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: 3.5★
There's a moment in Total Recall where you genuinely stop and ask yourself: is any of this actually happening? Paul Verhoeven plants that question early and never lets it go. Doug Quaid, a humble construction worker played with that trademark jaw-clenching physicality by Arnold Schwarzenegger, visits a
Rating: 2.5★
There's a version of Idiocracy that works brilliantly. A savage, formally rigorous takedown of anti-intellectualism, commercialisation and the slow rot of public life. The bones of that film are here. Mike Judge clearly has something to say, and in the years since its release, a lot of
Rating: 3.5★
For years "video game movie" was basically a warning label, shorthand for something cynical and half-watchable. You knew what you were getting: a production that understood the intellectual property well enough to put the right colours on screen, but had no real feel for why anyone loved
Rating: 2.5★
There's a particular kind of frustration that only a technically brilliant film can produce. If something is rubbish from top to bottom, you just shrug and move on. But when a film has every conceivable ingredient at its disposal and still manages to leave you completely cold, that&
Rating: 3.0★
Being buried alive, getting lost underground, being swallowed by the dark with no way out: there are few fears more primal, more hardwired into us, than the ones that live beneath the surface. Neil Marshall gets that. The Descent understands, on a gut level, exactly what makes the idea of
Rating: 4.0★
There is a premise at the heart of The Defiant Ones so brilliantly simple it almost feels like a provocation: two escaped convicts, one Black and one white, physically shackled together by a heavy iron chain. Stanley Kramer had the nerve to put that image on screen in 1958, long
Rating: 3.0★
Let's get one thing straight before anything else: the suit in this film is the best Spider-Man suit ever put to screen, full stop. That textured, crimson-and-blue design, worn by Andrew Garfield's lanky, skater-esque frame, gave the character a kinetic, grounded agility
Rating: 2.5★
I'll hold my hands up straight away: I'm not the biggest fan of the modern superhero industrial complex. There's a formula, and almost everybody sticks rigidly to it. You get your quippy hero, your globe-trotting set pieces, and then, inevitably, a third act
Rating: 2.0★
It took me watching two separate Andrew Garfield-led Spider-Man films to suddenly realise that the director's surname is Webb. I found that delayed epiphany significantly more amusing than anything that actually happens on screen in The Amazing Spider-Man 2. When a sequel leaves you more
Rating: 4.0★
I'll be honest: seeing Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse sitting at a higher rating than its predecessor on Letterboxd left me genuinely baffled. Not angry, not defensive, just... baffled. Because while this 2023 sequel is an extraordinary piece of work in several respects, I came out of
Rating: 4.5★
I am rarely one to sing the praises of the modern superhero industrial complex. You probably know this about me by now. Outside of the original X-Men trilogy and The Dark Knight, I've almost never handed out a score higher than average to a cape-and-cowl
Rating: 3.0★
There is something quietly remarkable about the fact that The Legend of Johnny Lingo exists at all. I came to it the way I come to a lot of films these days: not because anyone was clamouring for me to watch it, but because it was my pick for the
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