... You remain engaged but also find yourself wishing that all these many desperate pieces fit together more coherently.

| Jun 11, 2024

The directorial debut of French-Senegalese filmmaker Ramata-Toulaye Sy, this is one of those pictures to which the phrase “every frame a painting” might apply.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jun 7, 2024

In the end, Banel & Adama is most memorable when it forgets to push the story forward and wallows in the painterly, or allegorical, registers of its images.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Jun 3, 2024

Love blossoms and withers in a drought-stricken village in Ramata-Toulaye Sy's tragic, Shakespearean romance.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 23, 2024

While beautiful, the impression left by Banel & Adama is confusing.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Mar 11, 2024

A striking debut that puts Sy on the map as a purveyor of deceptively gorgeous visions that show flimsy desires at the mercy of the social, and literal, weather.

| Original Score: B+ | May 25, 2023

Banel & Adama is a distressingly searing love story that moves to its own rhythms, curiosities, impulses, and havoc for a shrewd picture of the heavy balance between loyalty to one’s community and devotion to each other.

| May 25, 2023

With its balletic choreography of performance and statuesque visual approach, Sy’s film is a work of remarkable composition.

| May 23, 2023

A stunningly conjured world in need of a sharper story.

| May 21, 2023

Wonderfully photographed and vehemently acted, the film is full of ideas that might perhaps go in a short film; it does not really deliver a narrative final act... Nonetheless, this is an impressive piece of work from a natural film-maker.

| Original Score: 3/5 | May 20, 2023

It’s a remarkable performance from Mane, who conveys the mutinous, deluded anger in a young woman who would bend the world around her to her will if she could.

| May 20, 2023

Sy’s film is a curious little fable, not quite fully formed in its final stages... But it’s a striking debut nonetheless, especially as it revolves, with graceful poetry around the inner experiences of such a curious, unknowable woman.

| May 20, 2023

In Ramata-Toulaye Sy's impressive debut, she’s saying we’re more than flesh and blood – and that if things are falling apart, we can still make sense of it because we’re storytellers.

| May 20, 2023