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: 1.5★
The monster-horror genre has always had a complicated relationship with imitation. One film cracks open a fresh idea, audiences respond warmly, and within eighteen months the streaming platforms are loaded with films that smell very much like the original but have somehow lost everything that made it interesting. Released
Rating: 3.5★
There are films that wear their cultural heritage lightly, sprinkling in a few local details for colour before defaulting to familiar genre shapes. And then there is Yeelen. Released in 1987 and rooted in the oral traditions and spiritual cosmology of the Bambara people of Mali, Souleymane Cissé's
Rating: 2.0★
The Pokémon franchise has been producing theatrical films since 1998, and at this point the formula is about as well-worn as an old pair of trainers. What began with the genuinely affecting Pokémon: The First Movie has expanded into a long-running series of largely standalone adventures, each built
Rating: 3.5★
By the mid-1980s, Hong Kong cinema was operating at a kind of creative fever pitch that the rest of the world was only just beginning to notice. John Woo had redefined the action thriller with A Better Tomorrow in 1986, and the Shaw Brothers tradition of wuxia spectacle, stretching
Rating: 2.0★
By the mid-1980s, the toy aisle had become one of Hollywood's favourite hunting grounds. Mattel's He-Man and the Masters of the Universe line had been a commercial phenomenon since its launch in 1982, generating billions in sales and anchoring one of the decade'
Rating: 3.0★
Jean Genet is best known to most people as a novelist and playwright, the author of works like Our Lady of the Flowers and The Maids, a writer whose entire creative life was shaped by time spent on the margins of French society, including real spells in prison. Un Chant
Rating: 2.5★
Aquaman arrived in December 2018 at something of a crossroads for the DC Extended Universe. Warner Bros. had spent several years watching Marvel print money while their own interconnected franchise stumbled through mixed-to-hostile receptions for Batman v Superman and Justice League. The pressure on this one was real:
Rating: 2.0★
Few toy franchises have had as stubborn a grip on popular imagination as Masters of the Universe. What began as a Mattel action figure line in 1982 snowballed, almost immediately, into an animated television series that became a Saturday morning institution for an entire generation of children on both sides
Rating: 2.0★
There are certain properties that feel almost critic-proof by design, and Pokémon is probably chief among them. The franchise, born from Satoshi Tajiri's 1996 Game Boy games and the trading card craze that followed, became one of the most commercially successful media brands in history before most
Rating: 4.0★
There is a particular kind of anticipation that surrounds any new Hayao Miyazaki film, and by 2023 that anticipation had curdled into something closer to disbelief. The director had, after all, announced his retirement in 2013 following the release of The Wind Rises, only to quietly reverse course a few
Rating: 2.5★
The Aral Sea was once the fourth largest lake in the world. By the early 2000s, decades of Soviet-era irrigation projects had reduced it to a scattering of shallow, salt-crusted remnants surrounded by desert, leaving fishing boats stranded on dry land miles from any water. It is one
Rating: 3.0★
There are films that arrive with a straightforward pitch and deliver more or less what they promise, and then there are films like Mad God. Phil Tippett's feature debut as director is something else entirely: a stop-motion nightmare three decades in the making, resurrected from a shelved
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