Science fiction, at its best, uses the impossible to say something true about the present: who we are, where we're headed, what we stand to lose. From the operatic scope of The Empire Strikes Back to the knotted time-logic of Inception, the genre rewards directors bold enough to think as well as spectacle. See what Macca made of it all below.
Rating: 3.5★
When you buy a ticket for a Godzilla picture, you already know exactly what you're getting. You're there for the roaring, the stomping, and the spectacular destruction of Japanese infrastructure. The question is never really will the monster show up. It's whether anyone bothered
Rating: 1.5★
There is a moment in the opening minutes of Attack the Block where a gang of London teenagers mug a young woman at knifepoint, goading and jeering as she runs away in terror. It is the very first thing we see them do. And from that point on, I spent
Rating: 2.5★
You can pile all the shiny, high-budget sprinkles you want on top of a scoop of vanilla ice cream, but at the end of the day it's still just prettier vanilla ice cream. That's essentially where I land on Avatar: The Way of Water, James
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
Rating: 2.5★
There's a version of watching The Heart of the World where you sit back, jaw slightly open, genuinely dazzled by what Guy Maddin has pulled off in six frantic minutes. And then there's the version where you resurface afterwards, blinking, and wonder what on earth you
Rating: 1.5★
A parched Earth. No oceans. Desperate pilots tearing each other apart in the sky just to harvest what little water the clouds have left. That's a genuinely cracking premise, the kind that makes you sit up and think, right, let's see where this goes. The problem
Rating: 2.5★
Somewhere between Aquaman and Transformers: Dark of the Moon, I stopped enjoying my self-imposed challenge of working through the billion-dollar box office club on Letterboxd and started genuinely dreading it. What I naively imagined would be a curated tour through modern cinema's crowning achievements has, in
Rating: 1.5★
There's a very specific kind of charm to the old Toho kaiju pictures, those gloriously clunky, rubber-suited monsters stomping through miniature Tokyo streetscapes. Films like Space Amoeba radiate genuine effort and earnestness from every frame, and even when they're objectively daft, you find yourself rooting
Rating: 3.0★
Ryan Coogler's Black Panther put me in a genuine quandary, and I've been trying to unpick exactly why ever since. Because on paper, this is everything I should want from a superhero film. Strong performances, real directorial ambition, a cultural significance that's impossible to
Rating: 3.0★
Most time-travel films are essentially flashy, convoluted messes that rely on a massive CGI budget to paper over their narrative plot holes. So when I sat down to watch Shane Carruth's 2004 indie mind-bender, I was bracing myself for something in the vein of The Butterfly
Rating: 2.0★
I was there for the original cartoon. I wore out the VHS of the 1987 film so many times the tracking lines practically became part of the aesthetic. So going into Travis Knight's 2026 live-action Masters of the Universe, I was hesitantly hopeful, clinging to the faint
Rating: 2.0★
What does it take to make a billion dollars at the global box office? Apparently, you just have to do the exact same thing you did three times before and turn the volume up a little louder. That's the only conclusion I can draw from Transformers: Age of
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