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: 3.5★
There is a haunting beauty to the American Midwest that few filmmakers have ever captured quite like Terrence Malick. His 1973 debut, Badlands, is one of those films you feel as much as you watch. It drifts over you like heat rising off a sun-baked road, gorgeous and unsettling
Rating: 3.5★
What does it look like when children rewrite their own pain? That question sits at the beating heart of Liyana, and it's the reason this film has stayed with me in a way I didn't entirely expect. There is something genuinely disarming about watching a documentary
Rating: 2.5★
The reputation arrives before the film does. You hear "Bloodsport" and you picture Van Damme in his prime, doing the splits between two chairs, Bolo Yeung thumping his own chest like a man possessed, and a tournament so brutal and underground it makes the UFC look like a
Rating: 1.0★
Meir Zarchi's 1978 exploitation picture made me feel genuinely, physically ill. Not in the way a properly crafted horror film leaves you shaken and unsettled, but in the way you feel after accidentally stepping in something vile on a dark pavement. I've sat through some bleak,
Rating: 2.5★
You can pile all the shiny, high-budget sprinkles you want on top of a scoop of vanilla ice cream, but at the end of the day it's still just prettier vanilla ice cream. That's essentially where I land on Avatar: The Way of Water, James
Rating: 3.0★
Sometimes the backstory sells a film harder than the film can sell itself. She's Gotta Have It arrives wrapped in one of indie cinema's great origin stories: Spike Lee, fresh out of film school, scrapes together $175,000, shoots something raw and alive and entirely his
Rating: 2.5★
I'll be upfront: I went into this one already rattled. I absolutely loathed Before Sunrise, the 1995 original, where two insufferably wide-eyed twenty-somethings wander around Vienna trying to extract grand philosophical meaning from every stray dog and overheard conversation. It was a complete chore. So when
Rating: 2.0★
There's a particular kind of betrayal that only childhood nostalgia can deliver. You build something up in your memory for decades, you convince yourself it was genuinely brilliant, and then you sit down to revisit it as an adult and watch it crumble before your eyes in real
Rating: 4.5★
The Omaha Beach sequence. Twenty-seven minutes of controlled chaos that still has the power to leave you genuinely shaking. I went back to Saving Private Ryan recently to see whether it held up after all this time, and the honest answer is: almost entirely, yes. From the moment that
Rating: 3.0★
There's a moment watching Garrett Bradley's America where you stop trying to work out exactly what you're looking at, and just let it wash over you. That surrender is, I think, exactly what Bradley is after. Shot in gorgeous, high-contrast black-and-white,
Rating: 1.5★
A parched Earth. No oceans. Desperate pilots tearing each other apart in the sky just to harvest what little water the clouds have left. That's a genuinely cracking premise, the kind that makes you sit up and think, right, let's see where this goes. The problem
Rating: 3.0★
There is a very specific, unapologetically loud energy to the comedy of the early 2000s, and Keenen Ivory Wayans's Scary Movie kicks the door off its hinges right from the opening frames. It is crass, it is relentless, and it has absolutely no interest in your good taste.
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