The review shelf
Full criticism from the entertainment desk: 14 films reviewed on four published axes, with the score shown as the average of the axes - no mystery numbers. The method is public; new reviews land as the desk finishes them, and every review is dated.
- Timbuktu (2014) ★ 8.75/10 — Occupation filmed as elegy: cowherds, banned music and a football match played without a ball — the gentlest fury in modern African cinema.
- Yeelen (Brightness) (1987) ★ 8.75/10 — The film that made world cinema treat African cinema as cinema: Cissé's creation-epic duel is a masterclass in severity, light and refusal to explain itself.
- Moolaadé (2004) ★ 8.5/10 — Asylum as a verb: the last Sembène turns a village dispute into a courtroom drama about who owns tradition — and lets the women hold the gavel.
- Atlantics (2019) ★ 8/10 — The crossing told from the shore it left: migration cinema rebuilt as a ghost story, with the sea as both monster and archive.
- King of Boys (2018) ★ 8/10 — A godmother tragedy in Lagos colours: stage-bound, operatic, and anchored by a lead performance that simply dares the camera not to blink.
- MamiWata (2023) ★ 7.75/10 — A water myth shot in black and white like a fever that refuses colour: the most formally audited Nigerian film in a generation.
- Aníkúlápó (2022) ★ 7.5/10 — A Yoruba-language epic that out-produced its doubts: gorgeous, stubborn, and a market turning point wearing ceremonial cloth.
- Supa Modo (2018) ★ 7.5/10 — A village becomes a film school so a dying girl can become a superhero: sentimental in its premise, incorruptible in its practice.
- Tsotsi (2005) ★ 7.25/10 — A township gangster finds a baby, and the film finds its thesis: tenderness as theft in a city built to make it impossible.
- The Wedding Party (2016) ★ 7/10 — Slick, warm, four-couples busy: the film that made the industry believe in its own box office — and mostly earns it.
- Glamour Girls (1994) ★ 6.5/10 — The video era's great moral panic — a campus-to-city cautionary tale whose notoriety still outdrives its craft.
- Living in Bondage (1992) ★ 6.5/10 — Crude, grieving, unforgettable: the film that proved Nigerian stories could carry a video economy on their own shoulders.
- Half of a Yellow Sun (2013) ★ 6.25/10 — The novel's war, the film's surface: beautiful performances stranded by an adaptation that keeps the plot and loses the time machine.
- The Figure (2023) ★ 6.25/10 — A party-girl-accused thriller with a genuine subject — viral evidence — and a third act that blinks before its premise does.