Timbuktu

Director: Abderrahmane Sissako
Year Released: 2014
Rating: 3.0

Jihadists invade the title city and demand people start following their rules (no music, no soccer, no smoking cigarettes, the fish lady has to wear gloves, all female heads must be covered) but most of the residents, themselves moderate Muslims, resist the changes - elsewhere, a herder, who lives with his wife and daughter, murders a fisherman for killing one of his cows. Sissako makes a point that the demands of the radicals and their vision of how the world is 'supposed to be' is downright bizarre - anyone who claims the filmmaker is making an apology for this interpretation of Islam (and Sharia law) clearly doesn't understand what they just watched: the jihadists are clearly anti-intellectual thugs and hypocrites. Sissako uses a light touch with the material for two thirds of it, but when he forcibly ties everything together in the last third it loses a bit of the ambient poetry that carried it up to that point.