At only 68 minutes, “Dahomey” brims with plenty of perspectives on what the restitution of these ancient treasures symbolizes and the dicey political implications around it.

| Nov 5, 2024

A welcome companion to the rich textures and spirits of Diop’s lauded feature film, Atlantics, Dahomey offers itself as a site of essential reflection and a necessary reminder of the living poetics that cinema is capable of.

| Nov 4, 2024

The French-Senegalese film-maker ... has certainly not taken the conventional approach while pondering an increasingly contentious area of postcolonial discourse. But this remains a lucid piece of work that lays out its arguments in sharp fashion

| Original Score: 4/4 | Nov 3, 2024

Diop dutifully, powerfully, yet poetically captures the complexity of a colonizer’s undoing so that we all can bear witness to the start of a resolution -- or, at the very least, restitution.

| Nov 2, 2024

“Dahomey” packs a lot of introspection and heart into its brisk 68 minutes.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Nov 1, 2024

Diop borrows a classic Disney trope, straight out of Toy Story, to imagine the inner life of an inanimate artefact... It’s a captivating motif and allows Diop to highlight some sobering ideas within the rolling monologue.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Oct 31, 2024

At a time when many documentaries stretch into episode after episode, there’s something refreshing about one that doesn’t aspire to be all-encompassing... Dahomey is at once haunting and humble.

| Oct 30, 2024

Easily one of the best and most modestly brilliant piece of nonfiction filmmaking you’ll see this year.

| Oct 30, 2024

... The film takes on a dreamy quality that puts the immediate debates in cultural and temporal perspective.

| Oct 29, 2024

Disorientation awaits in the brilliant, bracing documentary Dahomey.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Oct 28, 2024

Its youth represents a bold, discordant, and exciting counterpoint — vital and engaged, looking toward a future they demand be better than the past.

| Oct 26, 2024

Diop takes a brisk yet thoughtful look at whether even antiquities can go home again.

| Original Score: B | Oct 25, 2024

Diop uses “Dahomey” as a form of cinematic activism, using the medium to force us to look closely at the past to craft a better future for oppressed people everywhere.

| Original Score: 3.5 | Oct 5, 2024

Diop’s film is so daring: On the surface, it’s about the physical markers of culture and history, but it’s made in such a way that we understand the items we see in museums are more than just records of something that happened long ago.

| Sep 8, 2024

Mati Diop’s captivating, fabulistic documentary Dahomey confronts the reality of how modernity has been shaped by the West’s theft of cultural heritage.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Feb 27, 2024

At just over an hour, Diop’s strange, captivating and rigorously intellectual film leaves a mighty impression well beyond its compact length.

| Feb 27, 2024

A question that deserves our attention, and the answers that emerge from it...

| Feb 27, 2024

It is an invigorating and enlivening film, with obvious implications for the Elgin/Parthenon marbles in the British Museum.

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

What is displayed in “Dahomey” is a country, a people, in fact, who are deciding the world they want to build and what tools they want to build with.

| Feb 20, 2024

The film avoids polemic and instead presents itself as informed and inquisitive blueprint for the ways in which we discuss anti-colonialist action.

| Feb 19, 2024