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: 1.0★
Every so often a film comes along so brazen in its theft that you almost admire the nerve. Mac and Me is one of them: an E.T. knockoff so shameless it makes you wonder how it was ever allowed to reach a cinema. Stewart Raffill's 1988 "
Rating: 2.0★
Work through enough of Jackie Chan's vast filmography, as I have been steadily doing, and you start to notice two careers running side by side: the astonishing Hong Kong run that built his name, and the patchier Western-facing vehicles that followed once Hollywood came calling. The Medallion
Rating: 3.0★
Here is your quick test for whether Police Academy is going to work for you: Michael Winslow opens his mouth and out comes a full arsenal of gunfire, sirens, squealing tyres and revving engines, entirely from his own vocal cords, without a sound effect in sight. If that makes you
Rating: 3.5★
By 2006, the Bond franchise had well and truly lost the plot. The Brosnan years had drifted into self-parody, and Die Another Day, with its invisible car and that excruciating CGI surfing sequence, was the nadir of a series that had stopped taking itself seriously some time before that.
Rating: 3.0★
There is a whole worldview packed into a single administrative decision, and Under a Jarvis Moon builds its best argument from exactly that. In the 1930s and 40s, the United States government needed young men willing to be shipped out to Jarvis, Howland and Baker, three specks of coral and
Rating: 2.5★
There are films you admire and films you enjoy, and sometimes those two categories barely overlap. Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within sits squarely in the first group. I can watch it and feel genuine awe at what they pulled off technically, and then sit back at the end feeling oddly
Rating: 3.5★
There's a moment near the start of The Watermelon Woman where the camera just lingers on the inside of a video rental shop, and I felt it land somewhere in my chest before a single plot point had been established. The rows of VHS cases, the counter, the
Rating: 3.5★
There is something wonderfully audacious about the origins of Sign 'o' the Times. When the album underperformed in the American charts, Prince's response was not a re-release or a carefully targeted new single but to go and make an entire concert film to sell the
Rating: 3.0★
Some films you admire more than you enjoy, and some films you respect more than you admire. Titicut Follies sits somewhere in that uncomfortable second category, and I've been turning it over in my head ever since the credits rolled, not because it moved me in any clean
Rating: 3.0★
There is a version of Jazz on a Summer's Day that I could watch on a warm Friday evening with a glass of something cold and feel completely at peace with the world. Bert Stern's 1959 film, a record of the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival, is
Rating: 3.0★
There is a moment early on in Jiro Dreams of Sushi when you realise the film is not really about sushi at all. It is about what happens when a person gives their entire life over to one thing, and what that costs them, and what it costs the people
Rating: 3.5★
There are documentaries that succeed on craft, and then there are documentaries that succeed because they take you somewhere you would never otherwise go. Dark Days is firmly the second kind. The moment you understand what Marc Singer has actually done here, you are already half-hooked: he spent an
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