Marshall Islands0:00/276.0321× I mentioned this film many posts back as the kind of thing I was hoping for from each country; the people of the Marshall Islands were unhappy that they hadn’t been represented on film. There were many things they could have done, but they
Iran0:00/290.4533331× There are two films here. The first is an astonishing technical tour de force, a 135 minute film shot in a single take, complete with flashbacks. How you can manage flashbacks within an uninterrupted take is something I never thought possible, but it’s done here,
Paraguay0:00/324.4161× The thing about thrillers is that they’re highly structured, or at least they should be. Things happen in thrillers that don’t usually happen in real life. Crucially, for a thriller to actually cohere, the separate elements of the plot all need to tie together
Batches 12 130:00/478.4426671× I'm writing this at the end of June. The blog has been live for a month now. After writing too far ahead at one point (I had seven weeks of posts scheduled to go live) I've reached a point where
Kiribati0:00/305.1306671× I started with four rules: 1) A country as defined by the UN. 2) A commercially released film which is feature length (as defined by the BFI). 3) “The film would need to be either made in the country of origin, produced in it or meaningfully
Eswatini0:00/289.5146671× The reason I’m favouring horror isn’t because I like being scared (although I freely admit that I do) but because extremes push us to show our real selves. Well, as much as narrative fiction can anyway. Buying a film from every country isn’t
Driven Copilot Mad Pt 10:00/424.5304311×Driven Copilot Mad Pt 20:00/566.4213331× I was talking about awkward films with Copilot (well, not awkward films, but countries for which films are proving awkward to acquire) and it said I'd probably struggle to find a film
Equatorial Guinea0:00/331.1573331× I should probably stop opening these pieces with “Now, I don’t know much about…” because it’s starting to make me sound unusually parochial, but in the case of Equatorial Guinea all I know is that it’s probably on the equator (and that’
AI AI Oh Pt 10:00/488.1706671×AI AI Oh Pt 20:00/501.7386671×Batch 110:00/80.4481× I find AI fascinating. That's partly because I grew up on classic science fiction (so I've always thought that machine intelligence was inevitable), partly because
Uruguay0:00/234.6453331× We're back on firm ground here: horror. The premise of The Last Matinee is initially extremely simple (locked in a cinema, the patrons watching a horror film are killed one by one) and the film opens with a lovely aerial tracking shot that follows
Vanuatu0:00/171.4986671× I’m trying to watch these films blind. I may have a vague notion of genre, but ideally that’s as much as I’ll know so that my reactions are uncoloured by expectation. For the most part it works, but if I’d known what
Lesotho0:00/187.1146671× You can never underestimate the importance of a title. There are whole teams in Hollywood who work with focus groups just to make sure that the title of the next blockbuster works. Or resonates, as they’re more likely to say. Vibes, probably. They’re titlemaxxing,