Calling Sissako a brilliant filmmaker is an understatement.

| Mar 7, 2017

It's skilful, sardonic, honourably humane. Are those qualities, today, enough?

| Original Score: 3/5 | Dec 30, 2015

Sissako, who always has balanced his social conscience with a stridently comic sensibility, frames the Islamists as figures of fear, but also of mockery.

| Dec 30, 2015

For a film that makes you sick with dread, Timbuktu has a light, at times glancing touch.

| Dec 30, 2015

What makes it so unusually compelling as a protest film is that it's also a richly poetic work of cinema - witty, beautiful and even, sobering though it is, highly entertaining.

| Original Score: 5/5 | May 31, 2015

This is a film in which small pieces stand in for a daunting and horrifying whole.

| May 29, 2015

What we end up with is a film that adeptly meshes political anger with strong traditional narratives.

| Original Score: 4/5 | May 29, 2015

A film that's guaranteed to resonate for years to come.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | May 29, 2015

Seldom has a film about a subject as grim as this been so generous in its sympathy not just for the victims of a brutal system, but also the oppressors, often confused befuddled souls, who know not what they do.

| Original Score: 4/5 | May 28, 2015

There are few filmmakers alive today wearing a mantle of moral authority comparable to that which Sissako has taken upon himself, and if his film has been met with an extraordinary amount of acclaim, it is because he manages to wear this mantle lightly.

| May 28, 2015

It has some of the same comic absurdism that ran through Chris Morris's Four Lions, but the satire is combined with lyricism and a sense of mounting tragedy.

| Original Score: 5/5 | May 28, 2015

Abderrahmane Sissako watches as traditional life, in harmony with a beautiful landscape, is destroyed by the invaders' rules and Sharia.

| Original Score: 4/5 | May 28, 2015

Sissako creates an interrelated series of characters and tableaux giving us scenes from the life of a traumatised nation.

| Original Score: 4/5 | May 28, 2015

Exceptional human filmmaking.

| Original Score: 4/5 | May 25, 2015

Director Abderrahmane Sissako, a Muslim from neighboring Mauritania, has made a movie that is worthy of comparisons on several levels to Terrence Malick's wheat-field tragedy "Days of Heaven."

| Original Score: 4/4 | Mar 19, 2015

The performances are hushed and memorable. Cinematographer Sofian El Fanicaptures the beauty of this desert land. Amine Bouhafa's score is its own act of gorgeous grace and defiance.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Mar 13, 2015

The film is a magnificent document of secular humanism.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 6, 2015

Even though the atrocities committed by radical jihadists dominate the headlines and airwaves, few in the West know what it's like to live under their reign. Timbuktu...is a moving, haunting and beautifully shot peek behind the closed cultural curtain.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Feb 26, 2015

This is the clash of ancient and modern, of rulers and ruled, of rabid dogma and the joys of daily life. It is a portrait of the ugly folly of imposed ideology, a too-common condition for far too many.

| Original Score: A | Feb 20, 2015

A transcendent political poem as intellectually rigorous as it is beautiful.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Feb 20, 2015