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: 2.0★
The Oregon Trail has cast a long shadow over American mythology, and cinema has returned to it often enough to establish its own set of conventions: the wagon circle, the hostile horizon, the guide whose confidence outpaces his competence. Meek's Cutoff (2010) takes that familiar premise and strips
Rating: 3.0★
Spike Lee arrived at Inside Man in 2006 as something of a surprise package: a studio thriller from a filmmaker whose reputation had been built on personal, politically charged work, from the simmering tensions of Do the Right Thing to the jazz elegy of Mo' Better Blues. For those
Rating: 3.5★
On 25 February 1964, Cassius Clay, a 22-year-old challenger given little chance by almost anyone, knocked out Sonny Liston in Miami Beach to become heavyweight champion of the world. What happened later that night, away from the cameras and the crowd, is the premise of One Night in
Rating: 2.5★
In the spring of 1992, the acquittal of four Los Angeles Police Department officers in the beating of Rodney King set off five days of uprising across the city that left more than fifty people dead and caused over a billion dollars in damage. It remains one of the most
Rating: 4.0★
Sean Baker has spent the better part of two decades making films about people living at the edges of the American dream, and Anora is, in many respects, the moment that world broke through to the mainstream. Shot on location across Brooklyn and New York City, the film follows Anora,
Rating: 2.5★
The Aran Islands sit off the west coast of County Galway, three limestone outcrops where the Atlantic has the run of things and the soil, such as it is, has to be coaxed from seaweed and sand. By the early twentieth century they had acquired a particular romantic charge in
Rating: 3.5★
There is a moment, maybe twenty minutes into Tangerine, where it dawns on you that you are watching something genuinely alive. Not polished, not composed for maximum effect, but actually alive, with all the noise and heat and mess that implies. And then you remember it was shot on a
Rating: 3.5★
Some films you find for yourself. This one was handed to me, in a school history class, and it is one of the rare occasions I can say the curriculum did me a favour. Peter Medak's drama tells the true story of Derek Bentley, a young man with
Rating: 3.5★
There's a moment near the start of The Watermelon Woman where the camera just lingers on the inside of a video rental shop, and I felt it land somewhere in my chest before a single plot point had been established. The rows of VHS cases, the counter, the
Rating: 3.0★
Some films you admire more than you enjoy, and some films you respect more than you admire. Titicut Follies sits somewhere in that uncomfortable second category, and I've been turning it over in my head ever since the credits rolled, not because it moved me in any clean
Rating: 2.5★
There are films you respect without ever really feeling, and Distant Voices, Still Lives is one of them. I can see exactly why it is held in such high regard, can feel the devotion and the pain baked into every frame, and still come away from it strangely untouched. That
Rating: 3.5★
There is a nine-year-old girl in the first story of The Day I Became a Woman who has until noon. That is her deadline. Once the sun hits its highest point on her birthday, she will officially be a woman, and she will never be allowed to play
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