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: 3.5★
Before Terrence Malick became synonymous with whispered voiceover and golden-hour cinematography stretched across two-and-a-half hours, he made Badlands: a lean, sun-scorched debut that announced, with some confidence, that a genuinely unusual filmmaking voice had arrived. The film draws its bones from the real-life murder
Rating: 3.5★
By the early 1980s, the partnership of Jackie Chan, Sammo Hung Kam-Bo and Yuen Biao had already become something of a Hong Kong institution. The three men had trained together at the Peking Opera School as children, and that shared history gave their on-screen collaborations a physical shorthand
Rating: 2.0★
Arab cinema covers an enormous range of tones and registers, from the unflinching social realism of Capernaum (2018) to lighter, crowd-pleasing fare aimed squarely at regional multiplex audiences. Honeymoonish (2024) plants itself firmly in the latter camp: a Kuwait-Lebanon co-production that pitches itself as a breezy opposites-
Rating: 3.0★
By 1986, the American independent film scene was a world away from the polished studio machinery churning out blockbusters across town. Low-budget, self-financed pictures were finding audiences through word of mouth and festival buzz, and it was in that climate that a young film school graduate from Brooklyn
Rating: 2.5★
Before Sunset arrives as the middle chapter of Richard Linklater's trilogy following two strangers whose paths cross briefly and, it turns out, unforgettably. If you've read our review of Before Sunrise, you'll already know the setup: in 1995, Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Celine (Julie
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★
Guy Maddin occupies a peculiar corner of world cinema, one that most audiences stumble into by accident and leave either thoroughly enchanted or mildly baffled. The Canadian director built his reputation across the 1980s and 1990s making films that look as though they were pulled from a vault that nobody
Rating: 3.0★
Few national cinemas have as particular a backstory as Suriname's, and One People sits at the very centre of it. The film arrived in 1976, the year after Suriname formally gained independence from the Netherlands, and that timing is no accident. The country's departure from the
Rating: 2.0★
The "stranded together" romantic comedy has been a reliable staple of popular entertainment for decades, from classic screwball pictures right through to the wave of made-for-television romances that now dominate streaming schedules at the weekend. Lost in Paradise (2026) slots neatly into that tradition: a fashion
Rating: 2.5★
There is a certain romantic melancholy baked into the very source material of Ali and Nino. The 1937 novel of the same name, published under the pen name Kurban Said, has been attributed to various authors over the decades (the true identity of its writer remains genuinely disputed), but its
Rating: 3.0★
There is a particular kind of film that seems designed less to entertain than to make you shift uneasily in your seat, and Babygirl (2024) belongs firmly in that category. Written and directed by Halina Reijn, it is an erotic thriller centred on Romy, a high-powered tech CEO whose
Rating: 3.0★
And Then We Danced arrived in 2019 against a backdrop of real political tension. When the film screened at the Tbilisi Film Festival, far-right and nationalist groups organised protests outside cinemas, with some screenings requiring police protection. That reception said rather a lot about the territory the film was
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