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★
By 2009, Walt Disney Animation Studios had spent the better part of a decade in something of an identity crisis. The golden run of the late 1980s and 1990s, the period critics tend to call the Disney Renaissance, had petered out, and the studio had spent the intervening years releasing
Rating: 3.0★
Released in 2002, Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron arrived at an interesting crossroads for DreamWorks Animation. The studio had spent the previous few years carving out its identity in opposition to Disney, leaning on irreverence, celebrity voices and knowing winks to the audience. Spirit is none of those things. Co-
Rating: 3.5★
A Town Called Panic arrives from a corner of European animation that rarely gets much attention on this side of the Channel: the Belgian tradition of wilfully odd, low-budget, high-energy filmmaking that seems entirely unbothered by what anyone else is doing. The film grew out of a television
Rating: 1.5★
Paraguay's Chaco War of 1932 to 1935 was one of the bloodiest conflicts in twentieth-century South American history, a grinding territorial dispute between Paraguay and Bolivia fought over scrubland so remote and punishing that disease and thirst killed as many soldiers as combat did. It is not,
Rating: 2.5★
Catherine Breillat has never been a filmmaker interested in making things easy for her audience. The French director built her reputation across a string of provocative, sexually frank features, from Romance (1999) to Fat Girl (2001), that placed the female body and female desire at the centre of the screen
Rating: 3.5★
Werner Herzog has spent five decades building one of the most singular bodies of work in world cinema, and the through-line connecting nearly all of it is a preoccupation with men who burn themselves up chasing something the rest of us would have the good sense to leave alone.
Rating: 3.0★
Japanese cinema at the turn of the millennium was producing some of the most formally adventurous and commercially awkward work anywhere in the world, and The Happiness of the Katakuris (2001) sits near the extreme end of that spectrum. It is, on paper, a remake of the South Korean black
Rating: 3.5★
Michael Mann has spent the better part of four decades making Los Angeles his own particular territory, and Collateral (2004) sits squarely in that tradition. Where Heat spread itself across the city in daylight and shadow over nearly three hours, this film compresses everything into a single night, a single
Rating: 0.5★
Harmony Korine has never been particularly interested in making audiences comfortable. The Kentucky-born writer and director first announced himself to the world as the teenage screenwriter of Larry Clark's Kids (1995), a film that rattled cages on both sides of the Atlantic, and he has spent the
Rating: 3.5★
H. G. Wells published The War of the Worlds in 1898, and the story has never quite left us alone since. Orson Welles sent radio listeners into a panic with his 1938 broadcast adaptation, Byron Haskin put it on screen in 1953, and Jeff Wayne turned it into a prog-
Rating: 3.0★
Terence Davies is one of British cinema's most singular voices, a filmmaker whose work sits at the uncomfortable crossroads of memory, faith, class and longing. Born and raised in Liverpool, he spent the early part of his career turning the landscapes and emotional textures of his childhood into
Rating: 3.0★
Spike Lee arrived at Inside Man in 2006 as something of a surprise package: a studio thriller from a filmmaker whose reputation had been built on personal, politically charged work, from the simmering tensions of Do the Right Thing to the jazz elegy of Mo' Better Blues. For those
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