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: 3.5★
Video game adaptations have had a long and largely undistinguished relationship with the big screen, and Sega's most famous blue mascot was no exception to that tradition. The original Sonic the Hedgehog (2020) arrived trailing some of the most vocal pre-release backlash in recent memory (that infamous
Rating: 2.5★
Frank Herbert's 1965 novel Dune has spent decades being called unfilmable, which is either a challenge or a warning depending on who you ask. David Lynch found out the hard way in 1984, producing a film so chaotic and misshapen that Herbert himself reportedly walked out of an
Rating: 2.0★
Zom 100: Bucket List of the Dead arrives with a premise that feels tailor-made for the current cultural moment. Japan has long grappled, both in fiction and in daily life, with the phenomenon of karoshi, the concept of death by overwork, and the broader anxiety around salaryman culture, where
Rating: 3.0★
There is a particular kind of horror film that works best as a time capsule: one so rooted in the anxieties, language, and social rituals of its precise cultural moment that watching it even a few years later feels faintly anthropological. Bodies Bodies Bodies (2022) is very much that kind
Rating: 4.0★
When Sony Pictures Animation released Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse in 2018, it landed with the force of something genuinely new. The film collapsed the boundary between comic-book page and cinema screen in a way that felt less like a technical trick and more like a philosophical statement
Edinburgh International Film Festival
Thom Lunshof's First Zone, a Dutch post-apocalyptic drama premiering In Competition at the Edinburgh International Film Festival. Beautifully shot and scored with a strong lead, but a world left frustratingly unexplained.
Edinburgh International Film Festival
I came to The Mad World of Harvey Kurtzman knowing almost nothing about the man, and not a great deal more about the magazine that made him. MAD is one of those American institutions that only ever reached these shores second-hand, through references in other things, the gap-toothed
Rating: 2.0★
Video game adaptations have had a famously troubled relationship with cinema, and Uncharted arrives as one of the most anticipated, and most protracted, attempts to buck that trend. The game series, developed by Naughty Dog and first released by Sony in 2007, spent the better part of two decades building
Rating: 2.0★
Aki Kaurismäki has spent the better part of four decades building one of world cinema's most recognisable signatures: deadpan working-class characters, colour-saturated interiors that feel frozen in some indeterminate post-war decade, and a studied economy of dialogue that his admirers read as poetic restraint. The
Rating: 4.0★
Some sequels arrive with a quiet confidence, and some arrive with an F/A-18 Super Hornet at low altitude. Top Gun: Maverick is firmly in the second category. Thirty-six years after Tony Scott's original turned Tom Cruise into a global superstar and the United States Navy&
Rating: 4.0★
High school comedies have a way of cycling through trends, and for a while the prevailing one was the post-Superbad riff: a pair of socially marginal kids, a single chaotic night, and the messy business of working out who they actually are. Bottoms, released in the summer of 2023,
Rating: 3.5★
Video game adaptations have had a notoriously bumpy road to the big screen, but the Mortal Kombat franchise has always occupied a slightly different corner of that conversation. The original 1995 film is, for a certain generation, a genuinely beloved piece of nineties nonsense, and when Simon McQuoid's
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