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: 2.5★
Beatrix Potter's Peter Rabbit first appeared in 1902 as a privately printed picture letter, and the little blue-coated rabbit has been a fixture of British childhood ever since. The stories are gentle things: soft watercolours, a walled garden, a bad-tempered gardener, and the quiet moral that
Rating: 3.0★
Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler's picture book The Gruffalo's Child arrived in 2004, five years after the original The Gruffalo had become one of the best-selling children's books in British publishing history. Where the first book introduced a clever little mouse spinning predators
Rating: 4.0★
Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler published The Gruffalo in 1999, and within a decade it had become one of those rare children's books that parents can recite from memory whether they want to or not. The rhyming couplets, the woodland setting, the mouse with an improbable imagination: all
Rating: 3.0★
Roald Dahl's 1983 novel The Witches occupies a particular corner of children's literature: charming on the surface, genuinely alarming underneath. Dahl never much softened his edges for younger readers, and the book, with its bald premise that witches are real, hate children, and walk among us
Rating: 3.5★
By the time Sonic the Hedgehog 3 arrived in cinemas in December 2024, the series had quietly become one of the more reliable video game adaptations in recent memory, which is admittedly a low bar to clear but still worth acknowledging. The franchise is rooted, of course, in SEGA'
Rating: 3.5★
Video game adaptations have had a long and largely undistinguished relationship with the big screen, and Sega's most famous blue mascot was no exception to that tradition. The original Sonic the Hedgehog (2020) arrived trailing some of the most vocal pre-release backlash in recent memory (that infamous
Rating: 3.5★
There is a particular kind of British Christmas television that asks very little of you and gives back rather a lot. Magic Light Pictures and the BBC have been quietly building that tradition since 2009, adapting the picture books of Julia Donaldson and illustrator Axel Scheffler into short animated films
Rating: 4.0★
There are films that become so thoroughly absorbed into seasonal ritual that it becomes almost impossible to see them clearly anymore. Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life, released in 1946, is perhaps the defining example of this phenomenon in English-speaking film culture. Screened annually in
Rating: 3.0★
There is something quietly remarkable about a film arriving from New Zealand and the Cook Islands in 2003 under the banner of a production consortium that includes a wellness company (Morinda, Inc, the juice brand, whose involvement in family film financing is exactly as odd as it sounds) and a
Rating: 3.5★
By the early 2000s, Walt Disney Feature Animation was in an odd position. The so-called Disney Renaissance, that extraordinary run of films from The Little Mermaid through to Mulan, had wound down, and the studio was feeling its way forward with a string of pictures that never quite managed
Rating: 3.0★
By the early 1980s, the American animation industry was in a peculiar state of drift. Disney, the dominant force for decades, had produced a string of pictures through the late seventies that felt safe and somewhat tired, and audiences were beginning to sense it. It was into this gap that
Rating: 3.5★
There are animated films that arrive, do their job, and are more or less forgotten within a generation. Then there are the ones that come embedded in a culture so thoroughly that even people who have never sat down and actually watched them feel they already know them. The Twelve
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