Family cinema, at its best, refuses to talk down to anyone in the room. Films like Spirited Away and Song of the Sea handle grief, wonder and belonging with more honesty than most adult dramas dare to. Browse Macca's reviews below and find something worth watching together.
Rating: 3.0★
Charles M. Schulz's Peanuts comic strip ran from October 1950 until February 2000, the final instalment published the day after Schulz himself died. Over those five decades it became one of the most widely syndicated strips in history, appearing in thousands of newspapers across dozens of countries and
Rating: 4.0★
New Zealand cinema has always punched well above its weight, and Hunt for the Wilderpeople (2016) is one of the cleaner examples of why. Adapted by writer-director Taika Waititi from Barry Crump's 1986 novel Wild Pork and Watercress, the film is a collaboration between the small New
Rating: 3.5★
Released in the summer of 1972, Snoopy, Come Home arrived as the second theatrical feature spun out of Charles M. Schulz's beloved Peanuts comic strip, following three years after the franchise's big-screen debut. By this point, Schulz's characters had already conquered television, newspaper
Rating: 3.5★
By 2009, Walt Disney Animation Studios had spent the better part of a decade in something of an identity crisis. The golden run of the late 1980s and 1990s, the period critics tend to call the Disney Renaissance, had petered out, and the studio had spent the intervening years releasing
Rating: 3.0★
Released in 2002, Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron arrived at an interesting crossroads for DreamWorks Animation. The studio had spent the previous few years carving out its identity in opposition to Disney, leaning on irreverence, celebrity voices and knowing winks to the audience. Spirit is none of those things. Co-
Rating: 3.5★
A Town Called Panic arrives from a corner of European animation that rarely gets much attention on this side of the Channel: the Belgian tradition of wilfully odd, low-budget, high-energy filmmaking that seems entirely unbothered by what anyone else is doing. The film grew out of a television
Rating: 3.5★
There is a reasonable argument that the two years between 1989 and 1991 represent the single most important stretch in the history of American feature animation. The Little Mermaid had already announced the so-called Disney Renaissance with considerable force, and now the studio followed it with Beauty and the
Rating: 2.5★
There are films that reshape what cinema thinks it can do, and Fantasia (1940) is one of them. Released at a moment when animation was still widely regarded as a novelty medium, a thing for children and Saturday mornings, Walt Disney's production arrived as a deliberate provocation: a
Rating: 1.0★
Every so often a film comes along so brazen in its theft that you almost admire the nerve. Mac and Me is one of them: an E.T. knockoff so shameless it makes you wonder how it was ever allowed to reach a cinema. Stewart Raffill's 1988 "
Rating: 3.0★
The Great Escape, but with chickens. I'll be honest: that is not a bad pitch at all. And in the hands of Aardman, the studio that built its reputation on meticulous, lovingly hand-crafted stop-motion, it should be an absolute home run. The result is good. It
Country United States Of America
There are films you watch and films you remember, and The Jungle Book is firmly in the second camp. I couldn't tell you the first time I saw it, because it feels like it was always just there, woven into the furniture of early memory alongside the smell
Country United States Of America
There's a moment in Tim Burton's Dumbo remake when you realise nothing is actually going to happen. Not emotionally, anyway. The big ears flap, the little elephant takes flight, the crowd gasps, and I felt absolutely nothing. That's not supposed to be possible with
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