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.
Country United States Of America
Let me tell you something that genuinely messed with my head the first time I watched this. I came to Friday the 13th as a teenager already knowing Jason Voorhees. I knew the hockey mask, the machete, the lumbering gait. I'd seen Freddy vs. Jason. I thought I
Country United States Of America
The American Dream isn't dead. It just reanimated, shuffled through the automatic doors, and made itself at home in the nearest shopping mall. That image, a horde of the undead mindlessly drifting between shop fronts, escalators, and fountain displays, is so perfectly, savagely funny that it almost hurts.
Rating: 3.5★
There is a shot lodged in my head from Garrett Bradley's Time: a home video, slightly washed out, of small boys larking about in the way small boys do, and then the film cuts, and those same boys are teenagers, and then young men, and the years have
2020s
Macbeth in Compton had no right to work as well as it does. Shakespeare's bloodiest tragedy, relocated to the palm lined streets of Compton, spoken in full Elizabethan verse but subtitled in the modern slang of the block. On paper it sounds like a gimmick that ought to
Rating: 3.5★
On paper, Blade Runner is exactly my sort of thing. A rain-soaked cyberpunk future, a moral puzzle at its heart, a premise that asks what it even means to be human. Ridley Scott's 1982 adaptation of Philip K. Dick imagines a world where bio-engineered humans called
Rating: 3.0★
There is something a little strange about rating a thirteen-minute short film the same way you would rate a feature. What are you even measuring? Hotel Chevalier runs barely long enough to justify making a cup of tea, and yet here I am, genuinely glad I spent time with
Rating: 1.0★
There is a genuinely haunting idea at the centre of Decasia: The State of Decay, and I want to be fair to it before I explain why the film itself was one of the most punishing viewing experiences I have put myself through in recent memory. Bill Morrison builds the
Rating: 3.5★
Where a classic noir like Pickup on South Street or The Third Man prowls the rain-slicked back streets, The Reckless Moment brings the genre home. Quite literally. Max Ophüls plants his camera not in some seedy waterfront dive or fog-wrapped European alley but in a comfortable suburban household,
Rating: 3.0★
Before Shaft is anything else, it is that theme. Isaac Hayes's wah-wah-drenched, Oscar-winning title track, playing over John Shaft striding through the streets of early-seventies New York, is one of the great movie openings in the history of cinema, so effortlessly cool that the
Rating: 3.5★
My wife suggested we watch Deliverance, partly on the strength of our shared soft spot for Burt Reynolds, and partly because it sits on a couple of the "greatest ever" lists I'm slowly working through. I was happy to oblige. The only snag was that I&
Rating: 1.5★
Blame the algorithm. Tina Romero's Queens of the Dead had just finished, I was already in a zombie mood with my critical faculties suitably loosened, and before I'd even reached for the remote the next thing had started playing. That next thing was The Video Dead,
Rating: 3.5★
(500) Days of Summer opens by telling you, in as many words, that it is "not a love story, but a story about love." That is true, as far as it goes, but I would argue the framing is still a little off: this is a story about
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