Filmgoers looking for something to explicitly counter August's summer movie exhaustion should get first in line for Makala.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Aug 24, 2018

Makala depicts a harsh reality, but its unexpected beauty comes from the nonchalance of its portrayal.

| Original Score: 8.8/10 | Aug 23, 2018

To ponder the colonial implications of a French director exoticizing a Congolese man whose family eats rats for meals is to realize that a movie can be heartwarming and heartless at once.

| Aug 23, 2018

Emmanuel Gras resists pitying or sentimentalizing his main subject, or exalting him merely for his resilience in the face of such a harsh, uncaring reality.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 22, 2018

Makala the film offers the kind of confrontational, truthful depiction of capitalism that ought to screen early and often in schools.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 5, 2018

This immersive, slow-burning documentary about a Congolese charcoal maker finds poetry in the punishing, monotonous graft of one man's trade.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Feb 4, 2018

The toil becomes mythical; there are heartbreaking echoes of The Old Man and the Sea as thieves run off with some of his hard-won cargo.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 2, 2018

Tough, tough going, but rewarding.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Feb 2, 2018

It is a sad and lonely world, sympathetically captured, beautifully photographed.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Feb 2, 2018

A stunning depiction of a life most of us will never experience. This is an incredible documentary which pushes the format to new heights of meaning and is ultimately extremely rewarding.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 1, 2018

Emmanuel Gras' camera embraces the subject's every move with such rapt intimacy and cinematic poetry it's easy to forget this is not a fictional drama.

| Jun 9, 2017

One of those sly, low-key films whose early scenes will leave you unsure whether you're watching a documentary or a drama marked by a docu-real aesthetic, Makala's depiction of back-breaking labor is as no-frills as the work itself.

| Original Score: B- | May 25, 2017

Interesting in a watch-at-home, National-Geographic-Channel sort of way ...

| May 24, 2017