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: 2.5★
There's a moment early in Tiger Stripes where you can feel the film it wants to be, and it's a genuinely exciting one. A young Malaysian girl, Zaffan, becomes the first among her friends to menstruate, and the world around her shifts in that quiet, cruel
Rating: 1.5★
There's a particular kind of disappointment that comes not from a film being offensive or catastrophically misguided, but from one that simply fails to justify its own existence. Megdan: Between Water and Fire (released in the UK as Return to the Ring) is that kind of film. It&
Rating: 3.5★
That closing scene. You know the one. A father sits with his son and says, without judgement, without awkwardness, exactly what any young person in pain needs to hear. It's one of the finest scenes I've watched in a very long time, and it alone would
Rating: 3.0★
There's a moment about halfway through Lingui, the Sacred Bonds where the camera simply watches a woman work. No dialogue, no dramatic score, just hands moving and the sounds of daily labour filling the frame. It's the kind of moment that either locks you in completely
Rating: 2.5★
There's a version of She Paradise that I think would have been genuinely special. You can feel it in the bones of the thing, in its colours and its music and above all in the young woman at its centre. Director Maya Cozier clearly has a gift for
Rating: 1.5★
There's a version of Pacifiction that I would have loved. A French colonial administrator drifting through the bars, beaches and clubs of Tahiti, wielding soft power with a smile, colliding with locals in ways that expose something ugly and true about privilege and empire. That film sounds genuinely
Rating: 3.5★
There's a question at the heart of Simón that I couldn't shake long after the credits rolled: what does it actually mean to fight for something? Not in the abstract, flag-waving sense, but in the grinding, personal, what-do-I-owe-this-cause sense. Diego
Rating: 4.0★
There's a moment in Cachada: The Opportunity when you realise the film you're watching has quietly become something else entirely. What started as a modest community project, five female street vendors gathering for a spot of amateur dramatics framed as a lighthearted empowerment exercise, has turned
Rating: 3.0★
There's a moment early in You Won't Be Alone where the landscape itself feels like a character, brooding and enormous and indifferent to the tiny, violent lives being lived across it. That image lodged in my head. It's the kind of film that gets
Rating: 3.5★
There are films you see at the right moment in your life that hit like a thunderclap, and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was exactly that for me. I was a wide-eyed teenager picking up what felt like a "decent" rental, and what I got was something closer
Rating: 3.0★
There's something genuinely rare about The Bigamist. A film from 1953, made under the watchful eye of the Production Code, about a man who marries two women and somehow manages to make you feel sorry for him rather than furious at him. That's either a neat
Rating: 2.5★
There's a moment early in Winter Light when Bergman simply lets his camera sit in a Swedish church and watch a Sunday service play out, nearly in full, in real time. No cuts to spare you, no intercutting to build tension, just the sermon, the sparse congregation, the
Film images and data courtesy of TMDB. This product uses the TMDB API but is not endorsed or certified by TMDB.
The best new reviews, a buried gem with where to watch it, and where the every-country challenge is up to. Free, no spam.
Subscribe free