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★
In the spring of 1992, the acquittal of four Los Angeles Police Department officers in the beating of Rodney King set off five days of uprising across the city that left more than fifty people dead and caused over a billion dollars in damage. It remains one of the most
Rating: 2.5★
For just over seventy minutes, a calm, unhurried voice recites the tangled affairs of Germany's post-war industrial dynasties: the bankruptcies, the frauds, the convenient deaths, the dynastic feuds. Over the top of it runs a stream of images that, as far as I could ever tell, has
Rating: 3.0★
Here is your quick test for whether Police Academy is going to work for you: Michael Winslow opens his mouth and out comes a full arsenal of gunfire, sirens, squealing tyres and revving engines, entirely from his own vocal cords, without a sound effect in sight. If that makes you
Rating: 2.5★
I came to Kiss Kiss Bang Bang blind, as I like to, having spotted it on the "They Shoot Pictures, Don't They" list of the century's best films. For a while, I genuinely thought I understood the fuss. It opens strongly. I warmed to
Rating: 3.5★
Sometimes you just want a lean, punchy, no-nonsense bit of classic noir. No grand ambitions, no bloated runtime, no second-guessing itself. Just sharp dialogue, hard shadows, and a plot that knows exactly where it's going. Pickup on South Street delivers all of that and then gets
Country United States Of America
There's a moment in RoboCop where a corporate suit smugly presents a walking tank of a robot to a boardroom full of executives, it malfunctions spectacularly, and a man gets shot dead in front of everyone. The suits are horrified. Not because someone died. Because of the PR
Rating: 3.5★
Where a classic noir like Pickup on South Street or The Third Man prowls the rain-slicked back streets, The Reckless Moment brings the genre home. Quite literally. Max Ophüls plants his camera not in some seedy waterfront dive or fog-wrapped European alley but in a comfortable suburban household,
Rating: 3.5★
There's a moment early in Ariel when our newly unemployed protagonist, handed a convertible and precious little else by a despairing colleague, simply points the car south and drives. No grand speech, no swelling music. Just a man and a road and the vague hope that Helsinki might
Rating: 4.0★
There is a moment early in Sexy Beast where Gal Dove, retired safecracker, is dozing by his swimming pool in the Spanish sunshine, the very picture of a man who has successfully left his old life behind, and you think: this is going to be a pleasant little film about
Rating: 3.0★
Before Shaft is anything else, it is that theme. Isaac Hayes's wah-wah-drenched, Oscar-winning title track, playing over John Shaft striding through the streets of early-seventies New York, is one of the great movie openings in the history of cinema, so effortlessly cool that the
Rating: 4.0★
Nobody has ever worn their Hitchcock influence quite as proudly, or as quite as well, as Brian De Palma, and Blow Out is one of the films that earns him the comparison outright. He is one of my favourite directors, full stop, so I came to this already predisposed to
Rating: 3.0★
There is a version of Higher Learning that could have been one of the defining American films of the nineties. You can feel it in the best scenes, straining to get out. That it does not quite manage it is genuinely frustrating, because John Singleton was, at his best, among
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