Crime cinema, at its best, holds a mirror to power, loyalty and moral collapse in ways few other genres can. From the family dynasties of The Godfather to the street-level hustle of GoodFellas, it has produced some of the most richly observed characters in film history. Browse Macca's reviews below.
Rating: 3.5★
Jafar Panahi has spent much of the last fifteen years making films under conditions that would stop most directors outright. Arrested in 2010, banned from filmmaking and from leaving Iran, he has continued to work anyway, producing features on the quiet and smuggling them out to festival circuits while the
Rating: 3.0★
By the mid-1990s, the Batman franchise was one of the most commercially powerful properties in Hollywood. Tim Burton's 1989 original had proved that a superhero film could be taken seriously as a piece of cinema, and its 1992 follow-up Batman Returns pushed the gothic, expressionist aesthetic
Rating: 1.5★
Sri Lanka's film industry has spent much of the past decade quietly building a reputation for thoughtful, socially conscious drama, and Prasanna Vithanage has been one of its most persistent advocates. His earlier work, including With You, Without You (2012) and Oba Nathuwa Oba Ekka (2012), earned him
Rating: 4.0★
Nineteen thirty-three. The Depression is biting hard across America, breadlines stretch around city blocks, and New Orleans simmers in that particular Southern heat that makes everything feel slightly desperate and slightly dangerous. It is, in other words, exactly the right setting for a film about men who settle their
Rating: 3.5★
There are films that arrive as events, reshaping the cultural landscape around them simply by existing, and Tim Burton's Batman from 1989 is one of the clearest examples of that phenomenon British and American cinema has ever produced. Before a single frame had been projected in a public
Rating: 3.5★
Released in 2003, Elephant arrived at a moment when American culture was still reckoning, openly and anxiously, with the legacy of the Columbine High School massacre of April 1999. The film takes its title loosely from Alan Clarke's 1989 BBC short of the same name, itself a study
Rating: 3.5★
There are political thrillers, and then there are films that arrive so charged with real-world fury that the fiction barely disguises the rage beneath. Costa-Gavras's Z (1969) is very much the latter. Based on Vassilis Vassilikos's 1966 novel of the same name, the film
Rating: 3.0★
The original Starsky & Hutch ran on American television from 1975 to 1979, and for a good stretch of those four series it was one of the most-watched programmes on either side of the Atlantic. Paul Michael Glaser and David Soul made the mismatched-partners formula feel genuinely fresh,
Rating: 3.5★
South Korean cinema had, by the mid-2000s, already announced itself to international audiences in no uncertain terms. Bong Joon-ho's Memories of Murder had arrived in 2003 to widespread critical admiration, and Park Chan-wook was busy cementing his reputation with the Vengeance trilogy. Into this fertile
Rating: 2.5★
When Gareth Evans and Iko Uwais unleashed The Raid on the world in 2011, the response was somewhere between astonishment and mild disbelief. A Welsh director working in Indonesia with a relatively modest budget had produced one of the most viscerally efficient action films in years, a single-location siege
Rating: 3.0★
Few films can claim to have genuinely shaped the DNA of an entire genre, but Little Caesar, released by Warner Bros. and First National Pictures in January 1931, is one of the rare cases where that claim holds up to scrutiny. It arrived at a particular moment in American cultural
Rating: 2.5★
Twenty-two years after a modestly budgeted street-racing thriller about stolen DVD players became an unexpected box-office phenomenon, the Fast and Furious franchise has grown into one of Hollywood's most reliably profitable properties, and one of its most cheerfully ridiculous. What began as a point-to-
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