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★
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
Rating: 3.0★
French Guiana occupies a peculiar place in the cultural imagination: an overseas territory of France, geographically part of South America, historically shaped by the brutal legacy of the penal colony at Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni, and today home to communities whose lives bear little resemblance to anything you might associate
Rating: 2.5★
Utama, which takes its title from the Quechua word for "our home", arrived in 2022 carrying a substantial weight of festival expectation. It won the World Cinema Grand Jury Prize at Sundance, placing it in a lineage of landscape-driven, politically conscious films from Latin America that use
Rating: 3.5★
Few films in recent memory have arrived with quite the cultural weight that Barbie carried into cinemas in the summer of 2023. Mattel's most famous product has been a fixture of popular culture since Ruth Handler introduced the doll at the New York Toy Fair in 1959, and
Rating: 3.0★
Mary Shelley's 1818 novel has had a longer life on screen than almost any other work of fiction. From James Whale's definitive 1931 Universal production through to Kenneth Branagh's sodden, overwrought 1994 version, Frankenstein has been pulled in just about every conceivable direction: camp,
Rating: 3.0★
The University of Bangui sits at something of a crossroads. Founded in 1970 and long regarded as the intellectual heart of the Central African Republic, it has spent much of the past two decades operating under extraordinary pressure: chronic underfunding, the displacement caused by recurring armed conflict across the country,
Raindance Film Festival
There is a strain of Iranian cinema that loves to point the camera at itself, to sit an actor in a chair, ask them to perform, and watch the truth leak out around the edges of the fiction. Mehrnoush Alia's debut feature 1001 Frames belongs firmly to that
Rating: 3.5★
The Western is one of Hollywood's oldest and most codified genres, stretching back to the nickelodeon era and carrying with it a set of visual and moral assumptions that have proved remarkably stubborn. For most of that history, the genre's mythology was a white one, despite
Rating: 2.5★
Reproduction has been a recurring preoccupation of science fiction, from the bleakest dystopias to gentler satirical fables, and it is not hard to see why. Few subjects carry more political, philosophical, and emotional weight, and few lend themselves so readily to the kind of "what if" speculation that
Raindance Film Festival
Nuri Cihan Özdoğan's debut feature Dead Dogs Don't Bite takes its premise more or less straight from the headlines. After China stopped accepting the world's plastic waste in 2018, Turkey became one of the biggest destinations for Europe's discarded rubbish, and the
Raindance Film Festival
There is a particular kind of Iranian film that takes something tiny, a debt, a misunderstanding, a single object, and stacks an almost unbearable amount of pressure on top of it. My Daughter's Hair, the first feature from director Hesam Farahmand, belongs firmly to that tradition, and it
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