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★
Released in late 2019 and acquiring a wider profile in early 2020, The Assistant arrived at a particular cultural moment. The Harvey Weinstein scandal had broken in 2017, the Me Too movement had reshaped public conversation around workplace power, and the film industry was grappling, publicly if not always honestly,
Rating: 3.5★
H. G. Wells published The War of the Worlds in 1898, and the story has never quite left us alone since. Orson Welles sent radio listeners into a panic with his 1938 broadcast adaptation, Byron Haskin put it on screen in 1953, and Jeff Wayne turned it into a prog-
Rating: 4.5★
Steven Spielberg's The Color Purple (1985) arrives in his filmography as something of a pivot point, sandwiched between the rollicking adventure of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom the previous year and the science-fiction spectacle that bookended much of his early career. Based on Alice Walker&
Rating: 2.0★
The Oregon Trail has cast a long shadow over American mythology, and cinema has returned to it often enough to establish its own set of conventions: the wagon circle, the hostile horizon, the guide whose confidence outpaces his competence. Meek's Cutoff (2010) takes that familiar premise and strips
Rating: 3.0★
Spike Lee arrived at Inside Man in 2006 as something of a surprise package: a studio thriller from a filmmaker whose reputation had been built on personal, politically charged work, from the simmering tensions of Do the Right Thing to the jazz elegy of Mo' Better Blues. For those
Rating: 2.0★
There is something almost reassuringly old-fashioned about the premise of Fist Fight. Two teachers, one provocation, one parking lot, four o'clock. It is the kind of high-concept setup that could have been scrawled on a napkin in a writers' room circa 1985, and in many
Rating: 3.5★
On 25 February 1964, Cassius Clay, a 22-year-old challenger given little chance by almost anyone, knocked out Sonny Liston in Miami Beach to become heavyweight champion of the world. What happened later that night, away from the cameras and the crowd, is the premise of One Night in
Rating: 2.5★
In the spring of 1992, the acquittal of four Los Angeles Police Department officers in the beating of Rodney King set off five days of uprising across the city that left more than fifty people dead and caused over a billion dollars in damage. It remains one of the most
Rating: 3.5★
Brian De Palma arrived at Dressed to Kill in 1980 already well-established as Hollywood's most devoted, and most forensically skilled, student of Alfred Hitchcock. He had spent the previous decade developing a body of work that wore its Hitchcock influences openly, from the split-screen paranoia of
Rating: 4.0★
Sean Baker has spent the better part of two decades making films about people living at the edges of the American dream, and Anora is, in many respects, the moment that world broke through to the mainstream. Shot on location across Brooklyn and New York City, the film follows Anora,
Rating: 3.5★
There is a moment, maybe twenty minutes into Tangerine, where it dawns on you that you are watching something genuinely alive. Not polished, not composed for maximum effect, but actually alive, with all the noise and heat and mess that implies. And then you remember it was shot on a
Rating: 3.5★
Clint Eastwood does not ease you into The Outlaw Josey Wales. It opens with an act of violence so sudden and ugly that you feel it before you've had a chance to brace yourself, and that readiness to start on a gut-punch and make you live in
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