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: 1.0★
There is a particular corner of low-budget genre filmmaking where Thailand and the United States occasionally meet, producing co-productions that are a little difficult to categorise and often equally difficult to track down. Dead Earth, released in 2020 under the banner of Kaos Entertainment, sits firmly in that
Rating: 3.0★
Released in October 2001, Joy Ride arrives at an interesting crossroads in American thriller cinema. The road movie as a vehicle for dread has a long and well-worn history in Hollywood, stretching back through the paranoid highways of 1970s genre films and most famously through Steven Spielberg's
Rating: 4.0★
Few films arrive with quite the weight of expectation that Capernaum carried into cinemas in 2018. Directed by Lebanese filmmaker Nadine Labaki and premiering at Cannes, where it won the Jury Prize, the film centres on Zain, a twelve-year-old boy living in the poverty-stricken backstreets of Beirut,
Rating: 2.5★
There is a certain romantic melancholy baked into the very source material of Ali and Nino. The 1937 novel of the same name, published under the pen name Kurban Said, has been attributed to various authors over the decades (the true identity of its writer remains genuinely disputed), but its
Rating: 4.0★
The early 2000s were something of a golden era for the prestige Hollywood epic, the kind of film that demanded a big screen and an interval ice cream, and The Last Samurai arrived in 2003 very much as a product of that moment. Set against the backdrop of the Meiji
Rating: 3.0★
The Adopted Son (known in Kyrgyz as Beshkempir) arrived in 1998 as something close to a cultural landmark, not just for Kyrgyzstan but for the broader wave of Central Asian cinema that was quietly finding an international audience in the decade following the Soviet Union's collapse. Kyrgyzfilm, the
Rating: 2.5★
Madagascar in the late 1960s and early 1970s was a place caught between two worlds. France had formally granted the island independence in 1960, yet its military presence lingered, and the communities clustered around those air bases existed in a curious bubble, half-French and half-adrift, insulated from both
Rating: 4.0★
Sudan is not a country with a long or well-resourced filmmaking tradition. Decades of conflict, economic instability, and a cultural climate that offered little institutional support for the arts meant that, for much of the twentieth century, Sudanese cinema barely existed as a going concern. That context matters when
Rating: 3.5★
There is a particular kind of film that arrives with little fanfare, plays a handful of festivals, and then quietly refuses to leave your head for weeks afterwards. Rungano Nyoni's I Am Not a Witch (2017) is very much one of those films. The premise draws from a
Rating: 3.0★
By the time 3 Idiots arrived in Indian cinemas in December 2009, Bollywood had been producing crowd-pleasing comedies with social conscience for decades, but rarely had the two ingredients come together quite so explosively at the box office. The film grossed well over three billion rupees on its original
Rating: 1.5★
Sri Lanka's film industry has spent much of the past decade quietly building a reputation for thoughtful, socially conscious drama, and Prasanna Vithanage has been one of its most persistent advocates. His earlier work, including With You, Without You (2012) and Oba Nathuwa Oba Ekka (2012), earned him
Rating: 4.0★
Coming-of-age stories are hardly in short supply at the cinema, but every so often one arrives that feels less like a genre exercise and more like a memory someone has chosen to share with you. Lady Bird, released in 2017, is one of those films. Set in Sacramento,
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