Critics reviews

[Sissako] is not offering simpleminded polemics, and he’s not offering solutions to the problems raised, though he is giving us a deeper understanding of them.

Sissako scrupulously avoids making any facile connections between his two blocks of material, and his cast, even when silent, are always eloquent.

[Bamako] has the same quietist approach to movie-making [as its predecessor, Sissako's Waiting for Happiness], with the same dreamy sense of fable, but there is a distinctly more discursive tone... Bamako is certainly distinctive, with commanding moments... [yet] I felt it might work better as a theatrical piece.

Issue-driven drama has rarely been so polemic as in [Bamako]... You can’t help but feel that if Sissako had eased up on the message a little and let more narrative in... he would be reaching a much wider audience with what is, undoubtedly, a well-argued case.

Creating a forum for rarely heard voices is certainly a worthwhile cause, but in Bamako [Sissako's] didactic approach... risks switching people off... Unfortunately, the occasional titter and [the director's] eye for colourful detail aren't enough to hold attention.

“Bamako” is valuable because it so eloquently and succinctly lays out the major issues facing Africa in the era of globalization. It’s marvelous because it manages to dramatize these issues cinematically even as its more Socratic trial sections unspool... [It] represents a powerful protest.

[A] seething, complicated and disarmingly beautiful investigation of Africa’s social, economic and human crises... [Bamako is] a work of cool intelligence and profound anger, a long, dense, argument that is also a haunting visual poem.

An elegant, poignant – and prejudiced – attack on the consequences of IMF and World Bank policy in Africa... Bamako is a film that ought to be seen, for its humanity and its original approach to the debate over globalisation.

Far from an easy watch, either in terms of its hard-hitting content, seemingly haphazard structuring or its dense symbolism... [Bamako] makes sense of the political intricacies by balancing the rhetoric and statistics with everyday occurrences that give the iniquities and inadequacies a human face.

[Bamako is] not an easy work. It’s brimming with ideas, its narrative is at points vague and even confusing, and sometimes it makes the biggest of points with the smallest of gestures... [Yet] it’s worth braving the unique approach of this remarkable and stirring film that shows once again that the best of African cinema is without genre and brims with intelligence and responsibility.

Bamako gives the poor a chance to speak their minds... [and] shows the ugly face of colonization in its new dress of globalization. No matter how you dress it up, it still has the same contempt for human life in the name of progress.

[Bamako] exemplifies a number of trends in contemporary African cinema. What might be described as the new pan-African aesthetic interweaves melodrama, politics, ideology, satire and comedy - and Sissako draws on all these conventions to produce a film that not only instructs but entertains.