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★
That artillery. Good grief, that artillery. Within the first few minutes of Edward Berger's 2022 adaptation of All Quiet on the Western Front, the sound design alone is doing something almost physical to you. It doesn't rumble so much as detonate somewhere behind your eyes, and
Rating: 2.5★
There is a specific kind of emotional exhaustion that comes from watching people stubbornly refuse to save themselves. It is one of the most frustratingly, achingly human things a story can put on screen, and Mariya Saakyan's The Lighthouse (known in Armenian as Mayak) leans into it hard.
Rating: 2.0★
There's a particular kind of viewing experience that comes with hunting down films from nations with barely a handful of titles to their name. You're not approaching it the way you'd approach a new thriller from a country with a rich cinematic tradition. You&
Rating: 2.5★
I'll be upfront: I went into this one already rattled. I absolutely loathed Before Sunrise, the 1995 original, where two insufferably wide-eyed twenty-somethings wander around Vienna trying to extract grand philosophical meaning from every stray dog and overheard conversation. It was a complete chore. So when
Rating: 4.5★
The Omaha Beach sequence. Twenty-seven minutes of controlled chaos that still has the power to leave you genuinely shaking. I went back to Saving Private Ryan recently to see whether it held up after all this time, and the honest answer is: almost entirely, yes. From the moment that
Rating: 3.0★
Jean Genet is best known to most people as a novelist and playwright, the author of works like Our Lady of the Flowers and The Maids, a writer whose entire creative life was shaped by time spent on the margins of French society, including real spells in prison. Un Chant
Rating: 4.0★
There is a very specific, fascinating subgenre of cinema that blurs the line between documentary and performance, using real-life trauma as a vehicle for on-screen catharsis. I've sat through a fair few of these over the years. Think Salaam Cinema, or films like 1001 Frames, where
Rating: 1.5★
A parched Earth. No oceans. Desperate pilots tearing each other apart in the sky just to harvest what little water the clouds have left. That's a genuinely cracking premise, the kind that makes you sit up and think, right, let's see where this goes. The problem
Rating: 3.0★
If you've ever stumbled across Who Killed Captain Alex? and found yourself completely won over by the sheer, unbridled enthusiasm of Wakaliwood cinema, then Jean-Pierre Bekolo's 1996 Cameroonian/Zimbabwean oddity Aristotle's Plot is going to feel like a surprisingly polished cousin of that
Rating: 3.0★
There's a specific kind of patience required to sit through a truly slow-burning character study, and Kristina Grozeva and Petar Valchanov's Bulgarian drama The Lesson certainly tests it. But honestly, the deliberate pacing isn't the film's biggest flaw. The real tension
Rating: 1.5★
There's a very specific kind of charm to the old Toho kaiju pictures, those gloriously clunky, rubber-suited monsters stomping through miniature Tokyo streetscapes. Films like Space Amoeba radiate genuine effort and earnestness from every frame, and even when they're objectively daft, you find yourself rooting
Rating: 3.0★
There are few cinematic experiences as universally scarring as sitting down with a bucket of popcorn, only to have your childhood innocence absolutely shattered by a woodland creature. I still remember the collective, stunned silence in the room the first time I watched Bambi. Not a word. Not a sound.
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