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: 4.0★
There's a scene early in Capernaum that sets the tone for everything that follows: a hardened, streetwise twelve-year-old boy, sitting in a courtroom, announcing that he is suing his own parents for bringing him into the world. It's one of the most staggering opening
Rating: 2.5★
There's a moment in Ali and Nino where the sweeping score swells, the landscape opens up, and you think: yes, this is exactly what historical epic romance is supposed to feel like. Then the scene ends, and you remember that the two people at the centre of it
Rating: 4.0★
Let me get this out of the way upfront: yes, The Last Samurai is Americanised. Brazenly, unapologetically, Hollywood-to-its-bones Americanised. And I'm not going to pretend otherwise, because that would be dishonest. The sweeping orchestral score, the larger-than-life heroics, the Western outsider who arrives
Rating: 3.0★
There's a moment watching The Adopted Son when the black and white photography gives way to colour, and it hits you like stepping out of a darkened room into afternoon sunlight. It's a small thing, technically speaking, but it tells you everything about what Aktan Arym
Rating: 2.5★
There's a particular tightrope that films about colonial history have to walk, and most of them fall off it in one direction or the other. Either they sanitise the era into something palatable and pretty, or they overload the screen with guilt until the story suffocates under the
Rating: 4.0★
What does it do to a person, being told before you can even speak that your death is already written? That question sits at the heart of Amjad Abu Alala's Sudanese debut, and it never lets go. From the moment a Sufi sheikh delivers his prophecy over a
Rating: 3.5★
There's a scene early in Rungano Nyoni's I Am Not a Witch where a young girl is accused of witchcraft for reasons so flimsy, so breathtakingly absurd, that you'd almost laugh if the consequences weren't so horrifying. That collision of the ridiculous
Rating: 3.0★
The hype can be a killer. I went into 3 Idiots having been told by what felt like half the internet that it was one of the funniest films ever made, a stone-cold classic, an absolute must-see. I'm a huge fan of Sholay, so I have
Rating: 1.5★
Sometimes a film's premise does all the heavy lifting and the film itself does almost none. That's the frustrating situation with Prasanna Vithanage's Paradise, a Sri Lankan drama that arrives with what sounds like a genuinely compelling idea and then spends its entire runtime
Rating: 4.0★
There's a structural trick at the heart of Lady Bird that I couldn't stop thinking about after the credits rolled, and once you clock it, the whole film snaps into a kind of elegant, almost geometric focus. Everything comes in pairs. Two names for the protagonist,
Rating: 3.0★
There's a moment early in And Then We Danced where a veteran instructor tells the young dancers that traditional Georgian dance contains no love, no sensuality, no individual feeling. It should be rigid, precise, masculine. And you immediately understand the trap that the film is setting, because everything
Macca's Must Watch
I'll go out on a limb right here and say that Y Tu Mamá También might just be one of the best films ever made. And I don't throw that around lightly. This is a film you don't just watch. You feel it, somewhere
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