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★
Short horror films occupy a curious corner of the genre. Freed from the obligation to pad a story to feature length, the best of them can land a single, well-aimed punch and walk away clean. Moshari (2022) is one such film: a Bangladeshi production running to around twenty-two
Rating: 2.5★
There is a long and restless tradition in world cinema of using the horror genre as a vessel for social and political anxieties, particularly around bodies, identity, and the pressures of conformity. From the body-horror provocations of Cronenberg through to the folk-inflected dread of more recent European and
Rating: 1.5★
Bulgarian cinema has spent the better part of the last two decades earning a quiet, patchy reputation on the international festival circuit, producing the odd gem alongside a good deal of material that never travels far beyond the region. Zift (2008) remains perhaps the most striking example of Bulgarian genre
Rating: 3.5★
Luca Guadagnino's Call Me by Your Name arrived in 2017 as one of the most talked-about films of that awards season, and it has barely been out of the conversation since. Based on André Aciman's 2007 novel of the same name, the story is set
Rating: 3.0★
Chad is not a country you would typically associate with a thriving film industry, and that context matters when watching Lingui, the Sacred Bonds. The country gained independence from France in 1960, yet for decades its cultural output on screen remained negligible, constrained by poverty, political instability, and an almost
Rating: 2.5★
Soca music and the streets of Port of Spain make for a vivid backdrop, but She Paradise (2020) is less interested in tourism than in the particular pressures facing a young woman trying to carve out a life on her own terms. The film arrives as part of a modest
Rating: 1.5★
French Polynesia has served as a canvas for European fantasy and anxiety in equal measure ever since Gauguin packed his bags and headed for Tahiti in the 1890s. That long history of outsiders projecting their desires, their guilt, and their authority onto the islands and the people who live there
Rating: 3.5★
Venezuela's ongoing political crisis, the long shadow cast by the Chavista and then Maduro governments, has produced a wave of diaspora voices across literature, journalism, and film. Simón (2023) sits squarely within that current. Based on real events, it follows a young Venezuelan activist who has made it
Rating: 4.0★
El Salvador's cinema rarely finds its way onto the international festival circuit, which makes Cachada: The Opportunity something of an event in itself. The country carries one of the heaviest burdens of gender-based violence in Latin America, a social reality that sits quietly beneath this film'
Rating: 3.0★
Folk horror has enjoyed something of a quiet renaissance over the past decade or so, with films trading Gothic excess for a more grounded, elemental dread rooted in landscape, superstition, and community. It is a genre that rewards patience, and one that has proved a surprisingly fertile space for debut
Rating: 3.5★
There are certain films that arrive at precisely the right moment, catching a cultural mood and refusing to let go. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, released in the year 2000 and directed by Ang Lee, was very much one of those films. Drawing on the wuxia tradition, a genre with deep
Rating: 3.0★
By the early 1950s, Hollywood was, in most respects, still a man's world behind the camera. The major studios employed armies of contract directors, and women were conspicuously absent from that roster. Ida Lupino was the exception. Already a well-established actress by that point, she had turned
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