The AMVCA result clarified the terms of the conversation. Nine nominations from the industry. Zero wins from the jury. Whatever else Gingerrr is, it is now the most nominated AMVCA zero in the ceremony’s history — a distinction that demands a proper accounting rather than the ambient noise that has surrounded the film since its release.
Let me write the review that the result makes possible.
Gingerrr is a commercial ensemble film directed by Yemi Filmboy Morafa. The ensemble: Bisola Aiyeola, Lateef Adedimeji, Bukunmi Oluwasina, and a cast assembled with the specific intent of generating the warmth and chemistry that Nigerian audiences come to ensemble films for. The story moves through a Lagos social world — relationships, betrayal, aspiration, humour — with the narrative fluency of a filmmaker who knows exactly what this audience wants and is skilled at delivering it. The screenplay by Xavier Ighorodje (who received one of the film’s nine AMVCA nominations for his work) is functional and often funny. The cinematography by Emmanuel Igbekele — one of his three nominated works this year — gives the film a visual confidence it does not always earn from its story.
What Works
Bisola Aiyeola gives the film its best performance — controlled, specific, and funnier than the screenplay requires her to be, which is the specific skill of a comedic actress who knows how to inhabit a line rather than deliver it. Adedimeji does what Adedimeji does: fills the frame with a charm that costs nothing and earns everything. These are professional performances in a film that needed professionalism and received it.
The film moves efficiently. At its best, it has the quality of a Lagos social comedy that knows its own genre — the specific rhythm of ensemble humour, the building and release of group dynamic tension, the romance beats that arrive when they are supposed to and land without excessive sentimentality. This is not nothing. Most commercial films fail at the basic task of delivering the experience they promise. Gingerrr delivers.
What Does Not Work
The film does not know when to stop explaining itself. Scenes that should end on behaviour end on dialogue that names the behaviour. Characters articulate their emotional states in ways that the actors have already communicated through their performances, which produces a double-register of information that feels distrustful of the audience’s perceptiveness. This is the specific weakness of a commercial filmmaker who has internalised audience accessibility as a value to the point where it becomes a limitation — the compulsion to make every moment legible rather than trusting that the legibility is already there.
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The third act loses the narrative compression that makes the first two-thirds work. The film wants to resolve more than its structure has room to resolve. The Afrocritik review called it “one of the worst Nollywood films” — a position that this review does not share. It is not the worst Nollywood film. It is a competent commercial ensemble film that does not fully earn the nine nominations the industry gave it, and that the jury rightly declined to reward in the competitive categories it entered.
The audience’s relationship to it is its own argument. The commercial response was real. The audience that went to cinemas for this specific kind of Lagos warmth got what it came for. That counts. It just does not count as the best film of the year.
RCA Score: 6.8 — Watchable
Gingerrr (2025) · Dir. Yemi Filmboy Morafa · Nigeria · Stars: Bisola Aiyeola, Lateef Adedimeji, Bukunmi Oluwasina · Written by Xavier Ighorodje · Cinematography: Emmanuel Igbekele. AMVCA 2026: 9 nominations, 0 wins.
— Kwame Asante. RollCallAfrica, 13 May 2026.
