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★
If you've had a small child in the house at any point this century, you will know The Gruffalo more or less off by heart, whether you meant to or not. Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler's picture book is a fixture of British bedtimes, and there&
Rating: 3.5★
There is a very specific, almost hypnotic rhythm to a Wes Anderson picture. Whether you're watching The Grand Budapest Hotel or Fantastic Mr. Fox, you get this peculiar sensation that absolutely nothing is happening, even while the screen is bursting with meticulously choreographed activity. Characters drift through immaculately
Rating: 4.0★
There is a moment early in Gran Torino where Clint Eastwood, snarling on his porch over the barrel of a rifle, looks less like a man than a monument. Some forty years on from the squint and the poncho of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, still the finest
Rating: 2.5★
There's a version of Idiocracy that works brilliantly. A savage, formally rigorous takedown of anti-intellectualism, commercialisation and the slow rot of public life. The bones of that film are here. Mike Judge clearly has something to say, and in the years since its release, a lot of
Rating: 3.0★
There's a moment early in Paranoid Park where the camera just lingers on a skate bowl, the concrete curves catching light in a way that feels almost underwater, and you think: right, this is going to be something special. Gus Van Sant has a gift for that kind
Rating: 2.5★
There's a moment in Scary Movie 2 where you can almost feel the production running out of ideas in real time. The jokes don't build, they just pile up, louder and cruder and more desperate with each passing minute, as if sheer volume might convince you
Rating: 3.0★
Being buried alive, getting lost underground, being swallowed by the dark with no way out: there are few fears more primal, more hardwired into us, than the ones that live beneath the surface. Neil Marshall gets that. The Descent understands, on a gut level, exactly what makes the idea of
Rating: 3.5★
There is a moment early on in Vicky Cristina Barcelona that stopped me in my tracks. Vicky and Cristina are in the back of a taxi, and the screen literally splits down the middle, placing them side by side: dark hair on one side, blonde on the other. It is
Rating: 3.5★
There is a specific, haunting beauty to the way Roger Deakins shoots a train robbery in the dead of winter. Lantern light catching frozen breath, the world rendered in blues and greys and that particular silence that only deep snow can create. That single sequence tells you everything you need
Rating: 3.5★
There is a very specific, giddy thrill in watching Frank Darabont's creature feature The Mist and playing "spot the future television star" before they actually became famous. If you're a fan of the first season of The Walking Dead (which, funnily enough, Darabont also
Rating: 3.0★
There is something quietly remarkable about the fact that The Legend of Johnny Lingo exists at all. I came to it the way I come to a lot of films these days: not because anyone was clamouring for me to watch it, but because it was my pick for the
Rating: 4.5★
Sometimes going in completely blind is the best thing you can do for yourself. I had a poster in my head: Julia Roberts, a baby, what looked like a quiet family drama. Maybe a character study. Something gentle. What I actually got was a fiercely compelling, true-life legal thriller
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