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.
Raindance Film Festival
Some films matter as much for what they represent as for what is on the screen. Summer School, 2001, the feature debut from director Dužan Duong, is billed as the first Viet-Czech production, a film made by and about the Vietnamese community that has lived and worked in the
Rating: 3.0★
There is a particular kind of coming-of-age film that uses landscape as emotional shorthand, and Murina is very much in that tradition. Antoneta Alamat Kusijanović's debut feature is set almost entirely on and around a small Croatian island in the Adriatic, a place of sunlit water
Rating: 2.0★
There are franchises that have earned their place in the cultural furniture, and then there are franchises that have simply refused to leave the room. Transformers belongs firmly in the second category. What began as a Hasbro toy line in 1984, quickly spun into a Saturday morning cartoon series that
Raindance Film Festival
Japanese genre cinema has rarely been shy of a wild premise, and Nameless, the 2026 thriller from director Hideo Jojo, arrives with one of the wildest in some time. It had its European premiere at the Raindance Film Festival 2026. The best of these high-concept thrillers understand that a
Raindance Film Festival
Some films arrive quietly and stay with you. Silent Rebellion, the French-language drama from director Marie-Elsa Sgualdo, is one of them. Known in French as À bras-le-corps, it is a Belgian, French and Swiss co-production and Sgualdo's feature debut, and it has been
Rating: 3.5★
Canada and Pakistan make for an unusual co-production pairing, but The Queen of My Dreams (2023) earns that combination honestly. The film sits at the crossroads of a Pakistani immigrant experience and a rural Canadian coming-of-age story, using the sudden death of a father as the catalyst
Rating: 3.5★
Montserrat is a small British Overseas Territory in the Lesser Antilles, roughly the size of a medium-sized English market town, and for most of its modern history it was best known for its lush hills, its recording studios (the Rolling Stones and Paul McCartney both worked there in the
Rating: 2.5★
There is something genuinely bittersweet about the video rental shop as a cultural relic. For anyone who grew up in Britain or Ireland during the 1980s and early 1990s, the local video store was a kind of temple, its back shelves lined with lurid VHS covers promising monsters, mayhem, and
Rating: 4.0★
Japanese cinema has a long tradition of examining ordinary families under extraordinary pressure, and few directors working today understand that territory better than Hirokazu Kore-eda. Since his early documentaries in the 1990s, Kore-eda has built a body of work concerned with the quiet fractures inside domestic life: children
Rating: 3.0★
Animation from outside the Hollywood and major European studio circuits has had something of a quiet renaissance over the past decade or so, with films like Josep and No Dogs or Italians Allowed demonstrating that hand-crafted, personal animation can carry real emotional weight without the backing of a nine-
Macca's Must Watch
Cinema has long wrestled with the Palestinian experience, but rarely with the scope and emotional weight that All That's Left of You attempts. The film opens in the Occupied West Bank of the 1980s, where a single act of protest by a teenage boy sets in motion a
Rating: 3.5★
Short horror films occupy a curious corner of the genre. Freed from the obligation to pad a story to feature length, the best of them can land a single, well-aimed punch and walk away clean. Moshari (2022) is one such film: a Bangladeshi production running to around twenty-two
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