Japanese cinema has one of the longest traditions of horror anywhere in the world, rooted in kaidan ghost stories that stretch back centuries. Films like The Ghost of Yotsuya and The Snow Woman brought those folk terrors to the screen with a distinctly poetic menace. Browse Macca's reviews below to see how that tradition holds up.
Rating: 2.5★
There is a particular kind of frustration that has nothing to do with a film being bad, and everything to do with realising, somewhere around the halfway point, that you have walked into the middle of someone else's conversation. That is more or less where I found myself
Rating: 3.5★
There's a moment about halfway through Sonic the Hedgehog 3 when my son got up, wandered out of the room, and didn't come back for a while. He's the target audience. He loves these films. And when a Sonic movie loses the child in
Rating: 3.5★
For years "video game movie" was basically a warning label, shorthand for something cynical and half-watchable. You knew what you were getting: a production that understood the intellectual property well enough to put the right colours on screen, but had no real feel for why anyone loved
Rating: 2.0★
I'm not inherently opposed to a zombie comedy. When done right, blending the undead with sharp, dark humour can yield absolute classics. From Shaun of the Dead to the chaotic fun of the Return of the Living Dead series, the genre has proven it can handle laughs and
Rating: 1.5★
When you sit down to watch what is supposedly a horror film shot in the Northern Mariana Islands, you go in ready to make allowances. It's an unusual origin for a genre picture, and part of you wants to root for it on that basis alone. I did.
Rating: 2.5★
There's a version of The Red Turtle that I think I could love. The version that exists purely as a sequence of images, a moving watercolour book you'd leave open on a coffee table and let wash over you. Michael Dudok de Wit has made something
Rating: 3.5★
We are absolutely saturated with cinema set in Afghanistan. From the Soviet invasion to the endless, grinding War on Terror, the country has frequently served as a backdrop for foreign filmmakers looking to capture geopolitical conflict. There is something almost reflexive about it now, the way Western productions reach for
Rating: 4.5★
I genuinely paused the screen multiple times just to stare at a single frame. Not to grab a snack, not because something was confusing, but because Katsuhiro Otomo's Neo-Tokyo is so meticulously, breathtakingly rendered that to simply let it play felt almost disrespectful. That's the
Rating: 2.5★
There's a moment in Salaryman that stopped me cold, and not in a good way. The director, Allegra Pacheco, finds men in suits completely unconscious on the pavement, felled by sheer exhaustion after brutal shifts that blur into nights that blur into days. And rather than let that
Rating: 3.5★
When you buy a ticket for a Godzilla picture, you already know exactly what you're getting. You're there for the roaring, the stomping, and the spectacular destruction of Japanese infrastructure. The question is never really will the monster show up. It's whether anyone bothered
Rating: 3.5★
It's genuinely rare to sit down with a piece of cinema that treats its native folklore with this level of unapologetic, mystical fidelity. Souleymane Cissé's Yeelen doesn't just borrow from Bambara mythology and dress it up for outside consumption. It pulls you entirely into
Rating: 2.0★
There's a very specific kind of tired that sets in when you're watching a film and you realise, about fifteen minutes in, that absolutely nothing surprising is going to happen. That's the feeling that settled over me watching Pokémon the Movie: Secrets of the
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