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★
Ryuichi Sakamoto is one of those rare figures whose career resists easy summary. A founding member of the Yellow Magic Orchestra, the pioneering electronic group that shaped Japanese pop and left fingerprints all over Western synth music in the late 1970s and early 1980s, he went on to become one
Rating: 3.5★
Released in the summer of 1972, Snoopy, Come Home arrived as the second theatrical feature spun out of Charles M. Schulz's beloved Peanuts comic strip, following three years after the franchise's big-screen debut. By this point, Schulz's characters had already conquered television, newspaper
Rating: 3.5★
By 1936, Hollywood had refined the screwball comedy into something close to its own genre, a peculiar fusion of physical farce, rapid-fire wit, and class anxiety that felt perfectly suited to Depression-era audiences who were, by and large, in no mood to be sympathetic towards the idle rich.
Rating: 3.5★
When Rocky arrived in 1976, it was one of those films that seemed to come from nowhere and land everywhere. Made on a budget that barely registered by Hollywood standards, written by and starring a virtually unknown Sylvester Stallone, it won three Academy Awards including Best Picture and turned its
Rating: 2.5★
By 1948, film noir had already carved out its own corner of Hollywood, and the crime picture was a reliable commercial form, polished but unremarkable in many hands. Force of Evil arrives at that moment with rather more ambition than the genre usually demanded. It is based on Ira Wolfert&
Rating: 3.0★
There are films that matter because of what they are, and there are films that matter because of what they started. Nanook of the North belongs firmly to the second category. Released in 1922 and produced under the banner of the French trading company Les Frères Revillon, it is widely
Rating: 2.5★
Rob Zombie arrived at The Devil's Rejects (2005) with something to prove. His debut feature, House of 1000 Corpses (2003), had been a difficult birth: shot in 2000, shelved by Universal after concerns about its content, eventually picked up by Lionsgate and released to polarised notices. It was
Rating: 0.5★
Dog Star Man is one of the most discussed works in the history of American experimental cinema, a film that arrived in pieces between 1961 and 1964 before being assembled into its complete 78-minute form in 1965. Stan Brakhage released it through Film-Makers' Cooperative, the distribution organisation
Rating: 3.0★
Peter Hujar's Day arrives in 2025 as one of the more unusual entries in recent American independent cinema: a seventy-six minute reconstruction of a single day in the life of a photographer, drawn from an audio recording that had been sitting in an archive for half a
Rating: 2.5★
Michael Mann has been making films about men who are very good at dangerous jobs since Thief (1981), and the preoccupations he established there, the professional codes, the neon-drenched urban landscapes, the slow accumulation of pressure before violence arrives, have followed him through everything since. Miami Vice (2006) is,
Rating: 3.0★
There is a version of mid-2000s Hollywood comedy that dates badly, all smirk and swagger, and then there is the strand that Judd Apatow helped establish, one that kept its heart just visible beneath the raunch. The 40-Year-Old Virgin, released in August 2005 through Universal Pictures and
Rating: 3.5★
By 2009, Walt Disney Animation Studios had spent the better part of a decade in something of an identity crisis. The golden run of the late 1980s and 1990s, the period critics tend to call the Disney Renaissance, had petered out, and the studio had spent the intervening years releasing
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