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: 1.0★
On paper, a silent, hour-long film about the life cycle of a container ship, built, sailed and eventually scrapped, sounds like a hard sell. And, well, it is. Peter Hutton's At Sea follows a freighter from construction to dismantling in long, static, wordless shots. I will admit
Rating: 2.0★
I'll say this for Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind: I understood exactly what it was going for. And understanding what a film is going for is, unfortunately, not the same thing as enjoying it, or even finding it fully alive as a piece of cinema. John Gianvito&
Rating: 2.0★
I should say at the outset that I am plainly the wrong audience for Past Lives, and I know it. That admission feels necessary before anything else, because what follows is going to read as a minority report on a film that a great many people I respect absolutely adore,
Rating: 4.0★
Nobody has ever worn their Hitchcock influence quite as proudly, or as quite as well, as Brian De Palma, and Blow Out is one of the films that earns him the comparison outright. He is one of my favourite directors, full stop, so I came to this already predisposed to
Rating: 2.5★
There is a version of Entergalactic that works brilliantly, and you can almost see it from where the actual film is sitting. It is there in the colour palette, in the way a single frame freezes into something you would happily hang on a wall, in the deep, unhurried groove
Rating: 3.5★
There is a nice surprise waiting in the credits of Twisters, and it is the kind of surprise that makes you sit up a little straighter in your seat. This giant, deafening summer tornado movie was directed by Lee Isaac Chung, the man behind Minari, one of the most tender
Rating: 3.0★
There is a version of Higher Learning that could have been one of the defining American films of the nineties. You can feel it in the best scenes, straining to get out. That it does not quite manage it is genuinely frustrating, because John Singleton was, at his best, among
Rating: 3.5★
I came to The Maze Runner with my expectations set firmly to low. It sits on Letterboxd's "Top 250 Most Fans" list, which in my experience is often code for popular rather than good, and I had it filed away under interchangeable young-adult blockbuster, the
Rating: 2.5★
The marketing for I Saw the TV Glow is doing nobody any favours. I came in braced for horror, primed for dread, and found something else entirely: a slow, melancholy, dreamlike film about identity and dissociation that uses the language of late-night television and adolescent longing to ask some
Rating: 4.0★
There is a moment in Blue Valentine where Ryan Gosling's character stands outside a shop front strumming something ridiculous on a ukulele while Michelle Williams dances along, and it stopped me cold. Not because it is showy or scored to make you feel a particular way, but because
Rating: 1.5★
There is a special circle of cinema reserved for the truly botched video-game adaptation, and its patron saint is Uwe Boll, the man who gave us the immortal catastrophe of House of the Dead, still one of the worst films I have ever sat through. I bring him up
Rating: 4.0★
I have found myself falling hard for Iranian cinema of late. Alongside the Japanese and the Korean, it has become one of the national traditions I most look forward to exploring, and the films keep rewarding the attention. So many of them are built around revolution, or quiet defiance, or
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