Cinema in the 2020s has been defined by disruption: streaming upended theatrical habits, the pandemic forced a rethink of what a film release even means, and audiences have increasingly embraced subtitled films like How to Make Millions Before Grandma Dies alongside big animation and documentary work. Macca's reviews from the decade reflect that breadth. Browse what he's made of it below.
Rating: 4.0★
I honestly don't understand what went wrong at the box office with this one. Kenji Kamiyama's animated take on Tolkien came and went in late 2024 with barely a ripple, dismissed by critics and ignored by audiences, and I cannot for the life of me work
Rating: 1.5★
Sometimes a film's premise does all the heavy lifting and the film itself does almost none. That's the frustrating situation with Prasanna Vithanage's Paradise, a Sri Lankan drama that arrives with what sounds like a genuinely compelling idea and then spends its entire runtime
Rating: 3.0★
There are films you enjoy, and then there are films you survive. Babygirl falls squarely into the second category, and I mean that as something close to a compliment. Halina Reijn's erotic thriller is arguably one of the most uncomfortable films I've sat through in years,
Rating: 2.0★
My seven-year-old lost interest before the climax. That, more than anything, tells you what you need to know about Jungle Beat: The Movie. If a child who will happily rewatch the same episode of a cartoon twelve times in a row starts drifting off during a kids'
5th Cinecitta Italian Doc Season
Roberto Rossellini did as much as anyone to change what cinema could be. The father of Italian neorealism, he dragged the camera out of the studio and into the rubble of a real, wounded country with Rome, Open City and Paisan, and the films he made went on to shape
Rating: 4.0★
I'll be completely honest: when I first sat down to watch Lucia Kašová's documentary The Sailor, I wasn't entirely sure I was going to enjoy it. That might sound like a strange thing to admit up front, but there it is. The opening is
5th Cinecitta Italian Doc Season
The Italian documentary maker Gianluca Matarrese has built a name on pointing his camera at people who soon forget it is there. With I Want Her Dead he plants himself inside one feuding family in a remote Calabrian village, where a woman named Luisa is at war with her mother,
Rating: 3.0★
Kieran Culkin is magnetic in this film. Whatever scene he's in, whatever he's doing, you simply cannot look away from him. That's a good thing, because A Real Pain pretty much lives or dies by whether you buy into his performance, and he more
Muslim International Film Festival (MIFF)
Some films you watch, and some you live alongside. Birds of War belongs to the second kind. The filmmakers Janay Boulos and Abd Alkader Habak, a London-based Lebanese journalist and a Syrian activist and cameraman, turn the camera on themselves and their own thirteen-year love story, assembled from
Muslim International Film Festival (MIFF)
The Pakistani writer-director Seemab Gul built her reputation on short films before stepping up to her first feature, and Ghost School arrives with real festival pedigree, having played in the Berlinale's Generation strand and picked up a Crystal Bear nomination. It reaches UK audiences as part of
Rating: 4.0★
There's a moment early in Memoria where Tilda Swinton's character jolts awake at a sound nobody else seems to hear, a deep, resonant thud that comes from nowhere and goes nowhere, and I genuinely wasn't sure what kind of film I was watching. Horror?
Rating: 2.5★
There's a moment in They Will Kill You that I keep coming back to. The screen goes almost completely black, and all you can see is a flaming axe carving through the darkness, each swing briefly illuminating a fight in bloody, flickering flashes. It's properly spectacular,
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