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: 2.5★
Casshern arrives with a genuinely unusual pedigree. The source material is a 1973 Tatsunoko Production anime series, Casshan: Robot Hunter, which built a modest but loyal following in Japan on the strength of its pulpy, post-apocalyptic premise and its brooding cyborg hero. The property sat largely dormant for three
Rating: 2.0★
Dominica, the small Eastern Caribbean island not to be confused with the Dominican Republic, sits in a curious position when it comes to cinema. With a population of under 75,000 and no established domestic film industry to speak of, the country's total cinematic output amounts to a
Rating: 3.0★
Horror remakes are a risky business at the best of times, and the early 2000s were full of Hollywood studios eyeing up Japanese genre cinema with the kind of enthusiasm that did not always translate well to screen. Ringu, Hideo Nakata's 1998 adaptation of Koji Suzuki's
Rating: 3.5★
Before Andrea Arnold became the director associated with sun-scorched housing estates and raw, unvarnished portraits of working-class British life, she announced herself to the world with a twenty-six minute film made on a modest budget for Cowboy Films, the UK Film Council, and Film4. Wasp, released in
Rating: 4.0★
Released in 2004, Turtles Can Fly arrived at a moment when the dust from the 2003 invasion of Iraq had barely begun to settle. Shot on location in the Kurdish regions of Iran and Iraq, the film plants itself on the Turkey-Iraq border in the days just before the
Rating: 3.0★
Released in October 2001, Joy Ride arrives at an interesting crossroads in American thriller cinema. The road movie as a vehicle for dread has a long and well-worn history in Hollywood, stretching back through the paranoid highways of 1970s genre films and most famously through Steven Spielberg's
Rating: 4.0★
The early 2000s were something of a golden era for the prestige Hollywood epic, the kind of film that demanded a big screen and an interval ice cream, and The Last Samurai arrived in 2003 very much as a product of that moment. Set against the backdrop of the Meiji
Rating: 3.0★
By the time 3 Idiots arrived in Indian cinemas in December 2009, Bollywood had been producing crowd-pleasing comedies with social conscience for decades, but rarely had the two ingredients come together quite so explosively at the box office. The film grossed well over three billion rupees on its original
Macca's Must Watch
There is a particular kind of road trip film that uses the open road less as a backdrop and more as a pressure cooker, a confined, moving space where the real journey is entirely internal. Alfonso Cuarón's Y Tu Mamá También, released in Mexico in 2001, belongs firmly
Rating: 3.0★
There is a particular kind of British film that arrives quietly, gets called a modest crowd-pleaser, and then refuses to leave the cultural conversation. Bend It Like Beckham, released in 2002, is very much one of those. Gurinder Chadha's third feature (following the well-received Bhaji on
Rating: 3.0★
By the early 2000s, climate change had begun its slow migration from academic journals and environmental conferences into the popular consciousness, and Hollywood, being Hollywood, spotted an opportunity. The Day After Tomorrow arrived in May 2004 riding a wave of genuine cultural anxiety about global warming, its marketing leaning hard
Rating: 2.5★
Kidnap thrillers were practically their own cottage industry around the turn of the millennium. The genre had plenty of fuel: real-world anxieties about political instability in Latin America, the post-Cold War scramble of private military contractors and crisis negotiators, and a film industry hungry for adult dramas that
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