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: 3.5★
There are certain films that arrive at precisely the right moment, catching a cultural mood and refusing to let go. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, released in the year 2000 and directed by Ang Lee, was very much one of those films. Drawing on the wuxia tradition, a genre with deep
Rating: 3.0★
By the early 1950s, Hollywood was, in most respects, still a man's world behind the camera. The major studios employed armies of contract directors, and women were conspicuously absent from that roster. Ida Lupino was the exception. Already a well-established actress by that point, she had turned
Rating: 2.5★
Ingmar Bergman made Winter Light in 1963 as the second film in what critics and scholars have come to call his "silence of God" trilogy, sandwiched between Through a Glass Darkly (1961) and The Silence (1963). The trilogy emerged from a period of intense personal and artistic reckoning
Rating: 3.0★
Few films can claim to have genuinely shaped the DNA of an entire genre, but Little Caesar, released by Warner Bros. and First National Pictures in January 1931, is one of the rare cases where that claim holds up to scrutiny. It arrived at a particular moment in American cultural
Rating: 3.5★
Pablo Larraín has spent the better part of two decades becoming one of the most distinctive voices in world cinema, building a filmography that returns again and again to power, identity, and the kind of grief that refuses to resolve neatly. His earlier work, the so-called Pinochet trilogy (Tony
Rating: 4.0★
To mark the centenary of cinema, Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf placed a simple newspaper advertisement in Tehran in 1994, calling for anyone who wanted to appear in his next film to show up at a given time and place. He expected perhaps a few dozen people. Roughly three thousand turned
Rating: 2.5★
Robert Bresson occupies a singular position in the French cinema canon, a director so committed to his own aesthetic principles that his films feel less like conventional narratives and more like philosophical arguments made in moving images. By the time Pickpocket arrived in 1959, Bresson had already established himself as
Rating: 3.0★
February 1939 marked one of the most desperate mass movements of people in modern European history. As Franco's Nationalist forces closed in on the last Republican strongholds in Catalonia, somewhere between 400,000 and 500,000 Spanish civilians and soldiers crossed the Pyrenees into France in a matter
Rating: 3.0★
The legend of Robin Hood has been retold so many times, in so many formats, that every new version carries the weight of all the ones before it. By the time Kevin Reynolds brought his take to cinemas in the summer of 1991, audiences had already seen Errol Flynn swing
Rating: 3.0★
On the 5th of November 1975, a group of forestry workers drove back into Snowflake, Arizona, with a story that the local sheriff and a fair portion of the American public found very hard to swallow. They claimed that their colleague, Travis Walton, had been struck by a beam of
Rating: 2.5★
By 1928, Buster Keaton had spent the better part of a decade building one of the most remarkable bodies of work in American cinema. Films like The General and Sherlock Jr. had established him not merely as a popular comedian but as a genuinely inventive filmmaker, someone who understood the
Rating: 4.0★
There is a particular strain of American indie filmmaking that strips everything back, no genre scaffolding, no high-concept hook, just a character wandering through their own life and hoping you find it as interesting as they do. Done badly, it produces films that feel like homework. Done well, it
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