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.
Rating: 4.5★
Released in 2015 and selected as France's entry for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film (a choice that raised a few eyebrows given the film's Turkish setting and co-production roots), Mustang arrived at a moment when European and international cinema was in lively
Rating: 2.0★
There are films made for the multiplex, films made for the festival circuit, and then films that seem to exist in a category entirely their own. Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010) falls squarely into that third group. Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul (known affectionately to critics and
Rating: 2.0★
There are certain films that arrive trailing so much critical consensus that questioning them feels almost impolite. Mad Max: Fury Road is one of those films. Released in May 2015 after a production history that became something of a legend in itself, George Miller's return to the post-
Rating: 3.5★
Luca Guadagnino's Call Me by Your Name arrived in 2017 as one of the most talked-about films of that awards season, and it has barely been out of the conversation since. Based on André Aciman's 2007 novel of the same name, the story is set
Rating: 2.5★
When Gareth Evans and Iko Uwais unleashed The Raid on the world in 2011, the response was somewhere between astonishment and mild disbelief. A Welsh director working in Indonesia with a relatively modest budget had produced one of the most viscerally efficient action films in years, a single-location siege
Rating: 4.0★
American Samoa is, by most conventional football metrics, about as far from the top of the world game as it is possible to get. A small archipelago in the South Pacific with a population of around 55,000, it fields a national side that, in the early 2000s, had become
Rating: 3.0★
The Federated States of Micronesia sits roughly halfway between Hawaii and the Philippines, a scattering of islands in the western Pacific that most people would struggle to place on a map. Since 1986, Micronesia has been tied to the United States through the Compact of Free Association, an arrangement that
Rating: 4.0★
El Salvador's cinema rarely finds its way onto the international festival circuit, which makes Cachada: The Opportunity something of an event in itself. The country carries one of the heaviest burdens of gender-based violence in Latin America, a social reality that sits quietly beneath this film'
Rating: 3.5★
Pablo Larraín has spent the better part of two decades becoming one of the most distinctive voices in world cinema, building a filmography that returns again and again to power, identity, and the kind of grief that refuses to resolve neatly. His earlier work, the so-called Pinochet trilogy (Tony
Rating: 3.0★
Filipino cinema has long had a comfortable relationship with the romantic drama, producing films that wear their emotions openly and tend to prioritise feeling over formal ambition. I'm Drunk, I Love You, released in 2017, sits squarely within that tradition. The premise is a familiar one: two college
Rating: 1.0★
Mermaids have had a curious relationship with horror cinema. The creature sits at a crossroads between ancient folklore and monster-movie tradition, and filmmakers have periodically tried to drag it away from the fairy-tale end of the spectrum toward something more threatening. It is a reasonable instinct. Greek mythology,
Rating: 3.0★
By 2019, the Fast & Furious franchise had spent nearly two decades transforming itself from a moderately budgeted street-racing thriller into one of Hollywood's most reliably enormous franchises, complete with international espionage, orbital satellites, and a mythology so dense it practically requires a flow chart to follow.
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