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: 3.5★
There's a shot early in A Bittersweet Life where the camera simply holds on the protagonist, standing in the rain outside a restaurant, suit immaculate, face unreadable. Nothing is said. Nothing needs to be. Kim Jee-woon is already telling you everything about this man, his world, and
Rating: 1.0★
Let me paint you a picture. You sit down for a film challenge, press play on what you think is the first entry in a franchise, and spend the next ninety minutes slowly realising something is very, very wrong. The story feels like it's referencing events you never
Rating: 1.0★
Some films are bad in an interesting way. Max Havoc: Curse of the Dragon is not one of them. It's bad in the way a damp Tuesday afternoon is bad: no drama, no spectacle, just a grey stretch of time you'll never get back. I watched
Rating: 1.0★
There's a version of Cigarette (or Shigara, to use its Tigrinya title) that works. Fifteen minutes, a young lad picks up smoking, faces the consequences, learns his lesson. That's a perfectly decent skeleton for a public-health short, and the instinct behind it is genuinely good-
Rating: 2.5★
There's a moment roughly halfway through this film where I genuinely lost track of which robot was fighting which, who was winning, where it was happening, and frankly why I should care. A jumble of chrome limbs and grinding metal fills the screen, the camera whips around at
Rating: 3.5★
There are films you see at the right moment in your life that hit like a thunderclap, and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was exactly that for me. I was a wide-eyed teenager picking up what felt like a "decent" rental, and what I got was something closer
Rating: 3.0★
There's something almost perverse about a film that traps its audience in a phone booth for eighty-odd minutes and somehow makes it work. Phone Booth shouldn't hold together. On paper it sounds like a gimmick, a pitch you'd scribble on a napkin, and
Rating: 3.5★
There's a moment early in Fish Tank where Mia, alone on a concrete walkway, throws herself into dancing with a ferocity that's equal parts joy and fury. Nobody's watching. Nobody ever watches. And that, right there, is the whole film in miniature: a girl
Genre Adventure
★★★ — Kirikou and the Wild Beasts (2005)
Genre Comedy
★★★½ — Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy (2004)
Genre Fantasy
★★ — Daredevil (2003)
Genre Drama
★★ — Old Joy (2006)
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