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: 3.0★
Garrett Bradley is one of the more distinctive voices to have emerged from American documentary filmmaking in recent years, and America (2019) is one of the works that put her firmly on the map. Running at just thirty minutes, it sits comfortably in the tradition of the short-form essay
Rating: 1.5★
The short film is a curious creature in the broader landscape of cinema. Freed from the commercial pressures that govern feature production, it can take risks, experiment with form, and land a genuine punch in the time it takes to boil a kettle. Some of the most memorable pieces of
Rating: 3.0★
Bulgarian cinema has, over the past two decades or so, carved out a modest but respected place in the European art house conversation, with films that tend to favour economic storytelling, unglamorous settings, and a willingness to sit with uncomfortable social realities. The Lesson (or Urok in its original Bulgarian)
Rating: 2.5★
By the time Marvel Studios released Captain Marvel in March 2019, the Marvel Cinematic Universe was already eleven years and twenty films deep. The studio was weeks away from the release of Avengers: Endgame, and this origin story for Carol Danvers was positioned as something of a bridge: the MCU&
Rating: 3.0★
When Black Panther arrived in February 2018, it landed with a weight that went well beyond the usual Marvel marketing fanfare. For a studio that had spent a decade building one of the most profitable franchises in cinema history, the film represented something genuinely overdue: a superhero blockbuster centred on
Rating: 3.0★
Somali piracy became one of the defining news stories of the late 2000s and early 2010s, filling broadsheet column inches and television bulletins with images of armed men on skiffs, ransomed supertankers, and naval patrols in the Gulf of Aden. Hollywood's response was largely to frame it as
Rating: 1.5★
Jean-Luc Godard spent the better part of six decades making films that refused to sit still, and by the time Goodbye to Language arrived in 2014 he was eighty-three years old and showing absolutely no interest in making things easier for anyone. The film premiered at Cannes, where
Rating: 2.5★
Jorge Mario Bergoglio became the 266th Pope of the Catholic Church in March 2013, and from the moment he stepped onto the balcony of St Peter's Basilica and asked the crowd to pray for him before he blessed them, it was clear that something had shifted in the
Rating: 3.0★
Arthur Jafa is a name that carries considerable weight in American visual culture, even if mainstream audiences might not immediately place it. A cinematographer by training (his credits include Spike Lee's Crooklyn and Julie Dash's landmark Daughters of the Dust), Jafa spent decades thinking seriously about
Rating: 2.5★
Aquaman arrived in December 2018 at something of a crossroads for the DC Extended Universe. Warner Bros. had spent several years watching Marvel print money while their own interconnected franchise stumbled through mixed-to-hostile receptions for Batman v Superman and Justice League. The pressure on this one was real:
Rating: 2.5★
Olivier Assayas has spent the better part of four decades building a reputation as one of French cinema's more restless and formally curious directors. Coming off the two-part miniseries Carlos (2010) and the well-received Clouds of Sils Maria (2014), in which he first worked with Kristen
Rating: 3.0★
Bhutan does not have a long history as a film-producing nation. For much of the twentieth century it was closed to outside visitors entirely, and even after cautiously opening its borders in the 1970s it remained one of the least-filmed countries on the planet. That cultural insularity, combined
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