Fantasy at its best builds worlds that feel lived-in and true, whether that means Miyazaki's hand-drawn Japan in Spirited Away or the mud-and-grief of Middle-earth across Peter Jackson's trilogy. The genre earns its magic by grounding the impossible in real feeling. Browse Macca's reviews below and see which worlds hold up.
Rating: 0.5★
Dog Star Man is one of the most discussed works in the history of American experimental cinema, a film that arrived in pieces between 1961 and 1964 before being assembled into its complete 78-minute form in 1965. Stan Brakhage released it through Film-Makers' Cooperative, the distribution organisation
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: 3.5★
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 are films that demand you arrive prepared, and Neon Genesis Evangelion: The End of Evangelion is one of the less apologetic examples of the type. Released in 1997 by the Tokyo animation studio GAINAX, in partnership with Production I.G and Star Child Recording, the film was produced as
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: 2.0★
Work through enough of Jackie Chan's vast filmography, as I have been steadily doing, and you start to notice two careers running side by side: the astonishing Hong Kong run that built his name, and the patchier Western-facing vehicles that followed once Hollywood came calling. The Medallion
Rating: 2.5★
There are films you admire and films you enjoy, and sometimes those two categories barely overlap. Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within sits squarely in the first group. I can watch it and feel genuine awe at what they pulled off technically, and then sit back at the end feeling oddly
Rating: 3.0★
There is a lovely, wistful idea sitting at the heart of The Purple Rose of Cairo, and for a good while it is enough. Woody Allen's 1985 film follows Cecilia, a downtrodden waitress in Depression-era New Jersey, played by Mia Farrow, who escapes her miserable reality the
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Here's the thing about the 2021 Mortal Kombat reboot: it had exactly one job. One. Deliver bone-crunching, over-the-top, fatality-drenched carnage with a bit of heart holding it together. That's it. That's the whole brief. And somehow, despite every advantage a
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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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