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: 3.0★
There's a specific kind of shame that comes with admitting your thirteen-year-old self got something badly wrong. I first watched Gurinder Chadha's Bend It Like Beckham back in 2002, and my overwhelming memory of it was that it felt cheap, almost like a British
Rating: 4.0★
Walter Hill doesn't waste your time. That's the first thing you notice watching Hard Times, his 1975 debut feature, and it's a quality that separates him from most filmmakers working then or now. No fussy preamble, no overly explained backstory, no hand-holding. A
Rating: 3.5★
Before I even pressed play on Hands of Stone, I had no idea the film existed. Zero. And honestly, that says more about how criminally overlooked it is than it does about me. The ratings online are rough, the discourse around it is basically non-existent, and yet here I
Rating: 2.5★
There's a version of Proof of Life that's a genuinely gripping hostage thriller. You can almost see it, lurking somewhere beneath the film we actually got. A tense, high-stakes rescue operation set against the brutal landscape of South American guerrilla territory, with a formidable cast
Rating: 4.0★
I'll be straight with you: the first thing I saw when I looked up On-Gaku: Our Sound was the main character's face, and I genuinely could not tell what was going on with his mouth. This weird, jagged zigzag sitting under his nose that made
Rating: 3.0★
Kieran Culkin is magnetic in this film. Whatever scene he's in, whatever he's doing, you simply cannot look away from him. That's a good thing, because A Real Pain pretty much lives or dies by whether you buy into his performance, and he more
Rating: 3.0★
There's something quietly disarming about a film that knows exactly what it is. Bye Bye Blue Bird, directed by Katrin Ottarsdóttir, is a low-budget Faroese road movie about two women returning home after seven years away and finding that home no longer quite fits. It's
Rating: 3.5★
There's a particular kind of chill that comes from watching a decades-old film and realising it was right. Not in a vague, hand-wavy way, but in sharp, specific, uncomfortable detail. That's exactly what watching THX 1138 today feels like. George Lucas's 1971
Rating: 4.0★
There's a moment early in Memoria where Tilda Swinton's character jolts awake at a sound nobody else seems to hear, a deep, resonant thud that comes from nowhere and goes nowhere, and I genuinely wasn't sure what kind of film I was watching. Horror?
Rating: 3.0★
The premise sounds corny, I'll be straight with you. A djinn unleashed by a missile strike into a Tehran apartment block during the Iran-Iraq War. On paper, that reads like the kind of horror concept you might pitch as a joke. But Babak Anvari's Under
Rating: 3.5★
There's a moment in Touki Bouki where you feel the whole film snap into focus: two young lovers on a motorbike adorned with a cow's skull, tearing through the streets of Dakar with nothing but nerve and a half-formed plan, dreaming of Paris like it&
Rating: 3.0★
There's a moment early in Listen to the Voices where a grandmother and her teenage grandson are ribbing each other about girlfriends and social media, and it's so warm and unforced that you almost forget you're watching a film. It feels like you'
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