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★
By now, with a fair few of these under my belt, I've made my peace with the fact that arthouse and I are rarely going to see eye to eye. But even by my own standards, La Libertad tested the limits of that peace. This is arthouse in
Rating: 2.5★
There is a moment in this film that I keep turning over in my mind. A young man lifts his mother, frail and fading, and carries her out into the landscape she has always loved, giving her one last look at the world she is about to leave. On paper,
Rating: 3.5★
The Last Detail hangs on a small, quietly infuriating injustice. A young sailor, barely more than a boy, has been handed eight years in a naval prison for stealing forty dollars from a charity box. Two hardened Navy men are tasked with delivering him there: Nicholson's foul-mouthed
Rating: 3.0★
You have seen the bones of Man on Fire before, probably several times over. A burnt-out, hard-drinking former operative reluctantly takes a job protecting a young girl; they clash, they bond, she is snatched, and he sets about a merciless campaign to get her back. It is the
Rating: 3.5★
River Phoenix is the reason to watch this film. That much is clear within the first few minutes, and it never stops being clear. As Mike, the narcoleptic street hustler drifting through the Pacific Northwest in search of a mother and a home he can barely picture, he is raw
Country United States Of America
That opening shot. The sun cracking over the horizon, the savannah waking up, every creature on earth making its way to Pride Rock while Hans Zimmer and Lebo M fill the speakers with something that feels genuinely ancient. I've seen The Lion King more times than I can
Country South Korea
That corridor. You already know the one I mean. If you've seen Oldboy, it's probably the first image that flashes into your head. One man, a hammer, and a hallway absolutely packed with people who want him dead. No wirework, no quick cuts to spare anyone&
Rating: 3.5★
On paper, Blade Runner is exactly my sort of thing. A rain-soaked cyberpunk future, a moral puzzle at its heart, a premise that asks what it even means to be human. Ridley Scott's 1982 adaptation of Philip K. Dick imagines a world where bio-engineered humans called
Rating: 3.0★
There is something a little strange about rating a thirteen-minute short film the same way you would rate a feature. What are you even measuring? Hotel Chevalier runs barely long enough to justify making a cup of tea, and yet here I am, genuinely glad I spent time with
Rating: 0.5★
There is a version of cinema that asks you to slow down, to breathe, to let images and language wash over you without the usual apparatus of plot or performance. I understand that. I have even enjoyed it. But there is another version, rarer and less forgiving, that asks all
Rating: 3.5★
Where a classic noir like Pickup on South Street or The Third Man prowls the rain-slicked back streets, The Reckless Moment brings the genre home. Quite literally. Max Ophüls plants his camera not in some seedy waterfront dive or fog-wrapped European alley but in a comfortable suburban household,
Rating: 3.5★
There's a moment early in Ariel when our newly unemployed protagonist, handed a convertible and precious little else by a despairing colleague, simply points the car south and drives. No grand speech, no swelling music. Just a man and a road and the vague hope that Helsinki might
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