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: 2.0★
Mauritius is not a country you typically associate with feature animation. The island nation has built a modest but real screen presence over the years, with productions like Tany Mena offering a glimpse of local filmmaking ambition, yet a fully animated family film aimed squarely at the global streaming market
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★
There is a particular kind of documentary that asks almost nothing of you at first and then, quietly, takes everything. The Sailor (2021), directed by Slovak filmmaker Lucia Kašová and produced across Grenada and Slovakia, is precisely that sort of film. Its subject is Paul Earling Johnson, an eighty-year-
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★
There is a particular kind of road trip film that has less to do with the road and everything to do with the people sitting uncomfortably close to one another in it. A Real Pain (2024) belongs firmly in that tradition, though it swaps the car for a guided Holocaust
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★
Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul occupies a singular corner of world cinema, one that tends to divide audiences cleanly into the devoted and the bewildered. His work operates at a frequency all its own: unhurried, sensory, preoccupied with memory, landscape, and the thin membrane between the living and whatever comes after.
Rating: 2.5★
There is a particular flavour of genre film that announces its intentions in the title and then dares you to keep up. They Will Kill You, arriving in 2026 from the production partnership of Nocturna, New Line Cinema, Domain Entertainment and Film Afrika, is very much that kind of picture.
country-palestine
The Palestinian twins Tarzan and Arab Nasser have spent their careers making films about Gaza from the inside out, finding dark comedy and real style in a place the world's cameras usually frame only as tragedy. Once Upon a Time in Gaza, which won them the Best Director
Rating: 2.5★
The Evil Dead franchise occupies a peculiar corner of horror history. Sam Raimi's original 1981 film was a shoestring-budget affair shot in rural Tennessee, equal parts terrifying and accidental slapstick, and it launched careers, spawned a devoted cult following, and essentially wrote the rulebook for a certain
Muslim International Film Festival (MIFF)
Shahad Ameen announced herself with Scales (2019), a stark black and white fable about a girl marked out by her community, which premiered in Critics' Week at Venice and marked her out as one of the most distinctive new voices in Saudi cinema. Six years on, she trades that
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