WATCH THE WORLD

Our goal is to open up the world to everyone through film. Everyone should travel if they can (the world is amazing), but it costs time and money which we don't always have. That's where FilmRoot comes in. We bring the world of films to your couch, so you can travel wherever you want to without the flight fees.

Use our World Map to find the best films from each country, choose a continent below to explore the best films from each continent, or simply scroll down to see our latest posts featuring films from around the world. Or, if you're up for a challenge, work your way up to the top of our Film Difficulty Rankings to become a World Film expert.

Latest Posts

Kuttey (India) – An Insult to Global Action Influences

By Sebastian Torrelio

A defiant cry: “For the Revolution!” An undramatic cut sharpening a wooden facade, a blade lifted, an obvious prop blood squirter, and suddenly – a face rested decapitated. Kuttey is at least somewhat consistent in such bland motifs and imagery being used to create no motivational action.

Bhardwaj’s metaphorical tale on the animalistic tendencies of our most low-down gruesome criminals spills itself over three different perspectives, a concurrent narrative of outer-Mumbai seediness broken down into one gang’s interaction with another, and then another, each on the hunt for some dogged on-the-move cash flow.

Edited like a child was let loose with the footage, Kuttey plays a plethora of the book’s tricks: music preempts slowdowns of action for no reason besides to make shootouts seem cool; characters often don’t seem to know why they have to enter dialog scenes when intuition gathers – it would be easier to move onto the next opportunity to confront someone over drugs and guns.

India’s obsession with displaced timeline stories cannot survive an era of filmmakers unwilling to contend with how to keep the storytelling structure interesting, aside from names, gore, song queues and a really pompous intermission break. An action one isn’t interesting when you’re pacing your camera this slowly, when there is so little interaction between targets on-screen hidden by slow pans to other foes shooting from offscreen. Ended again, of course, by the overly dramatic slow-mo.

The film’s central young couple, portrayed by Radhika Madan and Shardul Bharadwaj, stop the film dead in its tracks. Madan brings an unbridled level of perceived mischievousness not only for the crime-adjacent world her family and loved ones place her in, but for her own curious mind, a soul willing to steer the film into a risk-fraught location (read: sex and intrigue) above something spoiled by bullet cases and fake blood splatters. It’s meant to thematically appeal to a traditionally masculine audience yet somehow plays more like a channel flip on an old television set, the brutalist Kuttey unfurled as a more sensitive homestead tale.

If the grand message at play is that crime is indefensible, then maybe so much of the film, namely its resolution, shouldn’t be played with this much animosity. Kuttey doesn’t value its own stock of human emotions well enough to make any considerate plays of its web of characters, choosing instead to let them fall into the pulpy pile of warnings and conflict foreboding.

Seen at Cinemark 18 & XD, Los Angeles

Waltair Veerayya – Telugu Cinema Tackling the Unserious with Confidence

By Sebastian Torrelio

It is perhaps not the most original sentiment in the world to declare a Telugu blockbuster interesting for subverting its tone, audience & subject, yet Waltair Veerayya, the newest from Bobby Kolli, has a blast doing so in spades. Waltair (Chiranjeevi) is a smuggler, often apparently a fisherman, hired by state police to extradite Solomon Caesar (Bobby Simha), a drug kingpin wanted for the murder of a slew of local authorities. Waltair hunts Solomon using his veritible tricks of the trade library – including such tactics as, disguising oneself in the villain’s hotel, wearing extremely noticeable attire, and bumbling around an airport with the crew.

The trailer for Waltair Veerayya, which gives some semblance of how this concept is supposed to come across, is a never-ending barrage of action shots in various settings with our lead placed squarely in the middle, as if kicking his enemies off the barriers of the screen for nearly three hours. What the trailer doesn’t reveal is how disorienting Kolli keeps his layered gang novela: the initial sequence of Solomon’s entrance promises a brutal story of “the beast hunter” meeting his prey. What follows could not be more mistakable for a common Telugu comedy, our lead a scruffy, drunken weirdo making every inconceivably silly intention a happy accident for the trueness of law enforcement.

At its best, Chiranjeevi—an actor no stranger to notoriously strange cinematic environments, but digging himself well into a charismatically aged humor here—leads an ensemble that comes across as tried and practiced with the sort of genre-mixed kerfuffle Kolli wants to embrace. The baffling whiplash from playing pants-down-level punchlines smoothly into serious, spotlight-coordinated corruption busting should be a lot more strained than this, and Waltair Veerayya‘s first half might as well feel part miracle for not allowing the actors to fall into tonal abyss.

Post-intermission leaves a lot to be desired, a commonplace travel back in time to the roots of Waltair’s true enemy, and true origins, that rides action de résistance far more than the wholesomely juggled first half. Where boring plot characters are interjected for sustenance, an entirely jarring final minutes at least makes up for what Kolli seems to be going for – memorable accountability, in spite of wanting so earnestly to play out the class clown role for himself.

Seen at Cinemark 18 & XD, Los Angeles

Clara Sola (Costa Rica) – An Awakening from Conservative Christianity

Clara Sola Film Difficulty Ranking: 3

Clara Sola is one of two Latin American films from 2022 that had a memorably anti-colonialist ending. The other, Bantu Mama, features a French-African tourist turned fugitive in the Dominican Republic that escapes to sanctuary in Africa after feeling a connection to her African roots. Clara Sola follows Clara’s awakening as she frees herself from conservative Christianity to embrace the indigenous roots of her powers.

From: Costa Rica, North America
Watch: IMDb, JustWatch
Next: Alba, Thelma, Ixcanul

Clara Sola – The Breakdown

Clara is imprisoned by a purple flag marked boundary around the small house she lives in with her mother and niece in the remote Costa Rican countryside. She’s closely protected by her mother for her miraculous god-given powers, that were apparently bestowed to her by an apparition of the Virgin Mary. Her fame for healing routinely brings people from across the country to her house for her blessings, as well as much needed donations that seem to be the main source of income for the three of them. At the beginning, Clara is content to follow her mother’s lead, staying within the purple flagged boundary marked for her and taking part in the religious ceremonies she’s the main attraction of. However, the arrival of Santiago prompts a sexual awakening that reconnects her to the true nature of her powers.

Colors are present from the start in the purple flags flying on the poles marking Clara’s boundary. In the opening scene, she’s beckoning her white horse named Yuca, to come to her from the other side of the boundary line. The natural white color of Yuca signify freedom, whereas purple signifies Clara’s confinement. It’s notable that the only other time purple appears in the film is after Clara tries to dye her pink dress blue, to match the blue quincenera dress of her niece. She’s trying to break free from the conservative baby pink (and her babying mother) to experience the freedom of the attractive blue dress of her niece, but ends up stuck with the same purple that marks her restricted world. It’s a moment in which she realizes that no matter how much she tries to be like her niece, she’ll never be her. It sets in motion her wish to escape.

Colors also confuse Clara. She’s drawn to both artificial and natural colors, even though both aren’t leading her in the right direction. The artificial colors of her niece’s blue dress draw her to Santiago and a ‘normal life.’ She’s pictured in the dress in her happiest moments with Santiago. However, like the artificial lights illuminating her smile as she’s driven home by Santiago one night, the blue dress symbolizes an unsustainable happiness. She’s only truly free in the moments she’s with nature – with natural colors – whether that be the lights of the fire-flies, the white coat of Yuca, or the greens and blues of the trees and river. The nature accepts her and understands her. They allow her to be free unlike the family and community that imprison her physically and spiritually.

In breaking free from her family and community, Clara breaks free from the conservative Christianity that imprisoned her, the descendant of Spanish Colonialism. In returning to the forest, she’s returning to her indigenous roots.

What to Watch Next

For more Latin American coming of age films, try Alba and Aurora. The former follow a daughter living with her single dad trying to navigate the awkwardness of puberty and school. The latter follows a pregnant teenager that finds support in a teacher. You can also try Ixcanul, which follow an indigenous woman in Guatemala.

Or for a dark, magical coming of age story in the vein of Black Swan, try Joachim Trier’s Thelma.

Hero (South Korea) – The First Cinematic Adaptation of a Patriotic Musical

By Sebastian Torrelio

Jung Sung-hwa has led a historical charge forward in this role for a significant portion of his life thus far. Hero claims to be the first motion picture fully adapted in South Korea from a native Korean musical, Jung’s portrayal of nationalist Ahn Jung-geun transitioning alongside the source. He does take the liberties of transformation to heart with such a brutalist narrative – recreating the personal strokes that took Ahn through the final period of his life, leading into the assassination of Japanese Prime Minister Ito Hirobumi.

Songs string along the first half of Hero, inspirational operatic breaks that never coax the outlying direction too disruptively. Even so, some numbers arise organically into a splendid vigor more emotional than stage-play standards can suffice. One showstopping tune from Kim Go-eun’s Seol-hee, a ringer played from a lady-in-waiting’s heart, ushers a dark inner turmoil to an otherwise prosperous Japanese regime. Many of the musical’s segments resonate in patriotic uproars more energetic in their war-like definition than anything reminiscent of mid-century Broadway.

This largely complement’s Hero while it initially paces out character introductions within the resistance with sillier odes to the delicious nature of dumplings, and how unity can come at the hands of a warm reunion over rations. Though by film’s second half, political record overwhelms Yoon’s balance, tone and historical relevance wrying Ahn’s every action into plot-driven forcefulness.

The brutality of the circumstance is hard to overlook, especially for a picture that opens with sacrificial appendage-severing amid a musically-snowbound group pledge. Romance, comedy, drama and heart-struck drumbeats deal out with synchronicity, levity like a forward-marching parade navigating the plot’s inevitable coup d’etat direction by intoxicating overcompensation into emotional suffering.

At least Hero cannot speak to be too uninteresting or slow for such a direct-to-nationalism Korean anniversary effort. Imperialism portrayed as undercover scheme-brokering alongside musical courtroom trial pleas is not necessarily something that can be easily indulged from a one-off Netflix selection. Such consistency in the film’s thespian roots unfortunately cannot hold cohesively to a country wanting to invoke and demand so much of its theatrical devotees.

Seen at CGV Cinemas LA

Deleter (Philippines) – Social Media Musings Fail to Muster Maliciousness

By Sebastian Torrelio

Mikhail Red is at this point a public figure in the scope of Filipino cinema against the world. His latest, Deleter—sub-technological mystery horror and 2022 Metro Manila Film Festival Best Picture-winner—follows no tighter premise than the act of a haunted house’s outreach transformed into an office building’s Wi-Fi signal. Lyra (Nadine Lustre) works an outsourced job as a content moderator for a Facebook-esque website, constantly spending her few remaining sane hours wide-eyed against a computer screen, either passing or deleting through the gore, obscenities and disturbed cell phone clips that everyday citizens pick up, for innocent or malicious intention in equal.

Their task is to “handle data … not people,” as Lyra explains away for her friend Aileen (Louise delos Reyes), the only character of concrete stakes in the film. It makes sense – drag a role into the dark mentally, and the steps to embed them in darkness physically become smaller in turn.

The first act of Red’s modern thriller doesn’t seem to entirely know what to do with Lyra’s occupation anyhow, letting the scanned-through Internet play on its own tempo almost too seamlessly with the randomness of delight the Internet actually triggers. Most of her job, pre-dramatics, plays from a third-person angle as confusing, if not unintentionally humorous.

Not that Lyra’s view of social media is self-seriousness taken astray, more so that Red’s frame seems consistently imperfect, a beck and call to keep the digital world’s barrier into our own stable & threatening, but without the camerawork to persistently keep a hypnotized audience on the cusp of realism. Unlike recent postmodern breakthroughs, namely Jane Schoenbrun’s We’re All Going to World’s Fair, Deleter finds no rooted connection through the wiring, a sustained vibe of unrevealed horrors cut off by doldrums of meaningless white-collar task-mastering.

When the film’s final act is settled on its tracks veering toward the goalposts, the threatening aura of Red’s attempted sophisticated edge has whittled down a blunt stub. The last 30 minutes of Deleter, a repercussion of traumatic happenings that have surrounded Lyra’s life in the days prior, scurries into an oblique darkness – characters floating around the office building’s hallways to the willingness of intermittent red security lighting, every shot performed for set-placing without allowing the actors any presence within their own space. If actors are not given the occupied space to connect, life cut short via aerial camera becomes errant, death then in turn whimsical.

Seen at Cinemark Carson and XD