British cinema spans everything from the Hammer horror boom of the 1950s and 60s to the gritty social realism that films like Fish Tank made impossible to ignore. That range, from The Curse of Frankenstein to kitchen-sink drama, is a big part of what makes it so consistently interesting. Have a browse through Macca's UK reviews below.
Rating: 3.5★
British cinema has always had a complicated relationship with its own class system, from the kitchen-sink dramas of the 1960s through to the heritage pictures that followed, and Emerald Fennell's Saltburn arrives very much in that tradition, even as it does its best to tear the wallpaper
Rating: 3.0★
Short films rarely get the sustained attention they deserve, and Kibwe Tavares's Jonah (2013) is a good case in point. Running at just seventeen minutes, it is the kind of work that gets a festival circuit run, picks up a few well-deserved column inches, and then quietly
Rating: 4.5★
There are films that arrive fully formed, seemingly from nowhere, and lodge themselves permanently in the cultural memory. The Muppet Movie, released in the summer of 1979, is one of them. Kermit the Frog had been a television fixture since Jim Henson first began tinkering with puppets in the mid-
Rating: 3.0★
There are films that arrive quietly and find their audience over time, and then there are films that kick the door in. Clive Barker's Hellraiser, released in 1987, belongs firmly in the second category. Adapted by Barker himself from his own 1986 novella The Hellbound Heart, the film
Rating: 3.0★
By the mid-1990s, the Batman franchise was one of the most commercially powerful properties in Hollywood. Tim Burton's 1989 original had proved that a superhero film could be taken seriously as a piece of cinema, and its 1992 follow-up Batman Returns pushed the gothic, expressionist aesthetic
Rating: 3.5★
June 1993 is a date that carries enormous weight in Nigerian history. The military government of Ibrahim Babangida annulled what is widely regarded as the freest election the country had ever held, a result that would have seen Moshood Abiola take the presidency. The cancellation triggered waves of civil unrest,
Rating: 4.0★
Few sports controversies have lodged themselves in the public imagination quite like the 1994 attack on Nancy Kerrigan, a moment so bizarre and theatrical that it almost beggared belief even as it was happening. A kneecapping, a rink-side wail, a disgraced champion, and a cast of supporting conspirators who
Rating: 4.0★
Few films arrive with quite the weight of expectation that Capernaum carried into cinemas in 2018. Directed by Lebanese filmmaker Nadine Labaki and premiering at Cannes, where it won the Jury Prize, the film centres on Zain, a twelve-year-old boy living in the poverty-stricken backstreets of Beirut,
Rating: 2.5★
There is a certain romantic melancholy baked into the very source material of Ali and Nino. The 1937 novel of the same name, published under the pen name Kurban Said, has been attributed to various authors over the decades (the true identity of its writer remains genuinely disputed), but its
Rating: 3.5★
There is a particular kind of film that arrives with little fanfare, plays a handful of festivals, and then quietly refuses to leave your head for weeks afterwards. Rungano Nyoni's I Am Not a Witch (2017) is very much one of those films. The premise draws from a
Rating: 4.0★
There is a specific kind of dread that the best horror thrillers manage to conjure, not the kind built from a sudden bang on the soundtrack or a face appearing in a mirror, but a slow, creeping certainty that something has gone very wrong and nobody is going to be
Rating: 3.0★
There is a particular kind of British film that arrives quietly, gets called a modest crowd-pleaser, and then refuses to leave the cultural conversation. Bend It Like Beckham, released in 2002, is very much one of those. Gurinder Chadha's third feature (following the well-received Bhaji on
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