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: 3.0★
There's a moment in The Secret of NIMH where you catch yourself leaning forward, genuinely unsettled, and then you remember this is supposed to be a Saturday afternoon film for kids. That tension, that slight discomfort at how dark and serious everything feels, is really the whole story
Rating: 2.5★
There's a version of The Red Turtle that I think I could love. The version that exists purely as a sequence of images, a moving watercolour book you'd leave open on a coffee table and let wash over you. Michael Dudok de Wit has made something
Rating: 3.5★
Press play on Tomm Moore's 2009 animated feature and within seconds you're struck dumb by how gorgeous it all is. The vibrant colours, the geometric, illuminated-manuscript art style, the sheer fluidity of the movement across the screen. It's a genuine visual feast, and
Rating: 2.5★
There's a very specific, nostalgic charm to the final gasps of traditional 2D animation at Disney, right before the studio completely surrendered to the CGI takeover. Something bittersweet hangs over these late entries in the hand-drawn era, a sense that you're watching a craft at
Rating: 3.5★
Let me be straight with you: the critics have absolutely savaged this film, and I understand why. On paper, Mortal Kombat II is a bloated, narratively incoherent action film that introduces too many characters, sidelines its most iconic ones, and wastes genuine dramatic potential on clumsy comic relief. All of
Rating: 1.5★
Let me be straight with you before anything else: if you are thinking about sitting down with Valerie and Her Week of Wonders, you deserve to know what you are actually getting into. Because the way this film tends to be packaged and sold, as a whimsical, avant-garde surrealist
Rating: 3.5★
Being half Romani, I came to Time of the Gypsies carrying a particular kind of curiosity. I knew the Romani experience depicted here, in what was then Yugoslavia, would be worlds away from anything I grew up with in the UK. What I didn't quite expect was how
Rating: 1.5★
There is a special kind of cynicism reserved for streaming cash-grabs, and John R. Leonetti's 2019 creature feature The Silence truly takes the biscuit. It is, without exaggeration, essentially a poor, straight-to-streaming tribute act to A Quiet Place. They even threw in a deaf child
Rating: 3.5★
It's genuinely rare to sit down with a piece of cinema that treats its native folklore with this level of unapologetic, mystical fidelity. Souleymane Cissé's Yeelen doesn't just borrow from Bambara mythology and dress it up for outside consumption. It pulls you entirely into
Rating: 2.0★
There's a very specific kind of tired that sets in when you're watching a film and you realise, about fifteen minutes in, that absolutely nothing surprising is going to happen. That's the feeling that settled over me watching Pokémon the Movie: Secrets of the
Rating: 3.5★
There's a moment in A Chinese Ghost Story where you sit back, squint at the screen and think, "What the hell am I actually watching?" And then you grin. Because whatever it is, it's brilliant. Tony Ching Siu-Tung's 1987 cult classic
Rating: 2.0★
There's a particular kind of betrayal that only childhood nostalgia can deliver. You build something up in your memory for decades, you convince yourself it was genuinely brilliant, and then you sit down to revisit it as an adult and watch it crumble before your eyes in real
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