The Perfect Candidate

It really liked it. It's not a doom and gloom movie -- it's about "how can you use your influence?"

What I appreciated about this was the subtleties -- she's doing things in small victories.

Mansour gives audiences a candid, often wryly amusing glimpse of life inside the Saudi kingdom, which is so often cloaked in opacity and menace.

The Perfect Candidate lacks a distinct visual grammar ... but as a film that recognizes the giant strides small wins can make for women, it feels significant.

The pleasure of the film rests not in the plot, which is so placid as to be anti-dramatic, but in the minutiae; as ever, Al Mansour homes in on the everyday workings of condescension and conformity.

Most of the value in this film comes from the peek it gives us into life as a Saudi woman - a life that is changing, Al-Mansour points out, albeit too slowly for some.

With The Perfect Candidate, she has made some rumbles but puts on a perfect platform for the rights of women in such a restrictive country for the modern century.

[Haifaa Al-Mansour] delivers a razor-sharp look at women's lives in modern Saudi Arabia.

Featuring finely-tuned characters and pitched to a degree of outrage that I found completely engaging

Al-Mansour has struck gold again with her leading lady. Mila Al Zahrani, who appears in nearly every second of the film, has a strong but elegant screen presence and she makes the heroine an extremely appealing character.