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★
There's a moment in Elephant where everything changes. You've spent the best part of half an hour just watching teenagers go about their day. Someone's late for school. Someone else is taking photographs. The rhythms are slow, unhurried, almost meditative. And then a character
Rating: 3.0★
My fiancée absolutely loves this film. It sits near the very top of her all-time favourites list, and so I went into it with a certain amount of pressure to feel the same way. I didn't, quite, but I can absolutely see what she sees in it,
Rating: 2.5★
There's a moment in Utama where the two elderly leads simply stand and stare out across a vast, bone-dry Bolivian plateau, the sky enormous above them, the silence total. It's a genuinely arresting image. The trouble is, that moment arrives about twenty minutes in, and
Rating: 4.0★
There's a moment watching Grand Prix where you stop thinking about cinema entirely and just grip the armrest. John Frankenheimer mounted cameras directly onto the cars, put you inside the cockpit, and suddenly you're not sitting in a darkened room anymore. You're hurtling around
Rating: 2.0★
There's a particular kind of disappointment reserved for films where the most interesting thing about them is the press release. Where the Road Runs Out holds the genuine, undeniable distinction of being the first feature film ever shot in Equatorial Guinea, and look, that really is something worth
Rating: 3.5★
Roger Ebert called Z his favourite film of 1969. It made history as the first film ever nominated for both Best Picture and Best Foreign Language Film at the Academy Awards. It sits near the top of Letterboxd's all-time charts and is routinely name-checked whenever anyone
Rating: 3.0★
There's a version of this film that would've been one of the best horror pictures in years. Guillermo del Toro taking on Frankenstein, with a cast that includes Oscar Isaac, Christoph Waltz, Lars Mikkelsen and Mia Goth, shot through with his trademark gothic grandeur? On paper,
Rating: 1.5★
Sometimes a film baffles you in ways you genuinely weren't expecting. I went into Bobby Boermans' Dutch action thriller Invasion (or Invasie, as it's known in its home country) completely blind and with an open mind, and I came out the other side scratching my
Rating: 3.0★
Kiyoshi Kurosawa is one of those filmmakers I find genuinely hard to stop thinking about. There's a quality to his work, the way he uses deep focus and elongated shots to make you feel something lurking just outside the frame, that keeps pulling me back. Even when a
Rating: 3.0★
Sometimes a film feels like it's standing right at the edge of a cliff, ready to jump, and then it just... doesn't. That's Murina in a nutshell. It's a sun-scorched, salt-sprayed Croatian drama with every ingredient you'd want,
Rating: 3.5★
There's something genuinely exciting happening in South Asian cinema right now, and Fawzia Mirza's The Queen of My Dreams sits right in the middle of it. I came to this one hot on the heels of watching Joyland, another film that had me completely gripped, and
Rating: 3.0★
There's a moment in Chocolat where you sense Claire Denis is doing something genuinely special, something quiet and loaded and precise. And then the film just... continues being quiet. And loaded. And precise. For another hour or so. I'd heard a lot about this one, and
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