Romance at its best is less about happy endings than about the ache of longing, the film holding you in suspense over whether two people will ever close the distance between them. From the bittersweet workplace yearning of The Apartment to the lush, dangerous desire of The Handmaiden, the genre rewards directors brave enough to let feeling do the heavy lifting. See what Macca made of these and more below.
Rating: 3.0★
There is something a little strange about rating a thirteen-minute short film the same way you would rate a feature. What are you even measuring? Hotel Chevalier runs barely long enough to justify making a cup of tea, and yet here I am, genuinely glad I spent time with
Rating: 3.5★
There's a moment early in Ariel when our newly unemployed protagonist, handed a convertible and precious little else by a despairing colleague, simply points the car south and drives. No grand speech, no swelling music. Just a man and a road and the vague hope that Helsinki might
Rating: 3.5★
(500) Days of Summer opens by telling you, in as many words, that it is "not a love story, but a story about love." That is true, as far as it goes, but I would argue the framing is still a little off: this is a story about
Rating: 2.0★
I should say at the outset that I am plainly the wrong audience for Past Lives, and I know it. That admission feels necessary before anything else, because what follows is going to read as a minority report on a film that a great many people I respect absolutely adore,
Rating: 2.5★
There is a version of Entergalactic that works brilliantly, and you can almost see it from where the actual film is sitting. It is there in the colour palette, in the way a single frame freezes into something you would happily hang on a wall, in the deep, unhurried groove
Rating: 4.0★
There is a moment in Blue Valentine where Ryan Gosling's character stands outside a shop front strumming something ridiculous on a ukulele while Michelle Williams dances along, and it stopped me cold. Not because it is showy or scored to make you feel a particular way, but because
Rating: 3.0★
Every so often a single performer is so magnetic that they drag an entire film up several rungs by sheer force of presence, and Dirty Dancing is one of the purest examples I can think of. Strip Patrick Swayze out of Emile Ardolino's 1987 hit and you are
Rating: 2.5★
Coney Island drew me in. It's the iconic, salt-bleached backdrop of The Warriors, one of my absolute favourite films, and the moment I clocked that Haley Elizabeth Anderson's 2024 indie drama was set along that famous stretch of boardwalk, I was in. Location can do
Rating: 3.5★
Let's talk about the sheer, unadulterated audacity of what David Lean pulled off with this one. You look at those sweeping, snow-drenched landscapes and assume some magical winter wonderland was captured on celluloid, that the production company packed up and headed somewhere gloriously frozen for months on
Rating: 3.5★
There is a moment early on in Vicky Cristina Barcelona that stopped me in my tracks. Vicky and Cristina are in the back of a taxi, and the screen literally splits down the middle, placing them side by side: dark hair on one side, blonde on the other. It is
Rating: 3.5★
When you put Michael Caine and Harvey Keitel in the same frame, something almost alchemical happens. You don't even need to build much of a story around them. Just point the camera, get out of the way, and let two absolute powerhouses do what they've spent
Rating: 3.0★
There is something undeniably arresting about watching a teenager narrate her own messy, chaotic awakening into a clunky 1970s dictaphone while sketching comic books. It pulled me in immediately, and for a while I thought I was watching something genuinely special. By the end, I was left with something more
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