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's a very specific, visceral thump to the soundtrack of mid90s that hit me somewhere deep in the chest the moment it started. I was a skater kid growing up in the UK, and those tracks, that particular blend of hip hop and noise rock bleeding from a
Rating: 3.5★
There is a very specific, almost hypnotic rhythm to a Wes Anderson picture. Whether you're watching The Grand Budapest Hotel or Fantastic Mr. Fox, you get this peculiar sensation that absolutely nothing is happening, even while the screen is bursting with meticulously choreographed activity. Characters drift through immaculately
Rating: 3.5★
When I was sweating through my GCSEs, our school sent us off with an unusual piece of revision advice: go and watch Quadrophenia. Decades on, my daughter now sits in the same classrooms, and the same recommendation is still doing the rounds. There is something perfect about that continuity, because
Rating: 4.0★
There is a moment early in Gran Torino where Clint Eastwood, snarling on his porch over the barrel of a rifle, looks less like a man than a monument. Some forty years on from the squint and the poncho of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, still the finest
Rating: 3.5★
There's a scene early in Top of the Heap that sets out exactly what kind of film you're in for. George Lattimer, a Black police officer in early-seventies America, is caught between two worlds and welcome in neither. His colleagues on the force make his
Rating: 3.0★
There's a moment early in Paranoid Park where the camera just lingers on a skate bowl, the concrete curves catching light in a way that feels almost underwater, and you think: right, this is going to be something special. Gus Van Sant has a gift for that kind
Rating: 3.0★
There's a version of watching Under the Skin where the whole thing just washes over you, strange and cold and beautiful, and you walk out feeling vaguely disturbed in a way you can't quite put into words. There's another version where you spend half
Rating: 3.5★
There is a moment early on in Vicky Cristina Barcelona that stopped me in my tracks. Vicky and Cristina are in the back of a taxi, and the screen literally splits down the middle, placing them side by side: dark hair on one side, blonde on the other. It is
Rating: 4.0★
There is a premise at the heart of The Defiant Ones so brilliantly simple it almost feels like a provocation: two escaped convicts, one Black and one white, physically shackled together by a heavy iron chain. Stanley Kramer had the nerve to put that image on screen in 1958, long
Rating: 3.5★
There is a specific, haunting beauty to the way Roger Deakins shoots a train robbery in the dead of winter. Lantern light catching frozen breath, the world rendered in blues and greys and that particular silence that only deep snow can create. That single sequence tells you everything you need
Rating: 4.0★
Let's get one thing straight: It's a Wonderful Life is not the cosy, feel-good Christmas card its reputation suggests. I went in half-expecting warm cocoa and sleigh bells, and what I got was something far more unsettling, and far more impressive, than that. The
Rating: 3.0★
Ten films deep into a director's back catalogue and you start to think you know what you're getting. With George A. Romero, I thought I had a reasonable handle on it: sharp social commentary wrapped in viscera, monsters as metaphor, chaos as critique. Then I sat
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