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★
Released in 2003, Elephant arrived at a moment when American culture was still reckoning, openly and anxiously, with the legacy of the Columbine High School massacre of April 1999. The film takes its title loosely from Alan Clarke's 1989 BBC short of the same name, itself a study
Rating: 2.5★
By 2009, Michael Bay had already established himself as Hollywood's most reliable purveyor of organised chaos, a filmmaker whose work divides audiences as reliably as his editing divides scenes. After the enormous commercial success of Transformers (2007), a sequel was never in doubt. What followed was a production
Rating: 3.0★
The original Starsky & Hutch ran on American television from 1975 to 1979, and for a good stretch of those four series it was one of the most-watched programmes on either side of the Atlantic. Paul Michael Glaser and David Soul made the mismatched-partners formula feel genuinely fresh,
Rating: 4.0★
There are films that tell you a story and films that place you inside one. Edward Yang's Yi Yi, released in 2000 and running to just under three hours, belongs firmly to the second category. Set across the sprawling, neon-tinged domesticity of Taipei, it follows three generations
Rating: 3.5★
South Korean cinema had, by the mid-2000s, already announced itself to international audiences in no uncertain terms. Bong Joon-ho's Memories of Murder had arrived in 2003 to widespread critical admiration, and Park Chan-wook was busy cementing his reputation with the Vengeance trilogy. Into this fertile
Rating: 1.0★
There is a particular corner of the early 2000s direct-to-video market that time has not been especially kind to, and Max Havoc: Ring of Fire (2006) occupies it with a kind of stubborn permanence. The film is a sequel to Max Havoc: Curse of the Dragon (2004), itself
Rating: 1.0★
There are directors who work fast and directors who work cheap, and then there is Albert Pyun, who managed both simultaneously across a career that produced somewhere in the region of fifty feature films. By the time Max Havoc: Curse of the Dragon arrived in 2004, Pyun had already cycled
Rating: 1.0★
Cigarette (known in Tigrinya as Shigara) arrived in 2005 as a short-form family comedy produced across the United States and Eritrea, one of the few feature-adjacent works to emerge from a country whose domestic film industry has remained largely invisible to international audiences. Eritrea's cinema culture
Rating: 2.5★
There are certain franchises that define a particular moment in Hollywood history, and the Transformers series is a fairly clear example of what blockbuster filmmaking looked like in the mid-2000s. The property itself began life as a line of Hasbro toys in the early 1980s, quickly followed by a
Rating: 3.5★
There are certain films that arrive at precisely the right moment, catching a cultural mood and refusing to let go. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, released in the year 2000 and directed by Ang Lee, was very much one of those films. Drawing on the wuxia tradition, a genre with deep
Rating: 3.0★
There was a time, roughly bookended by the anxieties of Y2K and the seismic shock of September 2001, when Hollywood found itself drawn to stories about ordinary people caught in systems they could neither escape nor fully understand. Phone Booth arrives squarely in that window, released in 2002 after a
Rating: 3.5★
Andrea Arnold arrived at Fish Tank with one Cannes Palme d'Or short film already to her name (2003's Wasp) and a BAFTA-winning debut feature in Red Road (2006), a picture that marked her out as one of the sharpest observers of contemporary British social life
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