Adventure cinema earns its place when the journey itself carries weight, whether it's the moral cost of power in The Lord of the Rings trilogy or the vertiginous scale of Interstellar. At its best the genre isn't escapism so much as a way of asking what people are made of when the stakes are real. See what Macca made of these and more in the reviews below.
Rating: 3.0★
Some film properties feel like they have no business working as feature-length cinema. The Trolls, those wide-eyed, neon-haired plastic dolls originally designed by Danish woodcutter Thomas Dam in 1959, spent decades as a toy-shelf curiosity and occasional cultural shorthand for gaudy kitsch. By the time DreamWorks
Rating: 3.5★
There is a version of the Mad Max franchise that exists almost entirely as mood and motion, a series defined less by plot than by the particular texture of post-apocalyptic Australia baking under a merciless sun. George Miller created that world back in 1979 with the original Mad Max,
Rating: 2.0★
There are certain films that arrive trailing so much critical consensus that questioning them feels almost impolite. Mad Max: Fury Road is one of those films. Released in May 2015 after a production history that became something of a legend in itself, George Miller's return to the post-
Rating: 2.5★
There are certain franchises that define a particular moment in Hollywood history, and the Transformers series is a fairly clear example of what blockbuster filmmaking looked like in the mid-2000s. The property itself began life as a line of Hasbro toys in the early 1980s, quickly followed by a
Rating: 3.5★
There are certain films that arrive at precisely the right moment, catching a cultural mood and refusing to let go. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, released in the year 2000 and directed by Ang Lee, was very much one of those films. Drawing on the wuxia tradition, a genre with deep
Rating: 2.0★
By 2021, the Fast and Furious franchise had long since left the street racing scene of Los Angeles in the rear-view mirror. What began in 2001 as a pleasingly straightforward film about cars and petty crime (you can read Macca's thoughts on where it all started over
Rating: 3.0★
By 2019, the Fast & Furious franchise had spent nearly two decades transforming itself from a moderately budgeted street-racing thriller into one of Hollywood's most reliably enormous franchises, complete with international espionage, orbital satellites, and a mythology so dense it practically requires a flow chart to follow.
Rating: 3.0★
The legend of Robin Hood has been retold so many times, in so many formats, that every new version carries the weight of all the ones before it. By the time Kevin Reynolds brought his take to cinemas in the summer of 1991, audiences had already seen Errol Flynn swing
Rating: 2.0★
There is a particular kind of sequel that arrives not out of creative necessity but out of commercial instinct, a follow-up built on the ruins of someone else's success and dressed up to look like continuation. Futureworld (1976) is that kind of film. Michael Crichton's
Rating: 3.5★
There is a particular pleasure in revisiting a film that arrived quietly, did modest business, and then spent the following fifty years proving itself right. Westworld, released in 1973, is exactly that kind of film. Written and directed by Michael Crichton, it imagines a sprawling luxury resort called Delos where
Rating: 2.5★
When Disney announced that The Mandalorian would be making the leap from Disney+ to the big screen, the reaction was roughly split between cautious optimism and weary scepticism. The series had been a genuine bright spot in the post-Rise of Skywalker wilderness, winning over audiences with its stripped-back,
1950s
Disney’s Alice in Wonderland (1951) is the studio’s middle-period work par excellence: technically polished, commercially tested, narratively cautious, and just slightly off. Made between two of Disney’s commercial successes (Cinderella in 1950, which had rescued the studio from one of its periodic financial near-misses, and
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