226 featured critic reviews. Page 1 of 26.
★★★★½
Hidetoshi Nishijima and Tōko Miura in a red Saab — Uncle Vanya, a dead wife’s tapes, and the rare three-hour film that earns every silent kilometre. Cannes Best Screenplay, Oscar Best International Feature.
Essential — the 2020s Japanese film that made patience feel like plot.
★★★★☆
Toshiro Mifune’s shoe executive faces a ransom for the wrong child — a two-act masterpiece that turns a living room into a moral cliff and then into a police procedural.
Essential — still one of the best films ever made about money, duty, and a city.
★★★★☆
Takashi Shimura’s dying bureaucrat tries to mean something — a playground, a stack of forms, and still one of the most moving films ever made about wasted time.
Essential — a humanist landmark, not a homework assignment.
★★★★☆
Lee Young-ae plans thirteen years of retribution in the close of the Vengeance Trilogy — pastry, prison, and a moral geometry colder than Oldboy’s hallway.
Essential if you are walking the trilogy — a masterpiece of control, not of warmth.
★★★★½
A makeshift Tokyo household survives on theft and odd jobs until a neglected girl makes their love visible — and therefore prosecutable. Gentle, devastating, unforgettable.
Essential — the Japanese film of the 2010s, and Kore-eda’s peak.
★★★★☆
Kim Yun-seok’s dirty ex-cop chases Ha Jung-woo’s killer through Seoul in something close to real time — the Korean crime film that still feels like a panic attack.
Essential Korean thriller — brutal, precise, and not for the faint-hearted.
★★★★☆
Ritesh Batra, Irrfan Khan, and Nimrat Kaur — a mistaken dabba becomes one of Indian independent cinema’s great epistolary romances, and a Cannes Un Certain Regard breakout.
Essential — the Hindi film to show someone who thinks Bollywood is only stadiums.
★★★★☆
Haluk Bilginer as a retired actor who owns the rooms and the arguments — a 196-minute moral weather system, and still the peak of contemporary Turkish cinema on Celluloid.
Essential for anyone who wants Turkish cinema beyond the popular comedies — demanding, and worth it.
★★★★☆
2026’s Korean action export proof-point — Agent Kim Reactivated put So Ji-sub atop Netflix’s global non-English Top 10, extending K-drama’s streaming dominance beyond romance. Kaiser Khan’s Celluloid review covers scores, cultural scale, and where Agent Kim Reactivated sits among South Korea and global streaming hits.
Recommended South Korea drama — Agent Kim Reactivated matters for K-drama action thriller topping Netflix global non-English charts.