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: 2.5★
Alex North's novel The Whisper Man arrived in 2019 to considerable commercial success, sitting comfortably within the tradition of British psychological crime fiction that puts grief and parenthood at the centre of its horror. The premise, a widowed father whose young son disappears, and the retired detective grandfather
Rating: 3.5★
Lynne Ramsay has never been a director interested in comfort. From the suffocating council-estate grief of Ratcatcher (1999) to the cold, forensic dread of We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011), she has spent her career making films that sit in the chest like a stone. You Were Never
Rating: 4.0★
Park Chan-wook returns in 2025 with No Other Choice, a South Korean and French co-production that wears its genre labels, comedy, crime, thriller, with a studied looseness that feels entirely characteristic of the director. The film is adapted, in broad strokes, from Donald Westlake's 1993 novel
Rating: 2.0★
There is a certain kind of comedy that exists purely on the strength of one outrageous idea, betting everything on the audience's willingness to go along for the ride regardless of whether the script can keep pace. White Chicks, released in the summer of 2004, is a fairly
Rating: 4.0★
Los Angeles at night has always been fertile ground for cinema's darker instincts, a city whose glossy surface conceals something considerably more unsettling underneath. Nightcrawler, released in 2014, taps into that unease with considerable precision, setting its story inside the world of freelance crime journalism, specifically the murky
Rating: 2.5★
There is a particular corner of European cinema that seems almost duty-bound to make its audience uncomfortable, and The Tribe, the 2014 Ukrainian drama from writer-director Myroslav Slaboshpytskyi, sits squarely in that tradition. The premise is both simple and disquieting: a teenage boy, Sergey, arrives at a residential
Rating: 3.5★
Nineteen seventy-two was a remarkable year for independent American cinema, and nowhere was that more visible than in the cycle of Black-led films that had begun to find distribution outside the traditional studio system. Blaxploitation was at its commercial peak, with studios eager to profit from a new
Rating: 3.0★
Gus Van Sant arrived at Paranoid Park fresh from one of the more celebrated stretches of his career. His loosely connected "Death Trilogy" (comprising Gerry, Elephant, and Last Days) had established him as one of American independent cinema's most formally adventurous directors, a filmmaker willing to
Rating: 4.0★
There are films that feel like they could only have been made at a very particular moment, and The Defiant Ones is one of them. Released in 1958, Stanley Kramer's film arrived at a point when the United States was visibly straining under the weight of its own
Rating: 3.5★
There are films that arrive with serious artistic intent, and then there are films that arrive wearing a Ronald Reagan rubber mask and sprinting straight at you. Point Break, released in the summer of 1991, falls very much into the second category. Written by W. Peter Iliff from a story
Rating: 4.0★
By 1971, San Francisco had already become one of the defining backdrops of late-1960s American anxiety: the Summer of Love had curdled, the Zodiac Killer had terrorised the Bay Area in very recent memory, and public trust in institutions was fraying at the edges. Into that climate arrived Dirty
Rating: 2.5★
By the early 1990s, Jean-Claude Van Damme had carved out a reliable niche for himself in the action market. His 1988 breakthrough Bloodsport had turned him from a Brussels-born martial arts hopeful into a genuine box-office name, and Columbia Pictures were understandably keen to keep the momentum
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