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★
George A. Romero is a name almost everyone associates with the undead, and understandably so. Night of the Living Dead (1968) rewired the horror genre almost overnight, and the films that followed it, including The Crazies and the long-running Dead series (see our reviews of Day of the Dead
Rating: 3.5★
Paolo Sorrentino arrived at Youth in 2015 as one of European cinema's most distinctive voices, fresh from the international success of The Great Beauty, which had taken the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 2014. Where that earlier picture roamed the ruins and remnants of Rome,
Rating: 3.0★
Coming-of-age cinema has always had a complicated relationship with discomfort. The genre works best when it refuses to sand down the rougher edges of adolescence, and Marielle Heller's debut feature, adapted from Phoebe Gloeckner's semi-autobiographical 2002 graphic novel of the same name, is
Rating: 3.0★
George A. Romero's name is so thoroughly bound up with the living dead that any film of his sitting outside that tradition tends to get overlooked. Monkey Shines, released in 1988 through Orion Pictures, is a case in point: a psychological horror thriller adapted from Michael Stewart'
Rating: 4.5★
By the turn of the millennium, Steven Soderbergh had already established himself as one of American cinema's more restless and unpredictable talents. His debut, sex, lies, and videotape, had announced him as a filmmaker with a sharp eye for moral discomfort and an instinct for character-driven drama.
Rating: 3.5★
Jeffrey Eugenides published his debut novel The Virgin Suicides in 1993 to considerable critical attention, praised for its unusual collective narration and its unflinching portrait of suburban American grief. It took a few years to make the journey to the screen, but when it did, the adaptation landed in the
Rating: 2.5★
Orson Welles arrived in Hollywood in 1941 carrying a reputation so enormous it was almost comical. His radio adaptation of The War of the Worlds had reportedly sent listeners into a panic, and his debut feature, Citizen Kane, was already drawing comparisons to the very best the medium had produced.
Rating: 3.0★
By the early 1980s, the American animation industry was in a peculiar state of drift. Disney, the dominant force for decades, had produced a string of pictures through the late seventies that felt safe and somewhat tired, and audiences were beginning to sense it. It was into this gap that
Rating: 3.5★
Johnny Mad Dog arrives from a corner of world cinema that rarely gets much attention on mainstream screens: the co-production networks of France and Belgium that, through the 2000s, funded a number of films made on location in sub-Saharan Africa with non-professional casts and limited budgets. Released
Rating: 2.5★
There is a particular kind of prestige that arrives pre-loaded, and The Red Turtle carried more of it than most. A co-production between the French outfits Wild Bunch, Why Not Productions and CN4 Productions, the Belgian studio Belvision, and, most eye-catchingly, Japan's Studio Ghibli, the
Rating: 3.5★
John le Carré spent the better part of five decades writing about the moral rot that accumulates quietly inside institutions, and The Constant Gardener, his 2001 novel, ranks among his most pointed indictments. Where many of his earlier books trained their scepticism on the intelligence services, this one aimed squarely
Rating: 3.0★
Werner Herzog and Klaus Kinski made five films together between 1972 and 1987, and the story of that partnership has, by now, almost eclipsed the films themselves. Herzog's 1999 documentary My Best Fiend laid it all out in uncomfortable detail: the threats, the tantrums, the mutual fascination that
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