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: 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: 4.0★
There is a particular kind of frustration that comes with watching a film get quietly buried at the box office, especially when that film carries the weight of one of the most beloved fictional worlds ever committed to paper. The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim arrived
Rating: 4.0★
Coming-of-age stories are hardly in short supply at the cinema, but every so often one arrives that feels less like a genre exercise and more like a memory someone has chosen to share with you. Lady Bird, released in 2017, is one of those films. Set in Sacramento,
Rating: 3.0★
There is a particular kind of film that seems designed less to entertain than to make you shift uneasily in your seat, and Babygirl (2024) belongs firmly in that category. Written and directed by Halina Reijn, it is an erotic thriller centred on Romy, a high-powered tech CEO whose
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
Rating: 4.0★
Nineteen thirty-three. The Depression is biting hard across America, breadlines stretch around city blocks, and New Orleans simmers in that particular Southern heat that makes everything feel slightly desperate and slightly dangerous. It is, in other words, exactly the right setting for a film about men who settle their
Rating: 3.0★
By the early 2000s, climate change had begun its slow migration from academic journals and environmental conferences into the popular consciousness, and Hollywood, being Hollywood, spotted an opportunity. The Day After Tomorrow arrived in May 2004 riding a wave of genuine cultural anxiety about global warming, its marketing leaning hard
Rating: 3.5★
Roberto Durán is, by any measure, one of the most significant boxers of the twentieth century: a ferocious, street-hardened fighter from the Chorrillo neighbourhood of Panama City who rose to become world lightweight champion in 1972 and held the belt for six and a half years before going on
Rating: 2.5★
There are certain films that loom large in the collective memory simply by virtue of existing at the right moment in history, and Disney's Sleeping Beauty (1959) is a fairly textbook example. Based on the centuries-old fairy tale made famous by Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm,
Rating: 2.5★
Kidnap thrillers were practically their own cottage industry around the turn of the millennium. The genre had plenty of fuel: real-world anxieties about political instability in Latin America, the post-Cold War scramble of private military contractors and crisis negotiators, and a film industry hungry for adult dramas that
Rating: 2.5★
Robert Flaherty is one of those filmmakers whose reputation rests almost entirely on a handful of films made across a relatively short window, yet whose influence on documentary cinema is almost impossible to overstate. His debut feature, Nanook of the North (1922), established a model for location-based, observational filmmaking
Rating: 3.0★
There is a particular kind of road trip film that has less to do with the road and everything to do with the people sitting uncomfortably close to one another in it. A Real Pain (2024) belongs firmly in that tradition, though it swaps the car for a guided Holocaust
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