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: 2.5★
Thirteen years is a long time to wait for a sequel. When Avatar (2009) landed, it rewrote the rulebook on blockbuster spectacle, becoming the highest-grossing film in cinema history and turning stereoscopic 3D into something audiences actually sought out rather than tolerated. James Cameron had always promised more stories
Rating: 2.0★
The Comoros, a small archipelago nation nestled in the Indian Ocean between Madagascar and the east coast of Africa, is about as far from Hollywood as it is possible to get, in every sense. With a population of under a million people and an economy that regularly ranks among the
Rating: 2.0★
Short films occupy a peculiar corner of the film world. With no commercial distributor to answer to and often no budget worth speaking of, a short is theoretically the purest expression of a filmmaker's instincts: you have a handful of minutes, a single idea, and nowhere to hide.
Rating: 4.0★
Tunisia's post-revolution years produced a wave of filmmaking that wrestled openly with what had been suppressed for decades: questions of religion, gender, state violence, and family. Four Daughters (2023) sits within that tradition while doing something altogether more unusual with it. The film begins from a real
Rating: 1.5★
There is something genuinely exciting about the idea of a kaiju film rooted in the Caribbean. The genre, broadly speaking, has been Japanese territory since Toho Studios first unleashed Godzilla on unsuspecting cinema audiences in 1954, and the handful of Western studios that have tried their hand at giant-creature
Rating: 3.5★
Lithuanian cinema does not often make waves on the international festival circuit, but Toxic (2024) arrived with enough momentum to turn heads. Writer-director Saulė Bliuvaitė's debut feature picked up the Golden Leopard in the Signs of Life section at Locarno, which is precisely the kind of recognition
Rating: 4.0★
The Shetland Islands sit at the very top of the British Isles, closer to Bergen than to Edinburgh, and they carry a particular kind of weather-beaten remoteness that feels almost mythological to anyone who has only seen them on a map. It is exactly the sort of place where
Rating: 2.0★
Few toy franchises have had as stubborn a grip on popular imagination as Masters of the Universe. What began as a Mattel action figure line in 1982 snowballed, almost immediately, into an animated television series that became a Saturday morning institution for an entire generation of children on both sides
Rating: 4.0★
Andy Weir's 2021 novel Project Hail Mary arrived with a fair amount of goodwill already attached to it. Weir had, after all, written The Martian, a book that had been turned into a reasonably beloved Ridley Scott film, and readers of the new novel were almost immediately asking
Rating: 4.0★
Tourism, as an industry, generates somewhere in the region of ten per cent of global GDP and employs one in ten people on the planet. Those are staggering numbers, and yet the conversation about what mass tourism actually does to the places it touches, the communities it displaces, the ecosystems
Rating: 2.5★
The Aztec death whistle is one of those historical curiosities that sounds almost too good to be true. Unearthed by archaeologists in Mexico during the 1990s, these small clay instruments shaped like skulls produce a sound variously described as a human scream, a howling wind, or something altogether harder to
Rating: 4.5★
There is a particular kind of filmmaker who treats cinema less like storytelling and more like controlled detonation, and Josh Safdie is firmly in that camp. After cutting his teeth on scrappier, street-level fare alongside his brother Benny, including the brothers' breakthrough with Uncut Gems (2019), Josh steps
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