Timbuktu is filmed with the habitual class, sensibility and lyricism of this remarkable director [Abderrahmane Sissako]. [Full review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Jun 22, 2023

Some movies need time and distance to establish themselves and prove their greatness. 'Timbuktu' only needs 17 minutes to establish itself as a masterwork.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Oct 11, 2021

Timbuktu is a strong statement against the extreme Islamic militants who seem to take the moral high ground and impose their laws upon people they don't understand.

| Feb 21, 2021

Timbuktu, is a drama of political subtlety that, being brutally honest, develops a powerful moralistic discourse. [Full review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 9/10 | Jun 26, 2020

As the story of a cross-section of the people living under the occupation of misogynistic Islamist extremists, you might expect Abderrahmane Sissako's Timbuktu to be bleak . It's the opposite. [TOP 50 FILMS OF THE DECADE]

| Dec 4, 2019

Told with disarming simplicity, it's a story of terror that quietly emerges from stark beauty.

| Aug 8, 2019

This isn't a grand political statement; it's a whispered condemnation that carries with it a great and noble weight.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jul 5, 2019

Sissako cuts his searing social realism with significant doses of absurdist comedy and dreamlike beauty.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Jun 17, 2019

A beautiful drama fuelled by a sense of urgent and righteous anger. But there's sadness here as well as hope.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 5, 2019

A work of staggering dramatic and ethnographic lucidity: a crystal-clear ode to life in a harsh outpost of Mali, namely the northerly, desert-laden city of Timbuktu.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 10, 2018

Obviously made on a low, low budget with many non-actors, this is nevertheless often visually gorgeous and feels painfully real.

| Feb 28, 2018

Unfortunately, "Timbuktu" falls a little short when it tries to show resistance to the fundamentalists.

| Feb 16, 2018

Structural neatness is not simply an interpretive shortcut, but a token of Sissako's adroitness at pivoting between individual dramas and the overarching social and political systems to which they are so inextricably bound.

| Nov 13, 2017

For a century or more the name Timbuktu has been shorthand for an impossibly remote exoticism, at least to Western ears, but with clarity and compassion Sissako dissolves any barriers to understanding, and insists on common cause.

| Oct 11, 2017

Calling Sissako a brilliant filmmaker is an understatement.

| Mar 7, 2017

Timbuktu is a film that should resonate for a long time to come.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 19, 2016

A haunting warning cry from a great North African director about the jihadi invasion of Mali, Timbuktu is a message the rest of the world can't afford to ignore.

Full Review | Jun 28, 2016

Abderrahmane Sissako can no longer be called one of the greatest African directors of our time; he has become, simply, one of the greatest directors of our time.

| Original Score: B+ | Jun 6, 2016

Suffers from a certain reductionism with respect to the jihadists but then again that is to be expected in an epoch when Islam is a dirty word almost universally. Could have been better but still worth seeing.

| Mar 3, 2016

'Timbuktu' startles by acknowledging the humanity of jihadists, even as it tacitly condemns their dogmas and especially their violence.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Jan 25, 2016