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.
Country United States Of America
There's a moment watching King Kong when you have to stop and remind yourself: they made this in 1933. No computers. No CGI. No motion capture. Just ingenuity, patience, and craftsmanship that, frankly, puts plenty of modern blockbusters to shame in terms of sheer ambition. I came away
Country United States Of America
There are films you remember seeing as a kid where you can still feel the exact sensation of watching them for the first time. Aladdin is one of those. The magic carpet soaring over the clouds, the Cave of Wonders roaring to life, and then Robin Williams opening his mouth
Rating: 1.5★
Blame the algorithm. Tina Romero's Queens of the Dead had just finished, I was already in a zombie mood with my critical faculties suitably loosened, and before I'd even reached for the remote the next thing had started playing. That next thing was The Video Dead,
Rating: 3.5★
Some films impress you. A few make you sit up and wonder how on earth they were made at all. The Tale of the Fox is firmly the latter. This is a stop-motion feature very nearly ninety years old, the painstaking puppet work of Władysław Starewicz and his daughter
Rating: 3.5★
There is a slightly awkward truth I have had to make my peace with after working my way through a fair chunk of Ingmar Bergman's filmography: I keep coming away respecting these films rather than loving them. I admire them. I think about them afterwards. And then I
Rating: 2.5★
Every so often a film comes along that dares you to describe it with a straight face. The Boxer's Omen is firmly one of them. Try explaining it to someone at a party and watch their expression shift from polite interest to genuine concern for your wellbeing. A
Rating: 2.5★
There is a particular kind of frustration that has nothing to do with a film being bad, and everything to do with realising, somewhere around the halfway point, that you have walked into the middle of someone else's conversation. That is more or less where I found myself
Rating: 4.0★
There's a particular kind of dread that comes with revisiting a film you loved as a teenager. You build it up over the years, smooth out its rough edges in memory, and then sit down to watch it again with the nagging suspicion that you're about
Rating: 3.0★
The best children's stories tend to be complete things. They say what they have to say, and then they stop. That is what made the original The Gruffalo so satisfying when it landed on BBC One that Christmas a couple of years earlier: it was tight, funny, structurally
Rating: 3.0★
My sister was physically sick watching this. Not metaphorically. Not "she felt a bit queasy." She threw up, right there on the living-room floor, in front of the telly, in the middle of a children's film. I have carried that image with me for decades,
Rating: 3.0★
Let's get the heresy out of the way immediately: I have never quite understood the rabid, unquestioning devotion to Sam Raimi's Evil Dead franchise. While the world collectively worships at the altar of cabin-in-the-woods terror, I've found myself consistently underwhelmed by
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
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