'MANILA'S FINEST:' WHEN CINEMA STOPS DISTRACTING AND STARTS ASKING

THERE ARE FILMS YOU WALK OUT OF SMILING. There are films you quote. And then, there are films you leave carrying many things. "Manila's Finest" belongs firmly in the last category.

- !hola MJ MARFORI

"Manila's Finest" belongs firmly in the last category.

I've been covering entertainment long enough to know that the Metro Manila Film Festival (MMFF) is often defined by what it gives audiences during the holidays: relief, laughter, spectacle and escape.

Directed by Cannes-winning filmmaker Raymond Red, "Manila's Finest" enters the MMFF not as an anomaly, but as a challenge: Are we still willing to sit with discomfort? Are we ready to look back without romanticizing the past?

The film starts in 1969, a period that quietly but deliberately precedes martial law, and follows a group of policemen navigating power, loyalty and morality in a Manila that feels hauntingly familiar. What makes "Manila's Finest" unsettling is not just its historical setting, but how little distance there seems to be between then and now.

This is not a film that shouts its message. It doesn't spoon-feed conclusions. Instead, it does something far more dangerous: it asks questions and leaves them ringing in your ears long after the credits roll.

A Cannes-winning director enters the MMFF not to entertain our escape, but to confront our memory, our silence and our responsibility as Filipinos.

One viewer posted on X that they walked out of the cinema "with more questions than answers—in a good, unsettling way." Another recalled overhearing an elderly woman say that what she saw on screen was "exactly how things were" during her high school years. That moment alone says everything about why this film matters.

Because "Manila's Finest" is not historical cosplay. It is a lived memory.