Abou Leila (2019)

For a long time, this tense thriller doesn't let you in on what is going on - all you know is that two men are travelling by car across the Algerian desert in 1994 looking for someone or something called Abou Leila, and you know their plan is foolhardy, misguided, or even delusional, and it is interrupted regularly, repetitively, by one man's violent dreams - and in the end, the movie didn't make much sense to me: in the context of Algeria's civil war, something is said about cyclical violence. 

★★★☆☆

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Far From Men (Loin des Hommes) (2014)

So that he can be tried in a French court, Daru, a schoolteacher, reluctantly transports Mohamed, a confessed murderer, across Algeria's Atlas mountains and along the way the two men become embroiled in the beginnings of Algeria's War of Independence, in this visually arresting, philosophically interesting, and broadly politically relevant neo-Western drama based on a 1957 Albert Camus short story, The Guest.

★★★★☆

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