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.
2020s
Macbeth in Compton had no right to work as well as it does. Shakespeare's bloodiest tragedy, relocated to the palm lined streets of Compton, spoken in full Elizabethan verse but subtitled in the modern slang of the block. On paper it sounds like a gimmick that ought to
2020s
Every so often a documentary comes along that feels less like a film and more like an act of love, and Bel is one of those. Louise Lockwood's portrait of the Scottish-Kenyan musician Beldina Odenyo, who performed and recorded as Heir of the Cursed, is a tender,
Rating: 2.0★
I should say at the outset that I am plainly the wrong audience for Past Lives, and I know it. That admission feels necessary before anything else, because what follows is going to read as a minority report on a film that a great many people I respect absolutely adore,
2020s
Some films leave you turning them over for days, not because they soared but because you can see the far better version hovering just out of reach. Sacred Creatures is one of those. Frieda Luk's debut feature, a Canadian and Italian co-production that premiered in competition at
Rating: 2.5★
There is a version of Entergalactic that works brilliantly, and you can almost see it from where the actual film is sitting. It is there in the colour palette, in the way a single frame freezes into something you would happily hang on a wall, in the deep, unhurried groove
Rating: 3.5★
There is a nice surprise waiting in the credits of Twisters, and it is the kind of surprise that makes you sit up a little straighter in your seat. This giant, deafening summer tornado movie was directed by Lee Isaac Chung, the man behind Minari, one of the most tender
Rating: 2.5★
The marketing for I Saw the TV Glow is doing nobody any favours. I came in braced for horror, primed for dread, and found something else entirely: a slow, melancholy, dreamlike film about identity and dissociation that uses the language of late-night television and adolescent longing to ask some
Rating: 1.5★
There is a special circle of cinema reserved for the truly botched video-game adaptation, and its patron saint is Uwe Boll, the man who gave us the immortal catastrophe of House of the Dead, still one of the worst films I have ever sat through. I bring him up
2020s
I came to Leave Me Alone partly for its lead. Kiran Sonia Sawar was wonderful in the miniseries Pure, a show I loved, and the chance to watch her carry a horror short was reason enough to say yes when the film-maker Shehroze Khan asked me to take a
Rating: 2.5★
There's a moment early in A Gorilla Story: Told by David Attenborough that stops you cold. The archive footage of a young Attenborough, sitting amongst mountain gorillas in the Rwandan Virungas in the 1970s, a juvenile called Pablo clambering over him with the casual confidence of someone who
Rating: 3.5★
They Cloned Tyrone announces itself as one of those films that refuses to sit still in a single genre, and for a good while that is exactly what makes it such fun. Juel Taylor's debut opens as an atmospheric, darkly comic crime picture set in a rundown neighbourhood,
Rating: 4.0★
Fairy tales have always had a cruel streak. Not the Disney kind, with the swelling strings and the guaranteed happy ending, but the older kind, the kind where girls slice off their own toes to fit a glass slipper and pigeons peck out the eyes of the wicked. The Ugly
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