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: 2.5★
There are films you admire and films you enjoy, and sometimes those two categories barely overlap. Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within sits squarely in the first group. I can watch it and feel genuine awe at what they pulled off technically, and then sit back at the end feeling oddly
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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
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There are films you watch and films you remember, and The Jungle Book is firmly in the second camp. I couldn't tell you the first time I saw it, because it feels like it was always just there, woven into the furniture of early memory alongside the smell
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There's a moment in Tim Burton's Dumbo remake when you realise nothing is actually going to happen. Not emotionally, anyway. The big ears flap, the little elephant takes flight, the crowd gasps, and I felt absolutely nothing. That's not supposed to be possible with
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There's a moment watching King Kong when you have to stop and remind yourself: they made this in 1933. No computers. No CGI. No motion capture. Just ingenuity, patience, and craftsmanship that, frankly, puts plenty of modern blockbusters to shame in terms of sheer ambition. I came away
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That opening shot. The sun cracking over the horizon, the savannah waking up, every creature on earth making its way to Pride Rock while Hans Zimmer and Lebo M fill the speakers with something that feels genuinely ancient. I've seen The Lion King more times than I can
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There are films you remember seeing as a kid where you can still feel the exact sensation of watching them for the first time. Aladdin is one of those. The magic carpet soaring over the clouds, the Cave of Wonders roaring to life, and then Robin Williams opening his mouth
Rating: 3.5★
My wife suggested we watch Deliverance, partly on the strength of our shared soft spot for Burt Reynolds, and partly because it sits on a couple of the "greatest ever" lists I'm slowly working through. I was happy to oblige. The only snag was that I&
Rating: 3.0★
There is something genuinely endearing about a film that wears its influences so openly. Armour of God is, quite plainly, Jackie Chan's answer to Indiana Jones: the hero is a globe-trotting treasure hunter nicknamed the Asian Hawk, and the whole thing cheerfully lifts the "ancient relics
Rating: 3.5★
I have watched and written about a lot of Wes Anderson by now, enough to call him one of my favourite directors, though I would stop short of calling him one of the best, and I think that distinction matters. The two are not the same thing. A favourite is
Rating: 2.5★
Taking Beatrix Potter's genteel little watercolours and turning them into a wisecracking, action-scored family romp was always going to be a gamble, and Will Gluck's Peter Rabbit lands somewhere in the awkward middle. Not a disaster, not a triumph. Just a very expensive, very polished
Rating: 3.0★
The best children's stories tend to be complete things. They say what they have to say, and then they stop. That is what made the original The Gruffalo so satisfying when it landed on BBC One that Christmas a couple of years earlier: it was tight, funny, structurally
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