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★
American independent horror has always had a habit of finding fresh angles on old anxieties, and It Follows (2014) arrived at a moment when the genre was largely occupied with found footage fatigue and franchise reboots. Shot on a modest budget across the quiet residential streets of suburban Detroit, the
Rating: 3.0★
Few comic book characters have been rebooted as quickly, or as controversially, as Spider-Man. When Columbia Pictures parted ways with Sam Raimi following the mixed reception to Spider-Man 3 in 2007, the studio found itself in a familiar bind: relinquish the licence back to Marvel, or restart the
Rating: 3.5★
By 1882, Jesse James was already more legend than man. Twenty years of dime novels, newspaper headlines and outright fabrication had turned a Missouri bank robber into something approaching a folk hero, and the circumstances of his death, shot in the back of the head by a trusted associate, only
Rating: 3.0★
There is a particular kind of horror film that works best as a time capsule: one so rooted in the anxieties, language, and social rituals of its precise cultural moment that watching it even a few years later feels faintly anthropological. Bodies Bodies Bodies (2022) is very much that kind
Rating: 2.5★
By the summer of 2019, the Marvel Cinematic Universe was standing at something of a crossroads. Avengers: Endgame had landed just a couple of months earlier, closing out more than a decade of interconnected storytelling and leaving audiences wondering where the whole machine could possibly go next. Spider-Man: Far
Rating: 2.0★
There is a specific kind of exhaustion that comes with watching a superhero sequel that has clearly been designed by a committee rather than a filmmaker. Spider-Man: Far From Home managed to sidestep that particular pitfall with some style, and Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse blew the doors
Rating: 4.0★
There are films that become so thoroughly absorbed into seasonal ritual that it becomes almost impossible to see them clearly anymore. Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life, released in 1946, is perhaps the defining example of this phenomenon in English-speaking film culture. Screened annually in
Rating: 3.0★
George A. Romero is a name almost everyone associates with the undead, and understandably so. Night of the Living Dead (1968) rewired the horror genre almost overnight, and the films that followed it, including The Crazies and the long-running Dead series (see our reviews of Day of the Dead
Rating: 4.0★
There are films that define a genre, and then there are films that redefine what a genre is even capable of. David Cronenberg's The Fly, released in 1986, sits firmly in the second category. Loosely based on George Langelaan's 1957 short story (itself previously adapted into
Rating: 2.0★
By the early 1990s, the RoboCop franchise had already begun to show the strain that comes with any Hollywood property asked to keep producing sequels beyond its natural lifespan. The original 1987 film, directed by Paul Verhoeven, was a genuinely sharp piece of work: a satirical, R-rated skewering of
Rating: 4.0★
When Sony Pictures Animation released Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse in 2018, it landed with the force of something genuinely new. The film collapsed the boundary between comic-book page and cinema screen in a way that felt less like a technical trick and more like a philosophical statement
Rating: 4.5★
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse arrives at an interesting moment in the long, occasionally exhausting history of superhero cinema. By 2018, the Marvel Cinematic Universe had been a going concern for a decade, and audiences had grown well-acquainted with its particular rhythm: the quippy banter, the world-ending
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