Flavia the Heretic (Flavia, la monaca musulmana)

  Flavia comes out of the nunsploitation current, which exploited convents through eroticism and violence, but Mingozzi's film carries an… Read more →

• Whomever the Heart Loves (Gönül Kimi Severse)

  With Asaf Tengiz as both writer and director, the film contains an interesting structural experiment: it sets real match footage inside a… Read more →

• Goodbye Berlin (Tschick)

  Fatih Akın balances the weight of adapting a best-selling novel printed in thirty countries with the lightness of the road-movie form.… Read more →

• Beautiful Driver

  Güzel Şoför plays honestly with the conventions of melodrama, but to today's eye those conventions show too plainly. Turns such as luck… Read more →

• Happy-Go-Lucky

  Mike Leigh's improvisation-based method faces its toughest test here: carrying a relentlessly cheerful character through a whole film… Read more →

• Headwinds (Des vents contraires)

  Adapted from Olivier Adam's novel, Headwinds is a drama built around an absence, and it faces the hard test of such films: what do you fill… Read more →

• Holy Lola

  Rather than forcing adoption into a classic dramatic mould, Tavernier shows it step by step with almost documentary patience: tests… Read more →

• Incendies

  Bringing a stage play to the screen, Villeneuve frees it from the theatre and turns it into a journey film built on a mystery. The notary's… Read more →

• India Song

  India Song's real subject may be cinema itself. By building sound and image as two separate films, Duras breaks the usual identification… Read more →

• Indochine

  Indochine uses every tool of the big-budget European period film: a wide time span, grand locations, and cinematography and production… Read more →

• Innocents with Dirty Hands (Les Innocents aux mains sales)

  Here Chabrol returns to his favourite material: betrayal and guilt in a well-off setting. His strength is generating tension less from… Read more →

• Rootless (Köksüz)

  Köksüz picks a bold focus for a debut: grief is handled less through plot than through roles shifting inside the home. The director's own… Read more →

• La Chèvre

  La Chèvre's real value is that it brought Pierre Richard and Gérard Depardieu together for the first time and laid down the skeleton of… Read more →

• Turkish Passion (La pasión turca)

  Aranda's film carries both the advantage and the risk of adapting a widely read novel together with its author: how far it achieves a truly… Read more →

• The Suspended Step of the Stork (To meteoro vima tou pelargou)

  The film that opens Angelopoulos's border trilogy turns the director's slow rhythm into a tool for thinking. Treating the border not just… Read more →

• Libera, My Love (Libera, amore mio...)

  Bolognini's most striking choice is to cut Libera and Matteo's dramatic moments together with documentary footage of the period. The method… Read more →

• Be Kind Rewind

  The strongest thing about Be Kind Rewind is that it makes love of cinema the subject of the story itself: remaking Ghostbusters, RoboCop… Read more →

• Malina

  Schroeter's Malina is less interested in telling a story in the classical sense than in staging the inside of a consciousness, which is why… Read more →

• Nasreddin Hodja and Timur (Nasreddin Hoca ve Timurlenk)

  Although the title puts the Hodja and Timur side by side, the script's centre of gravity is the feud with the judge in Akşehir, which… Read more →

• You Can't Win 'Em All

  Peter Collinson's film tries to fuse a war picture with a buddy comedy, and in my view the blend does not always work. The contrasting… Read more →

• Police Python 357

  Corneau's approach is intriguing: he takes Kenneth Fearing's 1946 novel The Big Clock, blends it with his own childhood experiences and… Read more →

• Press

  A bold debut feature for Sedat Yılmaz. With the same person writing, directing and editing, the film has a consistent language: choosing a… Read more →

• Roseanna's Grave

  Roseanna's Grave sets a heavy subject, death, inside a small-town comedy and keeps its ambitions modest from the start. Three empty plots… Read more →

• Sanctuary (Freistatt)

  Brummund chooses to tell his material without turning it into sensation; the oppression is built less through individual acts of violence… Read more →

• Sarfarosh

  What lifts Sarfarosh above a routine police thriller is the work behind the script: the years of research show in the solid, step-by-step… Read more →

• Time to Love (Sevmek Zamanı)

  Erksan's film is a rare and daring attempt in Turkish cinema to make falling in love with an image its subject. The real subtlety lies in… Read more →

• Sijjin 2 (Siccîn 2)

  The film's most interesting feature is that it builds its horror on grief. A couple who have lost their child and become strangers under… Read more →

• Sleepless Night (Nuit blanche)

  Frédéric Jardin's film is a tight genre exercise that squeezes its story into a single night. Its structural strength lies in making the… Read more →

• Taare Zameen Par

  Aamir Khan's first outing as director builds a classic but effective structure that puts the teacher-pupil bond at the centre of an… Read more →

• Tintin and the Golden Fleece (Tintin et le Mystère de la Toison d'or)

  The film's biggest gamble is putting the comic's famous faces onto real actors through make-up. That kind of look-alike approach walks a… Read more →

• The Apartment (L'Appartement)

  L'Appartement may be Gilles Mimouni's first feature as director, but it is ambitious in structure: once Max sets off after a woman he… Read more →

• The Boss of It All (Direktøren for det hele)

  The real subject of The Boss of It All may be its method rather than its story. In the system von Trier calls automavision, a computer… Read more →

• The Conspirators (Nell'anno del Signore)

  Luigi Magni tells a historical drama with a crowded cast of major Italian stars: Nino Manfredi, Alberto Sordi, Ugo Tognazzi and Claudia… Read more →

• The Diary of Anne Frank (Das Tagebuch der Anne Frank)

  Hans Steinbichler and screenwriter Fred Breinersdorfer face one of literary adaptation's hardest problems: turning an inward-looking diary… Read more →

• The Pizza Triangle (Dramma della gelosia (tutti i particolari in cronaca))

  Scola wrote the film with the celebrated duo Age & Scarpelli, and the partnership shows throughout: a comedy that plays with the… Read more →

• The Priest's Wife (La moglie del prete)

  Dino Risi's La moglie del prete carries the commedia all'italiana knack for hiding sharp satire under a light surface. Bringing Sophia… Read more →

• The Spy

  Telling a life whose ending history has already written means building tension from character rather than plot, and Gideon Raff's series… Read more →

• The Stranger's Hand

  A film born from an unfinished Graham Greene draft raises expectations from the outset, and the source itself is almost a literary joke… Read more →

• The Unvanquished (L'Insoumis)

  Cavalier's own screenplay starts from a real kidnapping and carries the film noir template into the political shadow of the Algerian War, a… Read more →

• The Way Back

  The film keeps the escape itself short and puts its weight on the journey; the route from Siberia through Mongolia and the Gobi is the… Read more →

• Everybody Knows (Todos lo saben)

  Farhadi's strength has always been watching the relationships an event exposes rather than the event itself, and here too the kidnapping is… Read more →

• War of the Robots (La guerra dei robot)

  War of the Robots is a typical example of the low-budget Italian space operas that tried to follow the road Star Wars opened. Brescia… Read more →

• Ya Ya Ya Sha Sha Sha (Ya Ya Ya Şa Şa Şa)

  Gökhan Akçura's script tries to carry two films at once: a neighbourhood comedy on one side, a drama of the fall that fame brings on the… Read more →

• Flying Home

  Deruddere, who both wrote and directed Flying Home, leans on one of romantic comedy's most familiar moulds: an ambitious city man goes to… Read more →

• 2019, After the Fall of New York (2019 - Dopo la caduta di New York)

  The film was made under the influence of John Carpenter's Escape from New York, and that influence can be felt at every step. It is a… Read more →

• 3 Idiots

  The structure that cuts between two timelines is cleverly built: the present-day search gives the campus years a frame of curiosity and… Read more →

• Absurd

  The first distinction to make with Absurd is this: when a film's fame comes from censorship cases, you have to ask separately what it is… Read more →

• Her Name Is Vasfiye (Adı Vasfiye)

  The film's real daring lies in its narrative structure. Each man who knew Vasfiye tells her story differently, and by never reducing her to… Read more →

• Ali Baba and the Seven Dwarfs (Ali Baba ve Yedi Cüceler)

  Cem Yılmaz's fourth film as writer-director drew 540,000 viewers in its first three days, topping the opening of his previous film, Pek… Read more →

• Relentless Road (Amansız Yol)

  It is no surprise that Ömer Kavur cited Wim Wenders as an influence: Relentless Road is a road movie that uses the road not just as a… Read more →

• Goddess of Love (Aşk Mabudesi)

  The script, co-written with Bülent Oran, turns every gear of the genre in order: a jealous ex-fiancée, a doctored suicide letter, an… Read more →

• The Shirt of Flame (Ateşten Gömlek)

  Written and directed by Muhsin Ertuğrul, this production deserves to be read today more as a document of film history than as an object of… Read more →

• Attack of the Robots (Cartas boca arriba)

  The film's most interesting idea is a script that inverts Eddie Constantine's familiar tough-agent image and turns him into a clumsier… Read more →

• Dumb Cousins (Avanak Kuzenler)

  The film rests on a single joke: three men who take themselves for a matinee idol, an inventor or a Valentino, colliding with reality. An… Read more →

• Babek (Babək)

  Born of a partnership between Azerbaijanfilm and Mosfilm, the film carries the scale and ambition of the Soviet historical epics of its… Read more →

• Ballermann 6

  With award-winning cinematographer Gernot Roll stepping into directing, one expects some visual ambition, but Ballermann 6 is above all a… Read more →

• Beau Travail

  Beau Travail is one of the rare films to show that a literary adaptation can be made with bodies rather than words. Moving Melville's Billy… Read more →

• Waiting for the Clouds (En attendant les nuages)

  After Journey to the Sun, Yeşim Ustaoğlu again turns to a story built on identity and belonging, but this time she centres not on large… Read more →

• Camille

  The biggest trap of the biopic is turning its subject into a saint. Boris Lojkine and Bojina Panayotova's script seems aware of it, making… Read more →

• Dante 01

  As Marc Caro's first film without Jeunet, Dante 01 faces an unavoidable comparison: one looks for the visual inventiveness of Delicatessen… Read more →

• Crazy Falcon (Deli Şahin)

  As a star's first attempt at directing, Deli Şahin raises an interesting question: does Cüneyt Arkın build a language of his own behind the… Read more →

• Dil Dhadakne Do

  Zoya Akhtar's starting point is clear: a more realistic sibling relationship set against Bollywood's overblown versions. The ship is an… Read more →

• Dil Hai Ke Manta Nahin

  Carrying a story drawn from the 1934 It Happened One Night into the moulds of mainstream Hindi cinema is an interesting experiment. The… Read more →

• Dolmen

  Dolmen's strongest card is its setting: a craggy island off Brittany naturally provides the closed world the mystery genre needs and… Read more →

• Beyond the Hills (După dealuri)

  Known for 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, Mungiu again chooses a distant, patient style that leaves judgement to the viewer. The Cannes… Read more →

• Dying of the Light

  This film is interesting less as a work than as the record of a dispute. Schrader wrote and directed it but did not have final cut; the… Read more →

• Ejareh-Nesheenha

  Written and directed by Dariush Mehrjui, the film aims at the hard balance of ensemble comedy: keeping many characters gathered in one… Read more →

• Ghulam

  What makes Ghulam interesting is how a story drawn from Elia Kazan's On the Waterfront is translated into the language of Hindi popular… Read more →

• Goliath and the Vampires (Maciste contro il vampiro)

  Goliath and the Vampires is regarded as one of the best examples of the fantastic peplum, and the reason is how boldly it mixes genres… Read more →

• Gunfight at Red Sands (Duello nel Texas)

  Today this film is remembered above all as a footnote in music history: the first western scored by Ennio Morricone. That alone is reason… Read more →

• I Love You All (Je vous aime)

  Claude Berri's film is built on Alice recalling her past relationships on a Christmas evening, and that framing device brings both function… Read more →

• Two Women (İki Kadın)

  Yavuz Özkan's film, rather than building a political scandal as a thriller or courtroom drama, puts its weight on the relationship between… Read more →

• Rebel (İsyan)

  Sadık Şendil's screenplay lines up familiar pieces of the period's village dramas, the agha, a love triangle, custom and honour, and ties… Read more →

• The Confession (İtiraf)

  İtiraf's greatest strength is how stubbornly it confines the story to Harun's point of view. The viewer watches a marriage collapse not… Read more →

• Julietta

  Julietta is a light vaudeville that has been likened to a glass of champagne, and lightness is the hardest tone for cinema to sustain… Read more →

• The Small Town (Kasaba)

  A startlingly mature visual language for a debut. The black-and-white images, long takes and time given over to landscape betray Ceylan's… Read more →

• Kokkinos Kyklos

  The most striking structural decision in Kokkinos Kyklos is rotating directors and writers from episode to episode. It is like running a… Read more →

• Rampage (Korkusuz)

  There is no discussing Korkusuz without the question of imitation: its plot and style borrow so heavily from Cosmatos's Rambo: First Blood… Read more →

• Birdman (Kuşçu)

  Vural Pakel both wrote and directed the film, and he loads the script heavily: revenge, atonement, father-son tension, an inheritance plot… Read more →

• Love on the Run (L'amour en fuite)

  Closing Truffaut's Antoine Doinel cycle, this film is an unusual farewell to a character journey spread across five films. Its nonlinear… Read more →

• Living & Dying

  A thriller built around characters trapped in a single location is a classic model, and in the right hands it could have produced a lean… Read more →

• Lola und Bilidikid

  Written and directed by Kutluğ Ataman, the film brings an identity drama together with an underground world in a realist idiom. Its… Read more →

• Luck By Chance

  Zoya Akhtar's debut looks at Bollywood from the inside without taking the easy route of simply mocking the industry; instead it builds a… Read more →

• Making Plans for Lena (Non ma fille tu n'iras pas danser)

  Following Love Songs and The Beautiful Person, Christophe Honoré turns to a tragicomic family drama and takes on the genre's hardest job… Read more →

• Manon 70

  Taking Prévost's 1731 novel Manon Lescaut as a loose starting point and moving the story to the late 1960s is a bold idea, and the 70 in… Read more →

• Massacre Time (Le colt cantarono la morte e fu... tempo di massacro)

  Given how few westerns Fulci made, this film is an intriguing stop on the road to his later horror work. The sense of darkness and mystery… Read more →

• Napoli velata

  Here Özpetek steps away from the emotional dramas he is best known for and moves towards the Italian giallo tradition. Joining a love story… Read more →

• Until I Lose My Breath (Nefesim Kesilene Kadar)

  In her first feature, Emine Emel Balcı deliberately avoids anything showy. Real locations in Bağcılar and Bayrampaşa turn the textile… Read more →

• The Teachers' Lounge (Das Lehrerzimmer)

  The smartest choice in The Teachers' Lounge is to tell a petty theft in the language of a thriller. The script needs no big events; each… Read more →

• On My Way (Elle s'en va)

  Emmanuelle Bercot deliberately uses Deneuve's star image as raw material: a former beauty queen whose glory days are behind her works as a… Read more →

• Once Upon a Time, Cinema

  Once Upon a Time, Cinema's great achievement is fitting its form exactly to its subject. A film about the history of Iranian cinema carries… Read more →

• Romantic (Romantik)

  Romantik's most interesting feature is its structure. The film first puts the audience on the hero's side and makes us want him to win the… Read more →

• Free Zone

  Gitai squeezes the road-movie template largely into the inside of a taxi and moves the region's tensions into the conversations of three… Read more →

• Silver Saddle (Sella d'argento)

  As the last of Fulci's three westerns and one of the final spaghetti Westerns produced by a European studio, the film invites a reading as… Read more →

• Cinderella (Sinderella Kül Kedisi)

  An adaptation that never strays from the familiar path of the tale, so anyone looking for narrative surprises will find little to discuss.… Read more →

• Our Crime Is Being Human (Suçumuz İnsan Olmak)

  Bringing a novel's inner world to the screen is never easy; the screenplay Erdoğan Tokatlı wrote with Mehmet Aydın has to lean heavily on… Read more →

• Tehran Taboo (Teheran Tabu)

  Rotoscoping here is not decoration but a solution. Keeping the real actors' movement while rebuilding Tehran from drawings and digital… Read more →

• The Celestine Prophecy

  The Celestine Prophecy shows how hard it is to film a book made of ideas. The novel's strength lies in the reader's own inner journey… Read more →

• The Dust of Time

  The Dust of Time is hard to judge on its own, because Angelopoulos conceived it as the middle part of a trilogy he never finished. His view… Read more →

• The Miracle of the Sargasso Sea

  Tzoumerkas's film refuses to settle into one genre: drama, thriller, horror and surreal elements are woven into the same story. It is a… Read more →

• The Psychic (Sette note in nero)

  The Psychic is a giallo that sits on the border of horror, yet it puts its weight on puzzle construction rather than blood. Its most… Read more →

• The Time That Remains

  Working from his father's diaries, Suleiman shrinks a huge history down to the scale of one family and one town. That choice sets the film… Read more →

• The Wolverine

  James Mangold's film tries something rare within the series: a character study treating the superhero as a man wrestling with guilt, alone… Read more →

• This Man Must Die (Que la bête meure)

  The screenplay Chabrol wrote with Paul Gégauff turns a crime novel published under the pen name Nicholas Blake into a study of grief and… Read more →

• Tidal Wave

  Before discussing Tidal Wave, you need to know which version you watched. The cut Roger Corman shortened, padded with new footage and… Read more →

• Murat of Tophane (Tophaneli Murat)

  Tophaneli Murat is an instructive example for reading Yeşilçam's production conditions. Two directors, two cinematographers and a… Read more →

• Hope and Glory

  Boorman's autobiographical film carries both the advantage and the risk of framing war through a child's imagination. The shifts in tone… Read more →

• A Long, Narrow Road (Uzun İnce Bir Yol)

  Written and directed by Tunç Başaran, the film sets up an ambitious premise mixing drama and fantasy: an ordinary homecoming that becomes a… Read more →

• Vengo

  Gatlif uses flamenco here not as decoration but as the backbone of the narrative; the song and dance scenes carry the plot's emotional… Read more →

• Vincent Wants to Sea (Vincent will Meer)

  Florian David Fitz writing the script and playing the lead gives the film a clear unity; the character feels as if he grew out of the text.… Read more →

• Yoko

  Adapted from a children's book, Yoko is a family film blending live action with animation, and it has to pass the usual test of such… Read more →

• When the Bell Rings (Zil Çalınca)

  Zil Çalınca is one link in an international format chain: the last version of the line running from Italy's Quelli dell'Intervallo to… Read more →

• The Visit (Ziyaret)

  With Kaya Ererez directing, producing and shooting the film himself, it comes from a single pair of hands, which is good reason to expect… Read more →

• 8 Women (Huit Femmes)

  Ozon drops any claim to realism from the start and turns that into a deliberate game: a single snowbound location, an entrance hall used… Read more →

• A Talking Picture (Um Filme Falado)

  Theatricality in Oliveira's cinema was first attacked as a flaw and gradually became a deliberate style; Um Filme Falado reads almost like… Read more →

• Pain Cannot Be Shared (Acılar Paylaşılmaz)

  What makes Acılar Paylaşılmaz interesting is Eser Zorlu pushing the family melodrama of the day towards a psychological, experimental… Read more →

• Anchor and Hope (Tierra firme)

  Marqués-Marcet's film chooses to walk the fine line between romantic comedy and drama, and that choice mostly pays off. The three-way… Read more →

• As If I Am Not There

  Wilson's film puts at its centre the responsibility of telling a story of wartime rape without sliding into exploitation, and takes its… Read more →

• Ator l'invincibile

  Ator is the product of a box-office opportunity rather than a film movement, and it makes no secret of it. Joe D'Amato acting as both… Read more →

• Road to the Moon (Aydede)

  Abdurrahman Öner did not just write and direct the film, he also edited it himself, which may be a clue to its looseness. The structure… Read more →

• Bebo's Girl (La ragazza di Bube)

  Comencini stays relatively faithful to the events of Cassola's novel while clearly changing its mood, and his key intervention is turning… Read more →

• Castle of Blood (Danza macabra)

  Assessing Castle of Blood means holding two facts together. On one hand it counts as a typical example of 1960s Italian gothic horror… Read more →

• Eden and After (L'Eden et après)

  This Robbe-Grillet film is less a story in the classical sense than an experiment in structure. Building the plot from Schoenberg's… Read more →

• Dangal

  The sports biopic has one of the best-known skeletons in cinema: talent is spotted, hard training follows, big tournaments come. And… Read more →

• Delhi Belly

  Delhi Belly's real claim lies in its language. The Hinglish mix, with most of the dialogue in English and the rest in Hindi, brings Akshat… Read more →

• Destroy All Monsters

  The ninth entry in the series, Destroy All Monsters is less a story than a gathering: bringing together on one screen every monster Toho… Read more →

• Django and Sartana Are Coming... It's the End (Arrivano Django e Sartana... è la fine)

  This film is best read as a portrait of a production system rather than of a director. Demofilo Fidani working under a pseudonym, even the… Read more →

• Everything Went Fine (Tout s'est bien passé)

  Ozon's most striking choice is to treat a subject as heavy as assisted dying in a tone that moves between drama and comedy. It seems chosen… Read more →

• Fanaa

  Fanaa takes its name from a Sufi concept meaning the annihilation of the self, which gives the film an ambition beyond melodrama: the idea… Read more →

• Far from the Madding Crowd

  Moving from his urban stories to Hardy's countryside was a bold leap for Schlesinger, and its biggest payoff is Nicolas Roeg's photography.… Read more →

• Flight from Ashiya

  The material from Elliott Arnold's novel tries to fuse adventure, drama and romance into one. That blend, common in large-scale productions… Read more →

• La Notte

  La Notte is one of the clearest demonstrations of why Antonioni left conventional storytelling behind. Instead of a plot, it follows the… Read more →

• Kill Them All and Come Back Alone (Ammazzali tutti e torna solo)

  In what is seen as the spiritual successor to his own heist western, Castellari leans the narrative almost entirely on action, and the… Read more →

• Gold

  Thomas Arslan's most interesting move is to pull the classic American western out of its own geography and point of view and rebuild it… Read more →

• Gridlocked

  Gridlocked stacks two old formulas: the buddy-cop template built on mismatched partners forced to cooperate, and the siege thriller set in… Read more →

• The Innocent (Günahsızlar)

  For an early production, what makes Günahsızlar interesting is how it puts music at the centre of the storytelling: Aziz Şenses in the folk… Read more →

• A Season in Hakkari (Hakkâri'de Bir Mevsim)

  Kıral builds a single season not out of big events but out of stillness and repetition; the place, under the weight of winter, becomes the… Read more →

• Hundra

  Matt Cimber's Hundra seems to owe its cult status largely to its unpretentious sincerity. A Spanish, Italian and American co-production, it… Read more →

• Two Lines (İki Çizgi)

  Selim Evci's first feature carries both the advantage and the limits of coming from the short-film tradition. The road-movie structure lets… Read more →

• Double Impact

  Double Impact uses the dual role not as a gimmick but as its reason for existing, and that is where it is really tested. Having one actor… Read more →

• Ishq

  Ishq opens every drawer of the masala formula at once: romance, family drama, action and a great deal of comedy share a single story. Indra… Read more →

• Jamón Jamón

  In Jamón, jamón Bigas Luna builds not a realistic love drama but a deliberately exaggerated theatre of symbols. Images such as ham, garlic… Read more →

• Jerichow

  Petzold takes the noir skeleton of The Postman Always Rings Twice and turns it into a spare provincial drama. That simplicity is both the… Read more →

• Immortal (Immortel, ad vitam)

  Immortal is a comics master's attempt to carry his own pages onto the screen, and its most interesting feature is also its most… Read more →

• Cold of Kalandar (Kalandar Soğuğu)

  Mustafa Kara's pursuit of realism runs through every choice in the film: non-professional actors, harsh conditions in the Black Sea… Read more →

• The Karadede Affair (Karadedeler Olayı)

  Found footage is not a cheap shortcut but a contract that demands discipline: why is the camera running, who is holding it, who assembled… Read more →

• Those Who Awaken in the Dark (Karanlıkta Uyananlar)

  It is no surprise the screenplay won at Antalya; by weaving the class conflict together with personal themes such as friendship and… Read more →

• La Cage aux Folles 3: The Wedding

  A change of director for the trilogy's final chapter makes it impossible not to ask where the series' spirit has gone. Georges Lautner… Read more →

• Les Vengeances de Maître Poutifard

  Starting from Mourlevat's children's novel, Pierre-François Martin-Laval builds a safe family comedy, and in my view that safety is both… Read more →

• Love Island (Otok ljubavi)

  Love Island is the first film by Jasmila Žbanić, a director known for war-themed work, to leave conflict out entirely, and to my mind the… Read more →

• Mademoiselle Chambon

  Brizé's strength is carrying what goes unsaid with real restraint: feeling builds less in dialogue than in glances, pauses and silences.… Read more →

• Miele

  Valeria Golino's first feature stands out for aiming to handle a hard subject without tipping into sensationalism. The script's smartest… Read more →

• My Best Part (Garçon chiffon)

  When a director writes himself into the lead, the camera can easily become the actor's mirror, and My Best Part runs that risk. In the… Read more →

• Omar

  Abu-Assad's smartest choice is to tell a political drama with the tools of the thriller. The cat-and-mouse game keeps the viewer inside the… Read more →

• One Day in Europe

  The common risk of anthology films is that the segments do not carry equal weight, and One Day in Europe does not escape it. Hannes Stöhr's… Read more →

• Wrestler (Pehlivan)

  Here Ökten places the familiar shape of the sports film, the curve that rises with every win, inside a social-realist drama. The victories… Read more →

• People in Luck (Les Veinards)

  An anthology of five sketches shared among three directors is open to unevenness by nature: even if the segments share a theme, pace, tone… Read more →

• Perfect Strangers (Perfetti sconosciuti)

  The strength of Perfect Strangers lies in a construction almost as spare as a stage play. A dinner, phones placed on the table and one… Read more →

• Psst (Pişt)

  On paper Pişt has a sound idea: a game that stages fear as therapy, with a real supernatural presence hidden inside the game. Few engines… Read more →

• Rabid Dogs (Cani arrabbiati)

  Rabid Dogs is an exception in Mario Bava's filmography on two counts. The first is form: the master of colourful horror builds a thriller… Read more →

• Rosewater

  As you might expect from a comedian's first film as director, Rosewater is strongest when it leans on irony: a comedy-show interview… Read more →

• Bewildered (Şaşkın)

  Şaşkın's most interesting move is trying to cross a familiar romantic-comedy setup with a serial-killer story. A search for love sparked by… Read more →

• What Wouldn't a Lover Do? (Seven Ne Yapmaz)

  Erdoğan Tünaş's screenplay, adapted from Kerime Nadir, sticks to the familiar skeleton of the period's romantic melodramas: separation, an… Read more →

• Shaft's Big Score

  The film's most interesting side is behind the camera: when Isaac Hayes turned down the offer, Gordon Parks composed and performed the… Read more →

• Simple Passion (Passion simple)

  The heart of the story is less a plot than a state of mind: waiting, and an obsession that keeps growing. Bringing material like that to… Read more →

• Skin Deep (Aus meiner Haut)

  Skin Deep uses the body-swap idea not as a science-fiction gimmick but as a lens on a relationship drama, and that choice sets it apart… Read more →

• Talaash: The Answer Lies Within

  Reema Kagti and Zoya Akhtar's script weaves a murder investigation into a story of grief, bringing the neo-noir mould into the Indian… Read more →

• Ten Days' Wonder

  The real curiosity of Ten Days' Wonder is its cast: bringing together performers from traditions as different as Welles, Perkins and… Read more →

• Terror Beneath the Sea

  Terror Beneath the Sea is a typical product of sixties Japanese genre cinema reaching for the international market, trying to melt science… Read more →

• The Secret Garden

  Holland's adaptation gives a children's classic a dignified tone without falling into the trap of a sugary fairy tale. The contrast between… Read more →

• The Vourdalak (Le Vourdalak)

  Debut films often try to say everything at once; Adrien Beau picks a single setting and a single mood and stays faithful to them. Shooting… Read more →

• The Wax Mask (M.D.C. - Maschera di cera)

  The story of The Wax Mask lives in the shadow of its off-screen story. Taking over after Fulci's death, Stivaletti, fittingly for a… Read more →

• Child of Taurus (Toros Çocuğu)

  Having the novelist Şevki Yazman write the screenplay himself cuts both ways for an adaptation. It guarantees fidelity to the text, but a… Read more →

• Tough Enough (Knallhart)

  Buck's best decision is locking the story to a teenager's point of view; Michael's step-by-step pull into a world he does not know draws… Read more →

• Trepalium

  Trepalium's dystopia rests on one of the genre's most literal metaphors, an actual wall separating the wealthy from everyone else. That… Read more →

• Two Men in Manhattan (Deux Hommes dans Manhattan)

  What makes Two Men in Manhattan most interesting is that it is the only one of his own films in which Melville takes the lead. With the… Read more →

• Grapes of Hope (Umut Üzümleri)

  The film's biggest test is the tone it chose for itself. The description "a very serious comedy" captures a structure in which drama and… Read more →

• Volt

  Tarek Ehlail uses the dystopian police template less as a thriller device than as a vehicle for a drama of conscience. The double… Read more →

• Will Our Heroes Be Able to Find Their Friend Who Has Mysteriously Disappeared in Africa? (Riusciranno i nostri eroi a ritrovare l'amico misteriosamente scomparso in Africa?)

  The script Scola wrote with Age & Scarpelli freely borrows the language of childhood adventure books and a Disney comic and turns it into… Read more →

• Before the Rain

  Before the Rain draws its real strength from its structure. Its three parts, Words, Faces and Photographs, look disconnected at first, and… Read more →

• Zip & Zap and the Marble Gang (Zipi y Zape y el club de la canica)

  Bringing a long-established comic to the screen, Óskar Santos leans on a proven formula: a strict institution that bans fun, a gang of… Read more →

• 1 Man, 1 Woman, 2 Children (1 Erkek 1 Kadın 2 Çocuk)

  The Turkish adaptation of Un gars, une fille, a format born in Canada, rests on an extremely bare structure: two characters, short scenes… Read more →

• 2020 Texas Gladiators (Anno 2020 - I gladiatori del futuro)

  This film is an instructive case for understanding how early-1980s Italian genre cinema worked: a low-budget post-apocalyptic story made in… Read more →

• A King Without Distraction (Un roi sans divertissement)

  Jean Giono adapting his own novel and producing the film himself explains its literary weight, and the title taken from Pascal announces… Read more →

• Across the sea (La Mer au loin)

  Saïd Hamich Benlarbi's decision to split the story into three chapters, each named for a main character, is the film's most interesting… Read more →

• God Is Generous (Allah Kerim)

  In script terms, Allah Kerim runs on a classic melodrama engine: a villain humiliated in front of his men and his plan for revenge. The… Read more →

• Amok

  The film's intent is clear and commands respect: to answer a witnessed injustice with cinema. But a risk common to films born of anger is… Read more →

• Hunting Time (Av Zamanı)

  Erden Kıral chooses to read the climate of fear left by the 1980 coup not through events head-on but through a writer's inner crisis, a… Read more →

• Voice of My Father (Babamın Sesi)

  The film's boldest move is the way it deliberately blurs the line between fiction and documentary: drawing on Zeynel Doğan's own family and… Read more →

• Honey (Bal)

  Honey completes the Yusuf Trilogy's backward journey through the poet's life, and that reverse chronology is the trilogy's most compelling… Read more →

• Barbara

  Amalric's Barbara deliberately breaks the biopic mould: instead of telling the singer's life, it settles into the world of an actress… Read more →

• Troublemaker (Baş Belası)

  Baş Belası applies the buddy formula of two opposite characters forced into partnership exactly as written: one a repentant composer… Read more →

• Bombay Talkies

  Four directors, four short films, roughly twenty minutes apiece: Bombay Talkies' strength and weakness both lie in that format. Karan… Read more →

• Both Sides of the Blade (Avec amour et acharnement)

  Adapting Christine Angot's novel together with Angot herself, Claire Denis turns a love triangle into a story stretched, as the original… Read more →

• Le Grand Voyage

  Ismaël Ferroukhi's debut fuses the road movie with generational conflict and makes smart use of the genre's strongest tool: shutting two… Read more →

• Changing Times (Les Temps qui changent)

  As one critic has noted, the film sits comfortably within Téchiné's line of stories where inner and outer journeys cross. The script's most… Read more →

• Children of Sarajevo (Djeca – Kinder von Sarajevo)

  After her Cannes prize-winner Kar, Aida Begić tells of the scars of war through a tight focus: the daily struggle of a pair of siblings.… Read more →

• The Mad Woman (Çıldıran Kadın)

  Film histories usually remember Çıldıran Kadın under a single heading: the first Turkish production to experiment with colour. That is an… Read more →

• Çöl

  The "mockbuster" label is enough to describe Çöl: it borrows its subject and some of its scenes from the 1975 film Jaws and makes no claim… Read more →

• Copilot (Die Welt wird eine andere sein)

  Five chapters spread over five years and a strictly subjective female viewpoint are the two decisions that shape the film's dramatic… Read more →

• Dhobi Ghat

  A multi-character structure in which four strangers' paths cross by chance is a favourite of art cinema, and a risky one: when it works… Read more →

• Dhoom 3

  Dhoom 3 is a striking example of the gap between critics and the box office: while reviews were mixed, it became the first Indian film to… Read more →

• Dil Chahta Hai

  Farhan Akhtar's debut feels like an experiment in how the sound and tone of mainstream Indian cinema could change. Being one of the first… Read more →

• DJ Ahmet

  The pull between a provincial life and a big dream is one of the most worn templates of the coming-of-age story: a kid growing up in a… Read more →

• Eastern Plays (Iztochni piesi)

  Kamen Kalev's debut makes no effort to hide its small budget, and in my view that is part of its strength. Finishing post-production on a… Read more →

• Exils

  Exils, which won Tony Gatlif Best Director at Cannes, is a road movie that leans on music and chance rather than a tight plot. In my view… Read more →

• Fuse (Gori vatra)

  Žalica's nod to Gogol's The Government Inspector is apt, because the film's spine is the same: a collective sham built around an important… Read more →

• Come Back (Geri Dön)

  Erdoğan Tünaş's script barely makes the conflict wait: Kenan confessing his feelings within days spends, right at the start, the slow… Read more →

• Halima's Path

  Telling a war drama not through frontline scenes but through a family's search for a missing body is a smart choice. Arsen Anton Ostojić… Read more →

• Fig Jam (İncir Reçeli)

  The most interesting layer of İncir Reçeli is that its hero is a television writer whose screenplays keep getting rejected: in telling the… Read more →

• The Trace (İz-Rêç)

  In his first feature, which he both wrote and directed, Tayfur Aydın starts from a short story by Yavuz Ekinci. The familiar risk of… Read more →

• Jo Jeeta Wohi Sikandar

  The comparison some sources draw with Breaking Away raises a fair question about originality: teenagers coming of age around an… Read more →

• White as Snow (Kar Beyaz)

  The most interesting choice in Kar Beyaz is squeezing the story into a single day and building it around lives that cross at the roadside… Read more →

• Mixed Kebab

  Guy Lee Thys, who also wrote the script, builds the triangle of love, family pressure and identity along a plain, honest line. Dialogue… Read more →

• Kickboxer

  Kickboxer is close to a textbook case of the revenge, reclusive master, punishing training and final bout template. That template is one of… Read more →

• The Little Lady's Driver (Küçük Hanımın Şoförü)

  The script relies on a ready-made device common in the romantic comedies of its time: a will with a hard condition and a game that forces… Read more →

• Late Shift (Heldin)

  Late Shift's structural choice is crystal clear: one late shift, one ward and a nurse around whom everything turns. Petra Biondina Volpe… Read more →

• The Demons (Les Démons)

  The first problem with assessing Les Démons is that there is no single film to assess. A gap of more than half an hour between a 79-minute… Read more →

• Love & Anarchy (Kärlek & anarki)

  Lisa Langseth's use of the half-hour format between romantic comedy and drama is clever: the short running time lets each dare be built as… Read more →

• Mafioso

  Mafioso's real achievement is its shift in tone: it approaches the Mafia with a smile and slowly lets that smile give way to darkness. A… Read more →

• Marjan

  Judging Marjan today is like reviewing a novel with pages torn out. The surviving fragments do not add up to a whole, and without knowing… Read more →

• Clouds of May (Mayıs Sıkıntısı)

  Ceylan keeping nearly everything in his own hands, from script to cinematography, from producing to editing, gives the film an almost… Read more →

• Corn Island

  Corn Island entrusts its story not to dialogue but to the season itself. Turning the soil, sowing corn, preparing for the harvest: the… Read more →

• Seven Days... Seven Nights (Moderato cantabile)

  Taking its title from a musical direction meaning moderately and in a singing style, the film announces from the outset that it will be… Read more →

• The Ottoman Lieutenant

  The gulf between an estimated budget of about 40 million dollars and takings of roughly 413,000 is not a measure of quality in itself, but… Read more →

• Paris Memories (Revoir Paris)

  Winocour's smartest decision is to build the attack not as a thriller set piece but as scattered fragments of memory. As the narrative… Read more →

• Piso Porta

  Piso Porta uses the familiar skeleton of the coming-of-age film: a loss, a new figure in the family and the pains of leaving childhood… Read more →

• Plato's Academy

  Plato's Academy turns a cramped neighbourhood of three shops and a dog into something close to a laboratory. The bet on whether the dog… Read more →

• Meant to Be (Prangalı Yarim)

  Two young people kept from marrying by feuding fathers is a pattern Turkish comedy knows inside out, and Prangalı Yarim makes no claim to… Read more →

• Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak

  Watched today, the film can feel familiar in places, but that is because so many romantic musicals that followed it took up its mould; such… Read more →

• Raakh

  What makes Raakh interesting today is the team behind the camera. As the Bollywood debut of ace cinematographer Santosh Sivan and editor A.… Read more →

• Rangeela

  Rangeela's place in film history comes largely from its music: being A. R. Rahman's first Hindi film with an original score, with the songs… Read more →

• Tel Aviv on Fire

  The clever idea behind Tel Aviv on Fire is to approach a heavy political reality through a soap opera. Rather than commenting on the… Read more →

• The Birthday Party (Histoires de la nuit)

  By building Mauvignier's novel as both drama and thriller, Léa Mysius has to manage two different rhythms under one roof: the sharp pace of… Read more →

• The Dreamlife of Angels (La Vie rêvée des anges)

  The film is a character study pitting two opposite temperaments against each other, and its full weight rests on the two leads. That they… Read more →

• The Embalmer (L'imbalsamatore)

  The Embalmer is a film in which Matteo Garrone builds a tight three-person triangle in the dark language of neo-noir, drawing tension from… Read more →

• The Man Who Lies (L'Homme qui ment)

  Robbe-Grillet's film is an experiment that makes distrusting the narrator the viewer's main job. The title sets the rule of the game from… Read more →

• The Man Who Sold His Skin (L'Homme qui a vendu sa peau)

  Kaouther Ben Hania puts an extremely strong metaphor at the centre: a man who has a Schengen visa tattooed on his back becomes both an… Read more →

• The Net 2.0

  The Net 2.0 borrows its name from the 1995 film but has no story link to it; it rebuilds a similar idea with new characters. That makes it… Read more →

• The Pod Generation

  The portable artificial womb is a premise tailor-made for satire, and Barthes keeps a smart distance by treating it in a romantic-comedy… Read more →

• The Woman Next Door (La Femme d'à côté)

  Truffaut's last serious film moves the fatal passion of the Tristan and Iseult legend into the ordinary middle-class homes of a provincial… Read more →

• Three Quarter Moon (Dreiviertelmond)

  A grumpy man softened by a child is one of cinema's most used templates, and Three Quarter Moon does not stray far from it; it is not hard… Read more →

• Turkish Passport (Türk Pasaportu)

  The film's strongest material is the words of the diplomats and survivors who lived through the period; testimony is one of documentary… Read more →

• Vampire Sisters (Die Vampirschwestern)

  Adapted from Franziska Gehm's bestselling book series, the film works from a screenplay that draws on several of the novels at once. Ursula… Read more →

• Xenia

  Xenia is a bold mix that tries to bind a road movie, a drama and a romance around a singing contest and Patty Pravo's songs. Panos H.… Read more →

• The Passenger (Yolcu)

  The classic risk of bringing a single-set play to the screen is on the table here as well: three characters, a closed-in station and a… Read more →

• Yor, the Hunter from the Future

  The most instructive thing about Yor is that it was first conceived as a four-part miniseries for RAI. Knowing that, it is easy to see why… Read more →

• The Swimmers

  Sally El Hosaini and Jack Thorne set a true life story on the frame of the classic sports biopic: obstacle, struggle, the big race. That… Read more →

• Zephyr (Zefir)

  Belma Baş's first feature, a thematic sequel to her short Poyraz, keeps the same minimalist sensibility: little dialogue, long takes and a… Read more →

• Letter from the Dungeon (Zindandan Gelen Mektup)

  The credits read almost like a textbook summary of the Yeşilçam production model: the actors' voices were supplied afterwards by separate… Read more →

• Painful Memories (Acı Hatıralar)

  Atıf Yılmaz sharing the director's chair with İreç Kadiri reflects the co-production's attempt to bring two film traditions together. The… Read more →

• Adam

  Maryam Touzani builds the film almost as a chamber drama: two women, a little girl, a bakery and a home. In such a confined space the… Read more →

• Scorpion Mustafa (Akrep Mustafa)

  Semih Evin taking on direction, script and production himself sums up the small-studio model of the period well: fast, economical… Read more →

• Amal

  Amal's script grows a small classroom conflict step by step into a test for a whole community, and that gradual escalation is the right… Read more →

• Anastasia

  The script's main capital is the tension of withheld information: Anastasia falling for Alexandros without knowing who he is sets up a… Read more →

• Big Man, Little Love (Büyük Adam Küçük Aşk)

  Written and directed by Handan İpekçi, the film rests on a strongly symbolic design: an authoritarian old judge and a stubborn little girl… Read more →

• Death in Sarajevo (Smrt u Sarajevu)

  Adapting Bernard-Henri Lévy's play, Danis Tanović confines the action to a single hotel and turns that constraint into an asset: the… Read more →

• A Dagger Fell into the Sea (Denize Hançer Düştü)

  Mustafa Altıoklar's first film uses Jean Genet's The Balcony not just as a backdrop but as a mirror that shapes its own structure: the… Read more →

• Ice Cream, I Scream (Dondurmam Gaymak)

  The nod to Bicycle Thieves is well placed: a cast drawn from local people, real locations and a stolen vehicle that sets the story going.… Read more →

• From Lips to Weapon (Dudaktan Silaha)

  Written and directed by Mehmet Aslan, the film uses the hidden-boss device as a mystery structure: as long as the boss's identity stays… Read more →

• Dreams

  Kurosawa's first solo screenplay in forty-five years, this anthology deliberately sets classical dramatic structure aside: what links the… Read more →

• Farha

  The film's defining formal choice is to limit its point of view to a single young girl. Rather than staging the great historical narrative… Read more →

• Storm (Fırtına)

  Shutting four people on a deserted island is fertile ground for character conflict in a confined space. Safa Önal's script brings two… Read more →

• Journalist (Gazeteci)

  Fuat Özlüer's script sets up a solid premise: getting to know a ring leader nobody dares approach through the eyes of a reporter chasing a… Read more →

• Future Lasts Forever (Gelecek Uzun Sürer)

  Özcan Alper does not take the easy route to meet the expectations that followed Sonbahar; he turns the road-movie template into a search… Read more →

• Gallipoli (Gelibolu)

  In an archive documentary the real cinema happens in selection and editing; the material Tolga Örnek distilled from more than seventy… Read more →

• Ghajini

  Ghajini takes a premise inspired by Memento and turns it into a mainstream revenge melodrama. Memory loss here is less a structural game… Read more →

• The Struggle for Life (Hayat Kavgası)

  Hayat Kavgası uses nearly every mould of Yeşilçam melodrama: the sister with a heart condition, the operation money that cannot be found… Read more →

• House M.D.

  The show's smartest choice is to build a medical drama like a detective story: each episode's mystery is an illness, and the interrogation… Read more →

• How I Ended This Summer (Kak ya provyol etim letom)

  Popogrebski inverts the chamber thriller with the openness of the Arctic: what hems the two men in is not a cramped room but a boundless… Read more →

• Hum Hain Rahi Pyar Ke

  What is interesting about Hum Hain Rahi Pyar Ke is how it translates Hollywood's Houseboat into the language of mainstream Indian cinema.… Read more →

• Free Man (Hür Adam)

  The classic trap of the biopic is turning the narrative into a string of stations in the ambition to fit a whole life in; Hür Adam stands… Read more →

• Between Two Bayonets (İki Süngü Arasında)

  Directed and shot by Şadan Kâmil, the film builds its narrative on Emine telling a doctor about her past, an ambitious structure for 1952… Read more →

• Fig Jam 2 (İncir Reçeli 2)

  The hardest question for a sequel is how it justifies its existence. Fig Jam 2 answers with an intriguing layer: Metin is a character who… Read more →

• Blood and Bullets (Kan ve Kurşun)

  Written and directed by Yavuz Figenli, the film rests on an interesting structural choice: the narrative loses its first hero halfway along… Read more →

• The Second Wife (Kuma)

  In his first feature Umut Dağ chooses not to fall into the melodrama trap. The subject could easily have become a shouting family drama… Read more →

• The Law of the Wolf (Kurt Kanunu)

  Bringing a Kemal Tahir novel to the screen means fitting a dense political backdrop and a large number of characters into a single film.… Read more →

• La criatura

  What makes La criatura interesting is less its provocative subject than what it turns that subject into. Eloy de la Iglesia does not leave… Read more →

• Melodrama

  The title puts the film's genre up front as a label, which can be read as İrfan Tözüm's intention to play knowingly with melodrama's rules.… Read more →

• A Matter of the Homeland (Memleket Meselesi)

  The premise is strong: a small insult snowballing is an ideal skeleton for a good black comedy. But striking the tonal balance between… Read more →

• Min Dît: The Children of Diyarbakır

  In his first feature, Miraz Bezar takes on the difficulty of telling a social issue through children's eyes: that viewpoint makes a strong… Read more →

• Muro: Damn the Humanist Inside (Muro: Nalet Olsun İçimdeki İnsan Sevgisine)

  Muro shows plainly how hard it is to move a character who shines in short scenes on a series to the centre of a feature film. The… Read more →

• Debt of Honor (Namus Borcu)

  Namus Borcu is the second Turkish adaptation of One-Eyed Jacks, after Dağların Oğlu, so the really interesting question is how a western's… Read more →

• Oflu Hoca’nın Şifresi 2

  Sequels are often caught between repeating what audiences loved in the first film and building a new story, and Oflu Hoca'nın Şifresi 2… Read more →

• Parthenope

  Sorrentino sticks to his familiar method here: moving the story forward through images and moods rather than plot. Tying decades of one… Read more →

• Defense (Savunma)

  The script's soundest idea is to hang the whole case on one concrete detail: a taxi ride that would have made a fast night-time return from… Read more →

• Selam: Bahara Yolculuk

  Selam: Bahara Yolculuk is a classic tale of sacrifice built around an idealistic teacher. Shooting in Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan gives the… Read more →

• Devil (Şeytan)

  Assessing Şeytan means assessing a copy rather than an adaptation: since most of its scenes were reshot one-to-one from The Exorcist, the… Read more →

• Should the Wind Drop (Si le vent tombe)

  Putting at the centre a foreign expert who must judge whether an airport can reopen is an original idea that uses a bureaucratic process as… Read more →

• Snow (Snijeg)

  In her debut Aida Begić chooses to convey grief not head-on but through the imaginary world the villagers have built. The approach gives… Read more →

• My Sweet Pepper Land (Tatlı Biber Diyarım)

  Hiner Saleem leans on a classic template to tell the story of a former peshmerga arriving in a tense border village and a teacher shunned… Read more →

• The Blue Caftan (Le Bleu du caftan)

  Maryam Touzani's direction trusts silence as a storytelling tool: looks, handiwork and place do more talking than dialogue. The tailor's… Read more →

• The Imam

  The film's problem is that it turns its lead character into a thesis rather than a person. Once Emre is designed as a figure who could… Read more →

• The Inner Life of Martin Frost

  The Inner Life of Martin Frost is an attempt to make real a film imagined inside a novel, and the idea is appealing in itself. Paul Auster… Read more →

• Lying Emine (Yatık Emine)

  Adapting a story by an established author for his first feature was an ambitious start for Ömer Kavur. Turning a short literary text by… Read more →