The 2010s were defined by a tension between blockbuster spectacle and a quiet surge in world cinema, with films like Inception and Parasite sitting at opposite ends of a very wide spectrum. Streaming reshaped how audiences found smaller work, and festival circuits felt more vital than ever. Browse Macca's reviews from the decade below.
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In 2017 Universal tried to do it all again, only bigger, darker and joined up. The Mummy was meant to be the cornerstone of a whole shared "Dark Universe" of classic monsters, with Tom Cruise drafted in to carry it and Russell Crowe waiting in the wings as
Rating: 3.0★
Short films rarely get the sustained attention they deserve, and Kibwe Tavares's Jonah (2013) is a good case in point. Running at just seventeen minutes, it is the kind of work that gets a festival circuit run, picks up a few well-deserved column inches, and then quietly
Rating: 2.0★
San Marino is not a country you would typically associate with a film industry. The landlocked microstate, entirely surrounded by Italy and home to fewer than 35,000 people, has produced only a handful of films across its entire history. That alone makes Mordraud (2013) something of a curiosity worth
Rating: 2.5★
Brunei Darussalam is, to put it gently, not a country that tends to dominate film festival circuits or multiplex schedules. With a population of under half a million and no particularly established commercial film industry to speak of, any feature production coming out of the Sultanate is something of a
Rating: 4.0★
Few sports controversies have lodged themselves in the public imagination quite like the 1994 attack on Nancy Kerrigan, a moment so bizarre and theatrical that it almost beggared belief even as it was happening. A kneecapping, a rink-side wail, a disgraced champion, and a cast of supporting conspirators who
Rating: 3.0★
Djibouti is not a country that tends to feature prominently in film criticism, or in much cultural conversation beyond geopolitical news bulletins. A small nation on the Horn of Africa, bordered by Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Somalia, it has a population of under a million people and a film industry that,
Rating: 4.0★
Few films arrive with quite the weight of expectation that Capernaum carried into cinemas in 2018. Directed by Lebanese filmmaker Nadine Labaki and premiering at Cannes, where it won the Jury Prize, the film centres on Zain, a twelve-year-old boy living in the poverty-stricken backstreets of Beirut,
Rating: 2.5★
There is a certain romantic melancholy baked into the very source material of Ali and Nino. The 1937 novel of the same name, published under the pen name Kurban Said, has been attributed to various authors over the decades (the true identity of its writer remains genuinely disputed), but its
Rating: 4.0★
Sudan is not a country with a long or well-resourced filmmaking tradition. Decades of conflict, economic instability, and a cultural climate that offered little institutional support for the arts meant that, for much of the twentieth century, Sudanese cinema barely existed as a going concern. That context matters when
Rating: 3.5★
There is a particular kind of film that arrives with little fanfare, plays a handful of festivals, and then quietly refuses to leave your head for weeks afterwards. Rungano Nyoni's I Am Not a Witch (2017) is very much one of those films. The premise draws from a
Rating: 4.0★
Coming-of-age stories are hardly in short supply at the cinema, but every so often one arrives that feels less like a genre exercise and more like a memory someone has chosen to share with you. Lady Bird, released in 2017, is one of those films. Set in Sacramento,
Rating: 3.0★
And Then We Danced arrived in 2019 against a backdrop of real political tension. When the film screened at the Tbilisi Film Festival, far-right and nationalist groups organised protests outside cinemas, with some screenings requiring police protection. That reception said rather a lot about the territory the film was
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