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.
Country United Kingdom
Some films are hard to grade precisely because they do nothing wrong. Joe Molander's All Change is one of those, a four-minute short that is competent, well acted and perfectly sincere, and that I still cannot talk myself into rating as anything more than average. Two and
Country United Kingdom
There is a particular pleasure in a short film that knows exactly what it is and gets on with it, and Leah Vlemmiks's Agnes is one of those. It is a slight thing, story-wise, but it is made and performed with such care that I came away
Rating: 3.5★
There is a particular kind of documentary that uses the camera not as an observational tool but as an act of love, almost of conjuration. Dick Johnson Is Dead, released in 2020 and distributed through Netflix after its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival, belongs firmly to that tradition. Kirsten
Rating: 3.0★
Taylor Swift occupies a peculiar position in contemporary culture: she is one of the most commercially successful recording artists on the planet, a figure whose every public move generates column inches, and yet she has remained, for years, genuinely difficult to read as a private person. Miss Americana, released on
Rating: 3.5★
Katia and Maurice Krafft were, by most reasonable measures, operating at the outer limit of what a human being can choose to do and survive. The French volcanologist couple spent roughly two decades driving themselves as close as physically possible to active eruptions, camera in hand, building an extraordinary personal
Rating: 2.0★
The Resident Evil franchise has had a complicated relationship with cinema since Paul W.S. Anderson launched the Milla Jovovich series back in 2002. That run stretched to six films, earning a certain loyal following while frustrating fans of Capcom's survival horror games in roughly equal measure. A
Rating: 3.5★
Hong Sang-soo has been making films in South Korea since the mid-1990s, and by the time The Woman Who Ran arrived in 2020 he had settled into a mode of working that is essentially his alone: low-budget, shot quickly, built around conversation, and shaped almost entirely by
2020s
The Influencer Project is a smart, unsettling little thriller that understands exactly what it wants to say about the age of the algorithm, and mostly says it very well. It comes from the team behind The Blair Witch Project, and that pedigree shows: this is found footage with a real
2020s
Kikuyu Land was, for me, one of the best documentaries of the year, a furious, beautiful and deeply personal film that traces an unbroken line from colonial land seizures in Kenya to the multinational tea estates still profiting from that soil today. You can read my full review here. It
Rating: 4.0★
Taiwan has produced some genuinely singular genre cinema over the past two decades, from the quiet devastation of Edward Yang's realism to the visceral unease of films like The Sadness (2021), which I found about as punishing as horror gets. Dead Talents Society, arriving in 2024 and distributed
Rating: 3.5★
On 25 February 1964, Cassius Clay, a 22-year-old challenger given little chance by almost anyone, knocked out Sonny Liston in Miami Beach to become heavyweight champion of the world. What happened later that night, away from the cameras and the crowd, is the premise of One Night in
Rating: 4.0★
Sean Baker has spent the better part of two decades making films about people living at the edges of the American dream, and Anora is, in many respects, the moment that world broke through to the mainstream. Shot on location across Brooklyn and New York City, the film follows Anora,
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