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★
Licorice Pizza arrives with the kind of creative pedigree that tends to generate genuine anticipation rather than mere industry buzz. Written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, it is a loose, sun-drenched coming-of-age story set in the San Fernando Valley during 1973, a film built less around
Rating: 4.0★
New Zealand cinema has always punched well above its weight, and Hunt for the Wilderpeople (2016) is one of the cleaner examples of why. Adapted by writer-director Taika Waititi from Barry Crump's 1986 novel Wild Pork and Watercress, the film is a collaboration between the small New
Rating: 3.5★
Adam Elliot is not a filmmaker who deals in the comfortable or the tidy. The Melbourne-born writer and director built his reputation through a series of short clay-animated films, each one a small, handmade biography of someone living at the margins: disabled, lonely, overlooked, and yet somehow persisting.
Rating: 3.5★
Stanley Kubrick made Full Metal Jacket in 1987, adapting Gustav Hasford's novel The Short-Timers with co-writers Michael Herr (whose own Vietnam memoir Dispatches had already reshaped how the war could be written about) and Kubrick himself. The film arrived two years after Oliver Stone's
Rating: 3.5★
Paths of Glory arrived in 1957 as something of an anomaly: an American studio picture that had the nerve to portray the French military command of the First World War as venal, cowardly, and casually murderous. Based on Humphrey Cobb's 1935 novel, itself drawn from a real court
Rating: 3.5★
Released in the summer of 1972, Snoopy, Come Home arrived as the second theatrical feature spun out of Charles M. Schulz's beloved Peanuts comic strip, following three years after the franchise's big-screen debut. By this point, Schulz's characters had already conquered television, newspaper
Rating: 3.0★
British prison dramas have a long and fairly distinguished lineage, from the kitchen-sink realism of the 1960s through to the grimier, more procedural territory that television has largely claimed in recent decades. Wasteman, arriving in 2025 from director Cal McMau and produced through a cluster of UK independents including
Rating: 3.5★
When Rocky arrived in 1976, it was one of those films that seemed to come from nowhere and land everywhere. Made on a budget that barely registered by Hollywood standards, written by and starring a virtually unknown Sylvester Stallone, it won three Academy Awards including Best Picture and turned its
Rating: 2.5★
By 1948, film noir had already carved out its own corner of Hollywood, and the crime picture was a reliable commercial form, polished but unremarkable in many hands. Force of Evil arrives at that moment with rather more ambition than the genre usually demanded. It is based on Ira Wolfert&
Rating: 3.0★
There are films that matter because of what they are, and there are films that matter because of what they started. Nanook of the North belongs firmly to the second category. Released in 1922 and produced under the banner of the French trading company Les Frères Revillon, it is widely
Rating: 2.5★
Rob Zombie arrived at The Devil's Rejects (2005) with something to prove. His debut feature, House of 1000 Corpses (2003), had been a difficult birth: shot in 2000, shelved by Universal after concerns about its content, eventually picked up by Lionsgate and released to polarised notices. It was
Rating: 3.0★
Peter Hujar's Day arrives in 2025 as one of the more unusual entries in recent American independent cinema: a seventy-six minute reconstruction of a single day in the life of a photographer, drawn from an audio recording that had been sitting in an archive for half a
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