Drama is the spine of cinema, the genre where performance, script and direction have nowhere to hide. From the courtroom pressure of 12 Angry Men to the generational weight of The Godfather, it has always rewarded patience and attention. See what Macca makes of the best and worst of it below.
Rating: 3.5★
When you put Michael Caine and Harvey Keitel in the same frame, something almost alchemical happens. You don't even need to build much of a story around them. Just point the camera, get out of the way, and let two absolute powerhouses do what they've spent
Rating: 3.0★
There is something undeniably arresting about watching a teenager narrate her own messy, chaotic awakening into a clunky 1970s dictaphone while sketching comic books. It pulled me in immediately, and for a while I thought I was watching something genuinely special. By the end, I was left with something more
Rating: 3.0★
Some films arrive with a completely unexpected key that unlocks them. I pressed play on Monkey Shines expecting a reasonably straightforward 80s horror thriller, and about twenty minutes in, I had one of those bizarre pop-culture lightbulb moments that genuinely stopped me in my tracks. This is the exact
Rating: 4.5★
Sometimes going in completely blind is the best thing you can do for yourself. I had a poster in my head: Julia Roberts, a baby, what looked like a quiet family drama. Maybe a character study. Something gentle. What I actually got was a fiercely compelling, true-life legal thriller
Rating: 3.5★
There is a very specific, hazy nostalgia to the airwaves of 1970s suburban America, and Sofia Coppola bottles that exact feeling perfectly in her 1999 directorial debut. From the very first frame, you are enveloped by a cracking supporting soundtrack and the melancholic, omniscient narration of Giovanni Ribisi, voicing the
Rating: 2.5★
The words "Directed by Orson Welles" appear on screen, and something shifts in you. You sit up a little straighter. You prepare yourself. This is the man who made The Third Man producer Carol Reed look over his shoulder, the man who redefined what a film could even
Rating: 3.0★
There's a moment in The Secret of NIMH where you catch yourself leaning forward, genuinely unsettled, and then you remember this is supposed to be a Saturday afternoon film for kids. That tension, that slight discomfort at how dark and serious everything feels, is really the whole story
Rating: 3.5★
The image that stays with me from Johnny Mad Dog is the dressing-up. Boys of ten to fifteen years old going into battle wearing wedding dresses, wigs, angel wings, whatever they have managed to loot along the way, each one answering to some fearsome nom de guerre. It is
Rating: 2.5★
There's a version of The Red Turtle that I think I could love. The version that exists purely as a sequence of images, a moving watercolour book you'd leave open on a coffee table and let wash over you. Michael Dudok de Wit has made something
Rating: 3.5★
The first thing that'll either hook you or drive you absolutely mad is the camera work. Fernando Meirelles shoots this with a deliberately restless, almost chaotic energy, and I know plenty of critics have knocked the skewed angles and hyper-stylised framing, dismissing them as distracting or overly
Rating: 3.0★
Whenever the names Werner Herzog and Klaus Kinski come up in the same breath, the phrase "toxic relationship" practically hangs in the air like smoke. Their final collaboration together is a glaring reminder of why. I often find myself wondering what on earth kept drawing them back to
Rating: 3.5★
There's a moment early in Dunkirk where the camera simply pulls back and you see it: hundreds of thousands of men, packed onto a beach, staring out at a sea that offers no obvious salvation. No character tells you how bad things are. No general delivers a grim
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