Vanity Fair names "Red Island" one of the 22 best films of 2024

The masterful French director Robin Campillo yet again mines some of his own experience for this evocative picture of French colonialism in 1970s Madagascar. Largely through the eyes of a young boy, we see the fraught social dynamics of a French military base and the locals in its orbit, divides between race and class revealing themselves in troubling ways. But Campillo uses a light touch; his film floats along as if born on the breeze of memory, lilting through vignettes that murmur with hidden meaning. A marriage falters, a forbidden romance feels the terrible strain of social pressure, a revolution foments among the occupied. And in the film’s beguiling closing moments, Campillo gracefully reveals whose story this has been all along.