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: 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,
Country United Kingdom
There is a lot to admire in Laundreams, and my only real complaint is that there isn't more of it. Amber Gadd and Evie Ward-Drummond's debut short, set almost entirely inside a working Sheffield laundrette, is a warm, nicely made little thing with a real
2020s
Mon Taxi did something I do not often let short films do to me. It moved me. I will be honest here, the experimental, avant-garde documentary short is usually a form I admire more than I actually enjoy, all mood and montage with not much to hold onto. Meriem
Country Luxembourg
Child is a film I admired and argued with in almost equal measure. For a good long stretch it is a lean, harrowing moral drama, and then it takes a hard turn into somewhere far stranger, and I came away genuinely torn about whether that swerve was brave or a
2020s
Every so often a documentary comes along that feels less like a film and more like a piece of evidence, and Kikuyu Land is one of them. Directed by the Emmy winning Andrew H. Brown and the Kenyan journalist and film-maker Bea Wangondu, it is one of the most
Country Iran
There is a haunting doubling at the heart of The Friend's House Is Here. It is a film about young artists forced to make their work in secret, and it was itself made in secret, shot on the streets of Tehran under the nose of a regime that
Country United Kingdom
Bel was, for me, one of the most moving films of the year, a tender, aching portrait of the Scottish-Kenyan musician Beldina Odenyo, who recorded as Heir of the Cursed, built by director Louise Lockwood as something much closer to an act of love than a conventional documentary. You
2020s
We are living through one of those rare moments when a whole new way of being human is invented in real time. Just as the early twentieth century gave us the idea of "a career", our own age has conjured the influencer, and society is still scrambling to
Country Germany
Babystar was one of the sharpest, most unsettling debuts I saw all year. It imagines a family of influencers whose teenage daughter, Luca, has had her entire life turned into content since before she was even born, and it uses that premise to say something genuinely bracing about the first
Country United States Of America
Here's the thing about the 2021 Mortal Kombat reboot: it had exactly one job. One. Deliver bone-crunching, over-the-top, fatality-drenched carnage with a bit of heart holding it together. That's it. That's the whole brief. And somehow, despite every advantage a
Country United States Of America
There's a really compelling film buried somewhere inside The Hunt, and the frustrating thing is you can see it trying to claw its way out. The premise is genuinely sharp: a group of strangers wake up in a field and quickly realise they're being hunted for
Rating: 3.5★
There is a shot lodged in my head from Garrett Bradley's Time: a home video, slightly washed out, of small boys larking about in the way small boys do, and then the film cuts, and those same boys are teenagers, and then young men, and the years have
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