The 1930s were shaped by Hollywood's full embrace of sound, the rise of the studio system, and a remarkable run of horror, comedy and noir that still holds up. Fritz Lang's M and Tod Browning's Freaks both arrived in the early years of the decade, pulling cinema into genuinely unsettling territory. Browse Macca's reviews below.
Rating: 3.5★
By 1936, Hollywood had refined the screwball comedy into something close to its own genre, a peculiar fusion of physical farce, rapid-fire wit, and class anxiety that felt perfectly suited to Depression-era audiences who were, by and large, in no mood to be sympathetic towards the idle rich.
Rating: 2.5★
The Aran Islands sit off the west coast of County Galway, three limestone outcrops where the Atlantic has the run of things and the soil, such as it is, has to be coaxed from seaweed and sand. By the early twentieth century they had acquired a particular romantic charge in
Rating: 3.5★
The most surprising thing about Bride of Frankenstein is how much heart it has. I turned up expecting a lurching-monster picture, a 1935 horror sequel picking up exactly where the original left off, more of the same gothic atmosphere and pitchfork-wielding villagers. What James Whale actually delivers is
Country United States Of America
There's a moment watching King Kong when you have to stop and remind yourself: they made this in 1933. No computers. No CGI. No motion capture. Just ingenuity, patience, and craftsmanship that, frankly, puts plenty of modern blockbusters to shame in terms of sheer ambition. I came away
Rating: 3.5★
Some films impress you. A few make you sit up and wonder how on earth they were made at all. The Tale of the Fox is firmly the latter. This is a stop-motion feature very nearly ninety years old, the painstaking puppet work of Władysław Starewicz and his daughter
Rating: 1.0★
There's a version of this review where I open with genuine respect for the avant-garde tradition, tip my hat to the academics, and ease you gently into my reservations. But honestly? Twenty minutes of a bloke cutting up someone else's footage and slowing it down
Rating: 3.0★
"Mother of mercy, is this the end of Rico?" It's one of the most quoted final lines in film history, and the fact that you probably already know it tells you everything about the strange position Little Caesar occupies. This is a film that matters enormously,
Rating: 4.0★
Claude Rains never shows his face. That's the trick, and it shouldn't work as well as it does. For virtually the entire runtime of James Whale's The Invisible Man, your lead actor is a voice, a set of bandages, and a pair of trousers
Rating: 3.5★
There's a moment in The 39 Steps where Robert Donat finds himself handcuffed to Madeleine Carroll and the pair have to navigate a Scottish hillside together, bickering and stumbling, and it's genuinely charming. It's also the moment that best captures what this film is:
Genre Drama
★½ — Earth (1930)
Genre Comedy
★★★ — Monkey Business (1931)
Genre Drama
★★½ — Sabotage (1936)
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