The 2000s were defined by franchise ambition and digital transformation, with studios betting big on serialised spectacle while world cinema found new urgency in films like City of God. It was a decade that rewarded patience, building stories across years and sequels. See what Macca made of it all in the reviews below.
Rating: 4.0★
Persepolis arrived in 2007 as something of an anomaly: a French animated feature, produced in black and white, adapted from a pair of autobiographical graphic novels, and set against the backdrop of the Iranian Revolution and its aftermath. The source material, written and drawn by Marjane Satrapi and published between
Rating: 3.0★
Released in 2002 through HBO Films and the small independent outfit LaVoo Productions, Real Women Have Curves arrived at a moment when Latina voices were conspicuously thin on the ground in American cinema, and when coming-of-age stories centred on working-class immigrant families were thinner still. The film
Rating: 3.0★
There is a particular kind of story that music throws up more reliably than almost any other world: the band that nearly made it. The ones who were there at the right moment, played alongside the right people, had the songs, had the hunger, and then watched the wave break
Rating: 3.5★
Wes Anderson's seventh feature, The Darjeeling Limited, arrived in 2007 off the back of The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, a film that had divided audiences and critics alike, and it carried with it a sense of the director needing to reassert himself without quite reinventing the wheel.
Rating: 2.0★
Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet are, depending on your disposition, either two of European cinema's most uncompromising visionaries or two of its most wilfully alienating formalists. Possibly both. The Franco-German couple worked together from the early 1960s until Huillet's death in 2006, producing a
Rating: 4.5★
There Will Be Blood arrived in late 2007 carrying the kind of quiet, serious weight that tends to announce itself without needing to shout. Paul Thomas Anderson's sixth feature is a period drama set across the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, rooted loosely in Upton Sinclair'
Rating: 2.0★
There is a certain kind of comedy that exists purely on the strength of one outrageous idea, betting everything on the audience's willingness to go along for the ride regardless of whether the script can keep pace. White Chicks, released in the summer of 2004, is a fairly
Rating: 3.5★
There is a particular kind of Greek cinema that exists almost entirely outside the mainstream, and Dogtooth (or Kynodontas, in its original Greek) sits right at the centre of that tradition. Released in 2009 and co-produced by the Greek Film Centre alongside Boo Productions and Horsefly Productions, the film
Rating: 4.0★
Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler published The Gruffalo in 1999, and within a decade it had become one of those rare children's books that parents can recite from memory whether they want to or not. The rhyming couplets, the woodland setting, the mouse with an improbable imagination: all
Rating: 3.5★
By the turn of the millennium, Wes Anderson had already established himself as one of American independent cinema's more distinctive voices, first with Bottle Rocket (1996) and then with the cult-beloved Rushmore (1998). With The Royal Tenenbaums, he stepped up in scale and ambition, moving from the
Rating: 4.0★
By 2008, Clint Eastwood had spent the better part of six decades becoming one of cinema's most recognisable faces, and Gran Torino feels, in many ways, like a reckoning with that fact. The film arrives at a particular moment in American cultural life: Detroit as a setting already
Rating: 2.5★
Mike Judge had already proved himself a sharp, sardonic observer of American cultural mediocrity long before Idiocracy arrived in 2006. His animated series Beavis and Butt-Head (and its big-screen spin-off, Beavis and Butt-Head Do America) skewered the slack-jawed end of the pop culture spectrum with
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