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★
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
Rating: 3.0★
Victor Hugo's 1831 novel Notre-Dame de Paris (better known in English as The Hunchback of Notre Dame) has had no shortage of screen adaptations, from the silent Lon Chaney version of 1923 through to the brooding 1939 Charles Laughton picture. By the time Disney came to the
Rating: 3.5★
The title alone tells you something about the world this film inhabits. "No Dogs or Italians Allowed" refers to the kind of signs that reportedly appeared outside lodgings and workplaces in early twentieth-century France, a blunt shorthand for the discrimination faced by the waves of Italian labourers
Rating: 4.0★
The First World War has occupied British cinema for over a century, from the silent era newsreels shot a few miles behind the actual front line to the mud-soaked poetry of films like Paths of Glory and Oh! What a Lovely War. It is a conflict that refuses to
Rating: 3.5★
Andrea Arnold arrived at Fish Tank with one Cannes Palme d'Or short film already to her name (2003's Wasp) and a BAFTA-winning debut feature in Red Road (2006), a picture that marked her out as one of the sharpest observers of contemporary British social life
1960s
Viy (1967) is a strange and almost solitary object in Soviet cinema: a horror film, an actual horror film with monsters and demons and supernatural set-pieces, in a national cinema that mostly didn’t make horror at all. Officially endorsed by Mosfilm and based on a Nikolai Gogol folktale,
Genre Family
★★½ — Wonder (2017)
Genre Action
★★★½ — A Better Tomorrow (1986)
Genre Documentary
★ — Blue (1993)
Genre Adventure
★½ — Louisiana Story (1948)
Genre Drama
★★★★ — The Last Picture Show (1971)
Genre Drama
★★★ — Persona (1966)
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