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★
There is a certain category of micro-budget indie film that arrives without fanfare, circulates quietly among festival programmers and curious cinephiles, and then lodges itself in the cultural memory of the country where it was shot more than the one that produced it. Blondes in the Jungle, a 48-
Rating: 3.5★
Folk horror has always had a particular relationship with isolation, the kind that isn't about darkness or closed spaces but about being the outsider in a community that has its own rules, its own calendar, and its own understanding of what is owed to the land. That tradition
Rating: 3.0★
Vanuatu, the Pacific island nation spread across more than eighty individual islands, has long occupied a curious space in the anthropological imagination. Its history of colonialism (it was jointly administered by Britain and France under the peculiar arrangement known as the New Hebrides Condominium until independence in 1980) left behind
Rating: 2.5★
Desmond T. Doss was a Seventh-day Adventist from Lynchburg, Virginia, who served as a combat medic with the 77th Infantry Division during the Second World War. He refused on religious grounds to carry a weapon, endured sustained harassment from fellow soldiers and the military establishment alike, and then, during
Rating: 2.5★
By the mid-1990s, Disney's theatrical animation division was riding one of the most celebrated winning streaks in the studio's history. The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin and The Lion King had redefined what audiences expected from a Disney release: sweeping scores, polished visuals,
Rating: 1.5★
The monster-horror genre has always had a complicated relationship with imitation. One film cracks open a fresh idea, audiences respond warmly, and within eighteen months the streaming platforms are loaded with films that smell very much like the original but have somehow lost everything that made it interesting. Released
Rating: 3.5★
Before Terrence Malick became synonymous with whispered voiceover and golden-hour cinematography stretched across two-and-a-half hours, he made Badlands: a lean, sun-scorched debut that announced, with some confidence, that a genuinely unusual filmmaking voice had arrived. The film draws its bones from the real-life murder
Rating: 3.5★
Swaziland (now officially Eswatini) sits landlocked between South Africa and Mozambique, and by the mid-2010s the country was carrying one of the highest HIV/AIDS prevalence rates in the world. The humanitarian consequences of that crisis produced a generation of orphaned children whose stories rarely made it beyond the
Rating: 2.5★
By the late 1980s, the American action film had carved out a fairly reliable template: a physically gifted lead, an exotic location, and enough punching to fill ninety-odd minutes. Bloodsport, released in 1988, slots neatly into that tradition, though it adds a specific wrinkle by setting its story in
Rating: 1.0★
Few films from the late 1970s American exploitation circuit carry quite the same poisonous reputation as I Spit on Your Grave. Released in 1978 under the original title Day of the Woman, a name its director would later insist better reflected his intentions, the film arrived at a moment when
Rating: 2.5★
Thirteen years is a long time to wait for a sequel. When Avatar (2009) landed, it rewrote the rulebook on blockbuster spectacle, becoming the highest-grossing film in cinema history and turning stereoscopic 3D into something audiences actually sought out rather than tolerated. James Cameron had always promised more stories
Rating: 3.0★
By 1986, the American independent film scene was a world away from the polished studio machinery churning out blockbusters across town. Low-budget, self-financed pictures were finding audiences through word of mouth and festival buzz, and it was in that climate that a young film school graduate from Brooklyn
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