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: 3.0★
The Muppets have a cultural footprint that is genuinely difficult to overstate. Jim Henson's original creations first found their audience on American television in the mid-1970s, before crossing the Atlantic and becoming a firm fixture in British living rooms too. By the time the theatrical films arrived,
Rating: 3.5★
Charles M. Schulz's Peanuts strip had been running in American newspapers since 1950, and by the late 1960s it had already made a successful leap to television via the beloved specials produced by Lee Mendelson and Bill Melendez, most notably A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965) and It'
Rating: 3.5★
Tonga is a small island kingdom in the South Pacific, one of the few nations in the world never formally colonised by a European power, and it carries that distinction with considerable pride. It also carries a strong tradition of Christian observance, with churches representing a remarkable range of denominations
Rating: 3.5★
Video game adaptations have had a notoriously bumpy road to the big screen, but the Mortal Kombat franchise has always occupied a slightly different corner of that conversation. The original 1995 film is, for a certain generation, a genuinely beloved piece of nineties nonsense, and when Simon McQuoid's
Rating: 4.0★
There are certain sporting figures from the 1990s who lodge themselves in the cultural memory not just because of what they achieved, but because of how they achieved it. Prince Naseem Hamed was one of those figures. The Sheffield-born featherweight, son of Yemeni immigrants, rose from the steel city&
Rating: 3.0★
If you've spent any time in the more obscure corners of the internet, you may already have encountered Wakaliwood, the lo-fi Ugandan film studio that operates out of the Wakaliga slum in Kampala and somehow manages to produce feature-length action films on budgets that wouldn'
Rating: 3.0★
There is a particular strain of early 2000s comedy that makes no apologies for itself, asks nothing of its audience beyond a willingness to switch off, and somehow ends up being more fondly remembered than films that tried considerably harder. Zoolander, released in September 2001 and directed by Ben Stiller
Rating: 3.0★
Universal's "Dark Universe" was, depending on your perspective, either a bold swing at creating a shared monster mythology or one of Hollywood's more spectacular misfires. After the 2017 The Mummy reboot collapsed under the weight of its own franchise ambitions, Universal quietly shelved the
Rating: 3.0★
Released in June 1963, just five months before the assassination that would freeze John F. Kennedy in the public imagination forever, PT 109 arrived at a peculiar moment in American cultural life. Kennedy was a sitting president, still very much alive and active in office, yet Warner Bros. had secured
Rating: 3.5★
There is a particular kind of action film that arrives without fanfare, earns its reputation entirely on its own terms, and ends up reshaping the genre around it. John Wick, released in October 2014, is exactly that sort of film. The premise is almost aggressively simple: a retired assassin, grieving
Rating: 2.5★
By the early 1990s, Jean-Claude Van Damme had carved out a reliable niche for himself in the action market. His 1988 breakthrough Bloodsport had turned him from a Brussels-born martial arts hopeful into a genuine box-office name, and Columbia Pictures were understandably keen to keep the momentum
Rating: 3.5★
The Aesop fable that gives this documentary its title sets up a neat moral framework: those who prepare and labour will survive, while those who idle will suffer the consequences. Raj Patel and Zak Piper invert that logic in uncomfortable fashion. Their 2021 film follows Anita Chitaya, a community organiser
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