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: 4.0★
There is a particular breed of low-budget independent animation that arrives with almost no fanfare, earns its reputation entirely by word of mouth, and ends up outlasting films that cost a hundred times more to make. On-Gaku: Our Sound is squarely in that company. Based on Hiroyuki Ohashi&
Rating: 4.0★
Female genital mutilation is one of the most widely practised and least openly discussed human rights issues in the world. The World Health Organisation estimates that more than 200 million women and girls alive today have undergone some form of the procedure, with prevalence particularly high across parts of sub-
Rating: 3.0★
Horror has always had a habit of finding its most unsettling footing when it roots itself in a very specific place and time. Under the Shadow, released in 2016, does exactly that, setting its supernatural premise inside a Tehran apartment block during the brutal, grinding years of the Iran-Iraq
Rating: 0.5★
South Sudan became the world's youngest nation in July 2011, following decades of civil conflict and a hard-won independence referendum. For a country still organising its basic institutions, establishing a film industry was never going to be a priority, and the evidence bears that out: domestic cinematic
Rating: 2.0★
Rudolf Buitendach is a South African filmmaker who has worked across commercials, short films, and low-budget features, generally operating in that productive but unglamorous space where resourceful production and modest ambition tend to meet. Where the Road Runs Out, released in 2014 and co-produced through Cotton Tree Productions
Rating: 2.0★
There are roughly 56,000 people living in Greenland, spread across one of the largest and most sparsely populated landmasses on Earth. Most of those people are concentrated in the coastal towns of the south and west. Go further north, further still into the frozen periphery, and the communities become
Rating: 2.5★
There is something almost quaint about the fact that Bright arrived in December 2017 with the kind of fanfare usually reserved for a major studio tent-pole release, yet landed quietly on Netflix with no theatrical run to speak of. That was still a relatively novel distribution model for a
Rating: 3.0★
Kiyoshi Kurosawa has built one of the most distinctive careers in contemporary Japanese cinema, arriving at international recognition on the back of unsettling genre films like Cure (1997) and Pulse (2001) before gradually broadening his scope into quieter, more domestically scaled dramas. To the Ends of the Earth, released in
Rating: 3.0★
Action cinema has always had a restless relationship with the camera. From the bone-crunching physicality of films like The Raid 2 to the elegantly choreographed mayhem of Hong Kong classics, directors have spent decades searching for new ways to put audiences inside the violence rather than simply watching it
Rating: 3.0★
Some film properties feel like they have no business working as feature-length cinema. The Trolls, those wide-eyed, neon-haired plastic dolls originally designed by Danish woodcutter Thomas Dam in 1959, spent decades as a toy-shelf curiosity and occasional cultural shorthand for gaudy kitsch. By the time DreamWorks
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
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