The 1980s split cinema between blockbuster excess and quiet, searching art house work: the same decade that gave us The Empire Strikes Back also produced Paris, Texas and Cinema Paradiso. Hollywood chased franchises and spectacle while European and world cinema asked slower, harder questions. Macca's reviews cover the full range, so have a browse.
Rating: 4.0★
There is a very specific, primal dread associated with picking up a stranger on a desolate stretch of highway, and Robert Harmon's 1986 thriller The Hitcher weaponises that exact anxiety to brilliant effect. It gets under your skin almost immediately, tapping into something ancient and instinctive, the kind
Rating: 4.0★
Let's talk about practical effects, because if any film makes the case for them over weightless, pixelated CGI, it's this one. The Fly is the gold standard of body horror, and the reason it works so ferociously well comes down to latex, foam, and fake blood
Rating: 3.0★
Some films arrive with a completely unexpected key that unlocks them. I pressed play on Monkey Shines expecting a reasonably straightforward 80s horror thriller, and about twenty minutes in, I had one of those bizarre pop-culture lightbulb moments that genuinely stopped me in my tracks. This is the exact
Rating: 3.0★
There's a moment in The Secret of NIMH where you catch yourself leaning forward, genuinely unsettled, and then you remember this is supposed to be a Saturday afternoon film for kids. That tension, that slight discomfort at how dark and serious everything feels, is really the whole story
Rating: 3.0★
Whenever the names Werner Herzog and Klaus Kinski come up in the same breath, the phrase "toxic relationship" practically hangs in the air like smoke. Their final collaboration together is a glaring reminder of why. I often find myself wondering what on earth kept drawing them back to
Rating: 3.5★
There is a quiet magic to A Dessert for Constance that genuinely sneaks up on you. Sarah Maldoror's 1981 picture announces itself with the kind of premise that could easily slide into bleak social commentary: two immigrants in France, doing the thankless, back-breaking work of refuse collection.
Rating: 3.5★
Sometimes a film catches you completely off guard, and that's the best possible feeling. I'll be honest: a 1980s rural Slavic road trip movie wasn't exactly on my radar as essential weekend viewing. But Slobodan Šijan's Who's Singin' Over
Rating: 4.5★
I genuinely paused the screen multiple times just to stare at a single frame. Not to grab a snack, not because something was confusing, but because Katsuhiro Otomo's Neo-Tokyo is so meticulously, breathtakingly rendered that to simply let it play felt almost disrespectful. That's the
Rating: 3.5★
Being half Romani, I came to Time of the Gypsies carrying a particular kind of curiosity. I knew the Romani experience depicted here, in what was then Yugoslavia, would be worlds away from anything I grew up with in the UK. What I didn't quite expect was how
Rating: 3.5★
It's genuinely rare to sit down with a piece of cinema that treats its native folklore with this level of unapologetic, mystical fidelity. Souleymane Cissé's Yeelen doesn't just borrow from Bambara mythology and dress it up for outside consumption. It pulls you entirely into
Rating: 3.5★
Jackie Chan is genuinely one of the most underrated actors working in cinema, and I'll keep saying it until more people actually believe me. We get so caught up in the sheer, unadulterated spectacle of his physical comedy that we forget he's actually a brilliant, expressive
Rating: 2.5★
The reputation arrives before the film does. You hear "Bloodsport" and you picture Van Damme in his prime, doing the splits between two chairs, Bolo Yeung thumping his own chest like a man possessed, and a tournament so brutal and underground it makes the UFC look like a
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