American cinema stretches from the silent comedies of Buster Keaton, The Cameraman among them, through to the sharp, funny indie work of films like Booksmart. It's a tradition wide enough to hold big-studio spectacle, low-budget horror, and everything in between. Browse Macca's reviews below.
Rating: 3.0★
Somali piracy became one of the defining news stories of the late 2000s and early 2010s, filling broadsheet column inches and television bulletins with images of armed men on skiffs, ransomed supertankers, and naval patrols in the Gulf of Aden. Hollywood's response was largely to frame it as
Rating: 1.0★
In the mid-1930s, the American visual artist Joseph Cornell was making a name for himself in New York's surrealist circles, constructing elaborate shadow boxes filled with found objects and ephemera. His only foray into filmmaking, Rose Hobart (1936), applied the same found-object logic to moving image:
Rating: 4.0★
The Shetland Islands sit at the very top of the British Isles, closer to Bergen than to Edinburgh, and they carry a particular kind of weather-beaten remoteness that feels almost mythological to anyone who has only seen them on a map. It is exactly the sort of place where
Rating: 3.0★
Arthur Jafa is a name that carries considerable weight in American visual culture, even if mainstream audiences might not immediately place it. A cinematographer by training (his credits include Spike Lee's Crooklyn and Julie Dash's landmark Daughters of the Dust), Jafa spent decades thinking seriously about
Rating: 2.5★
Aquaman arrived in December 2018 at something of a crossroads for the DC Extended Universe. Warner Bros. had spent several years watching Marvel print money while their own interconnected franchise stumbled through mixed-to-hostile receptions for Batman v Superman and Justice League. The pressure on this one was real:
Rating: 3.0★
Time travel has been a fixture of science fiction storytelling since at least H.G. Wells, and by the early 2000s Hollywood had well and truly made it its own, serving up glossy, effects-heavy productions that prioritised spectacle over rigour. Into that landscape arrived Primer in 2004, a film
Rating: 2.0★
Few toy franchises have had as stubborn a grip on popular imagination as Masters of the Universe. What began as a Mattel action figure line in 1982 snowballed, almost immediately, into an animated television series that became a Saturday morning institution for an entire generation of children on both sides
Rating: 2.0★
By 2014, the Transformers franchise had become something of a cultural phenomenon in its own right, and not entirely for flattering reasons. The first film, which you can read about in Macca's review of Transformers (2007), arrived with genuine novelty, translating a beloved 1980s toy line and animated
Rating: 2.0★
By 2011, the Transformers franchise had already established itself as one of the defining commercial forces of late-2000s Hollywood, for better or worse. The first film, which you can read Macca's thoughts on Transformers (2007), was a reasonably fun if overlong piece of summer blockbuster fare. Its
Rating: 3.0★
There is a particular kind of American regional cinema that flourished in the mid-1970s, built on pickup trucks, backroads, lawmen with bad tempers, and a deeply ingrained suspicion of authority in any form. Moonrunners sits comfortably, perhaps even proudly, within that tradition. Released in 1975 through United Artists, the
Rating: 4.0★
Andy Weir's 2021 novel Project Hail Mary arrived with a fair amount of goodwill already attached to it. Weir had, after all, written The Martian, a book that had been turned into a reasonably beloved Ridley Scott film, and readers of the new novel were almost immediately asking
Rating: 2.5★
The Aztec death whistle is one of those historical curiosities that sounds almost too good to be true. Unearthed by archaeologists in Mexico during the 1990s, these small clay instruments shaped like skulls produce a sound variously described as a human scream, a howling wind, or something altogether harder to
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