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: 2.5★
There's a moment in Scary Movie 2 where you can almost feel the production running out of ideas in real time. The jokes don't build, they just pile up, louder and cruder and more desperate with each passing minute, as if sheer volume might convince you
Rating: 3.5★
There's a particular kind of admiration that keeps you at arm's length. You can see the craft, feel the ambition, and acknowledge the historical weight of what you're watching, all while remaining somehow untouched by it. That's the strange, slightly frustrating place
Rating: 4.0★
There is a very specific, primal dread associated with picking up a stranger on a desolate stretch of highway, and Robert Harmon's 1986 thriller The Hitcher weaponises that exact anxiety to brilliant effect. It gets under your skin almost immediately, tapping into something ancient and instinctive, the kind
Rating: 3.0★
There's a version of watching Under the Skin where the whole thing just washes over you, strange and cold and beautiful, and you walk out feeling vaguely disturbed in a way you can't quite put into words. There's another version where you spend half
Rating: 3.5★
There is a moment early on in Vicky Cristina Barcelona that stopped me in my tracks. Vicky and Cristina are in the back of a taxi, and the screen literally splits down the middle, placing them side by side: dark hair on one side, blonde on the other. It is
Rating: 4.0★
There is a premise at the heart of The Defiant Ones so brilliantly simple it almost feels like a provocation: two escaped convicts, one Black and one white, physically shackled together by a heavy iron chain. Stanley Kramer had the nerve to put that image on screen in 1958, long
Rating: 3.5★
Picture the grim, tactical intensity of Heat colliding head-on with the sun-drenched, wave-riding vibes of Blue Crush. That is the gloriously absurd reality of Kathryn Bigelow's 1991 classic, and I mean that as the highest possible compliment. Point Break is a film that should not
Rating: 3.5★
There is a deeply unsettling genius to the way David Robert Mitchell frames a suburban street. The camera slowly, deliberately pans across wide-angle shots of empty neighbourhoods, and suddenly you find your eyes darting frantically around the screen, hunting for that next dull-eyed figure casually walking towards the
Rating: 3.0★
Let's get one thing straight before anything else: the suit in this film is the best Spider-Man suit ever put to screen, full stop. That textured, crimson-and-blue design, worn by Andrew Garfield's lanky, skater-esque frame, gave the character a kinetic, grounded agility
Rating: 3.5★
There is a specific, haunting beauty to the way Roger Deakins shoots a train robbery in the dead of winter. Lantern light catching frozen breath, the world rendered in blues and greys and that particular silence that only deep snow can create. That single sequence tells you everything you need
Rating: 3.0★
Rachel Sennott made me queue this up. Simple as that. After being completely won over by her in Shiva Baby and Bottoms, I knew she was one of the most exciting young comic performers working right now, and I wasn't about to let a slasher-comedy with her
Rating: 2.5★
I'll hold my hands up straight away: I'm not the biggest fan of the modern superhero industrial complex. There's a formula, and almost everybody sticks rigidly to it. You get your quippy hero, your globe-trotting set pieces, and then, inevitably, a third act
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