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: 2.0★
I must be missing the memo. Fallen Leaves has been hailed all over the place as some sort of triumphant return to form, a festival darling showered with praise, and I sat there watching it wondering what on earth everyone else was seeing that I wasn't. Strip away
Rating: 3.0★
The cover art had me completely fooled. Something about the imagery suggested I was in for a horror film, the kind that lingers in your peripheral vision and makes you uneasy in the dark. So when Antoneta Kastrati's Zana revealed itself to be something else entirely, something far
Rating: 4.0★
It's an absolute statistical anomaly for a legacy sequel to not just match its predecessor but to utterly eclipse it. Yet here we are. I walked into Top Gun: Maverick carrying the reasonable scepticism of anyone who's sat through enough hollow nostalgia grabs, and I walked
Rating: 3.5★
We are absolutely saturated with cinema set in Afghanistan. From the Soviet invasion to the endless, grinding War on Terror, the country has frequently served as a backdrop for foreign filmmakers looking to capture geopolitical conflict. There is something almost reflexive about it now, the way Western productions reach for
Rating: 0.5★
I want to be fair here, I genuinely do. Oman doesn't have a deep or sprawling cinema history, so the fact that this fifteen-minute short by Anirban Ray is considered one of the most popular films from the nation isn't exactly a ringing endorsement of
Rating: 4.0★
There are films that entertain you, and then there are films that practically reach through the screen and squeeze the joy right out of your chest. John Hillcoat's adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's The Road is firmly, unapologetically in the latter category. I don't mean
Rating: 3.5★
Sometimes a film catches you completely off guard, and that's the best possible feeling. I'll be honest: a 1980s rural Slavic road trip movie wasn't exactly on my radar as essential weekend viewing. But Slobodan Šijan's Who's Singin' Over
Rating: 2.5★
There's a specific, sun-drenched haze to Bruce Robinson's adaptation of Hunter S. Thompson's The Rum Diary, and unfortunately it mostly just obscures a deeply average film. You sit there watching the warm Puerto Rican light bounce off rum bottles and white beaches, and
Rating: 3.5★
There's something almost rebellious about how unashamed A Boy Named Charlie Brown is of its own age. Press play and within seconds you're confronted with scratchy lines, flat colours, and character movements that creak along with a kind of charming stiffness. This is nearly sixty years
Rating: 3.0★
There's a certain kind of film that dares you to keep watching, and Glauber Rocha's The Lion Has Seven Heads is very much one of them. It's a baffling, swirling beast of a picture, and I mean that in the most genuinely ambivalent way
Rating: 3.5★
Ten days. Think about that for a second. Just ten days after East Timor gained its independence from Portugal in 1975, Indonesia moved in and began over two decades of brutal occupation. It's one of those historical facts that stops you cold, and it's one that
Rating: 4.0★
My dad was never one for splashing out unnecessarily, but Prince Naseem Hamed's pay-per-view fights were a different matter entirely. I can still picture it now: the two of us squeezed onto the sofa, watching this flamboyant, impossibly cocky kid from Sheffield float into the ring
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