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★
By 1990, RoboCop had already earned its place as one of the more pointed pieces of science fiction cinema to come out of the previous decade. Paul Verhoeven's 1987 original was a film that used the Detroit crime wave, the rise of corporate privatisation, and Reagan-era excess
Rating: 3.0★
Coming-of-age cinema has always had a complicated relationship with discomfort. The genre works best when it refuses to sand down the rougher edges of adolescence, and Marielle Heller's debut feature, adapted from Phoebe Gloeckner's semi-autobiographical 2002 graphic novel of the same name, is
Rating: 3.5★
Stephen King's relationship with cinema is a long and uneven one. For every faithful adaptation that captures the specific flavour of dread he does so well on the page, there are several that miss the point entirely, reducing his work to either slick gore or toothless television fare.
Rating: 3.0★
George A. Romero's name is so thoroughly bound up with the living dead that any film of his sitting outside that tradition tends to get overlooked. Monkey Shines, released in 1988 through Orion Pictures, is a case in point: a psychological horror thriller adapted from Michael Stewart'
Rating: 4.5★
By the turn of the millennium, Steven Soderbergh had already established himself as one of American cinema's more restless and unpredictable talents. His debut, sex, lies, and videotape, had announced him as a filmmaker with a sharp eye for moral discomfort and an instinct for character-driven drama.
Rating: 3.5★
Jeffrey Eugenides published his debut novel The Virgin Suicides in 1993 to considerable critical attention, praised for its unusual collective narration and its unflinching portrait of suburban American grief. It took a few years to make the journey to the screen, but when it did, the adaptation landed in the
Rating: 2.5★
Orson Welles arrived in Hollywood in 1941 carrying a reputation so enormous it was almost comical. His radio adaptation of The War of the Worlds had reportedly sent listeners into a panic, and his debut feature, Citizen Kane, was already drawing comparisons to the very best the medium had produced.
Rating: 3.5★
By the early 2000s, Walt Disney Feature Animation was in an odd position. The so-called Disney Renaissance, that extraordinary run of films from The Little Mermaid through to Mulan, had wound down, and the studio was feeling its way forward with a string of pictures that never quite managed
Rating: 3.0★
By the early 1980s, the American animation industry was in a peculiar state of drift. Disney, the dominant force for decades, had produced a string of pictures through the late seventies that felt safe and somewhat tired, and audiences were beginning to sense it. It was into this gap that
Rating: 1.5★
Horror films shot in genuinely unusual locations tend to carry a certain curiosity value before a single frame has even played, and Gehenna: Where Death Lives arrives with that novelty in abundance. Set and partially produced in Saipan, the largest island in the Northern Mariana Islands, a United States commonwealth
Rating: 2.0★
Video game adaptations have had a famously troubled relationship with cinema, and Uncharted arrives as one of the most anticipated, and most protracted, attempts to buck that trend. The game series, developed by Naughty Dog and first released by Sony in 2007, spent the better part of two decades building
Rating: 3.5★
Few moments in modern British history carry the weight of Dunkirk. Between the 26th of May and the 4th of June 1940, over 330,000 Allied soldiers, British, French, Belgian and Canadian, were lifted from the beaches and harbour of a small French port town by a combination of Royal
Film images and data courtesy of TMDB. This product uses the TMDB API but is not endorsed or certified by TMDB.
The best new reviews, a buried gem with where to watch it, and where the every-country challenge is up to. Free, no spam.
Subscribe free