Timbuktu

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

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."

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.

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.

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.

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

Calling Sissako a brilliant filmmaker is an understatement.

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

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.

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.

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.

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