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: 4.0★
Fairy tales have always had a cruel streak. Not the Disney kind, with the swelling strings and the guaranteed happy ending, but the older kind, the kind where girls slice off their own toes to fit a glass slipper and pigeons peck out the eyes of the wicked. The Ugly
Rating: 2.5★
A cast this stacked has no business being this forgettable. That is the thought I kept returning to throughout James Ashcroft's The Whisper Man, adapted from Alex North's novel, which somehow assembles Robert De Niro, Michael Keaton, Michelle Monaghan, Owen Teague and Adam Scott, and then
Rating: 3.5★
Imagine Léon: The Professional with every last scrap of warmth surgically removed, and you are somewhere close to You Were Never Really Here. Both films pair a haunted hired killer with a young girl he is trying to save, but where Léon finds an unlikely tenderness in that bond, Lynne
Rating: 3.0★
Every so often a single performer is so magnetic that they drag an entire film up several rungs by sheer force of presence, and Dirty Dancing is one of the purest examples I can think of. Strip Patrick Swayze out of Emile Ardolino's 1987 hit and you are
Rating: 2.5★
Coney Island drew me in. It's the iconic, salt-bleached backdrop of The Warriors, one of my absolute favourite films, and the moment I clocked that Haley Elizabeth Anderson's 2024 indie drama was set along that famous stretch of boardwalk, I was in. Location can do
Rating: 4.0★
When you think of David Lynch, your mind likely drifts to surreal nightmares, flickering neon, and industrial dread. You do not, typically, picture a family-friendly road trip across the American Midwest on a ride-on lawnmower. Yet here we are, and I mean that as the highest possible compliment:
Rating: 4.5★
A man finds oil, drills it, and gets rich. That is genuinely it. On paper, the plot of Paul Thomas Anderson's epic is staggeringly simple, and yet what he does with that bare-bones premise is something remarkable. This is a towering, standalone classic of modern cinema, and
Rating: 4.0★
The most genuinely terrifying thing about Nightcrawler isn't the nocturnal car chases, or the flashbulbs popping in blood-soaked suburban living rooms. It's the creeping, stomach-dropping realisation that people like Louis Bloom actually exist. I've crossed paths with them in the corporate world,
Rating: 3.5★
Before Yorgos Lanthimos became an awards-season fixture with the likes of The Favourite and Poor Things, he made this, and what strikes you immediately is how fully formed his sensibility already was. The flat, deadpan strangeness, the refusal to wink at the audience, the sense that horror and absurdity
Rating: 2.5★
There are films that challenge you, and then there are films that challenge you before a single frame has properly landed. The Tribe opens its account immediately: no dialogue, no subtitles, no music, no voiceover. Just people, gesturing, and you, squinting, trying to keep up. Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy's Ukrainian
Rating: 4.5★
I'll hold my hands up: I was dead wrong, and I'm not too proud to admit it. For years, I actively avoided The Perks of Being a Wallflower. It had acquired this rather tiresome reputation as a mandatory watch for "basic cinephiles," and, to
Rating: 3.5★
Let's talk about the sheer, unadulterated audacity of what David Lean pulled off with this one. You look at those sweeping, snow-drenched landscapes and assume some magical winter wonderland was captured on celluloid, that the production company packed up and headed somewhere gloriously frozen for months on
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