At its best, the thriller keeps you one step behind, engineering dread from information withheld rather than action shown. Hitchcock proved that with Psycho, and the tradition runs through Se7en's rain-soaked moral horror right up to the present day. See what put Macca on edge in the reviews below.
Rating: 3.5★
Ask me to picture James Bond, and, sacrilege though it surely is with Connery and Moore both in the room, I don't reach for either of them. I see Pierce Brosnan, tuxedo immaculate, Walther in hand, in GoldenEye. That image is lodged somewhere deep, and after rewatching it
Rating: 3.5★
By 2006, the Bond franchise had well and truly lost the plot. The Brosnan years had drifted into self-parody, and Die Another Day, with its invisible car and that excruciating CGI surfing sequence, was the nadir of a series that had stopped taking itself seriously some time before that.
Rating: 2.5★
I came to Kiss Kiss Bang Bang blind, as I like to, having spotted it on the "They Shoot Pictures, Don't They" list of the century's best films. For a while, I genuinely thought I understood the fuss. It opens strongly. I warmed to
Rating: 3.0★
I adore the original Die Hard. It is one of the finest action films of the eighties, the one that turned Bruce Willis into a superstar, and for years I carried around a memory of the sequel being even better. Sharper, bigger, more fun. So when I finally sat down
Rating: 3.5★
Sometimes you just want a lean, punchy, no-nonsense bit of classic noir. No grand ambitions, no bloated runtime, no second-guessing itself. Just sharp dialogue, hard shadows, and a plot that knows exactly where it's going. Pickup on South Street delivers all of that and then gets
Rating: 3.0★
You have seen the bones of Man on Fire before, probably several times over. A burnt-out, hard-drinking former operative reluctantly takes a job protecting a young girl; they clash, they bond, she is snatched, and he sets about a merciless campaign to get her back. It is the
Rating: 3.5★
The scariest thing in Pulse is almost never the thing you are actually looking at. That is the film's central trick, and Kiyoshi Kurosawa pulls it off with a quiet, devastating patience that most horror directors would struggle to match even once, let alone sustain across a full
Country United States Of America
There's a moment watching The Crazies when you think: right, this is actually pretty decent. It moves well, it's got genuine menace, and it taps into something properly unsettling about ordinary people turning feral and the institutions meant to protect you becoming the threat. And then
Country United States Of America
There's a really compelling film buried somewhere inside The Hunt, and the frustrating thing is you can see it trying to claw its way out. The premise is genuinely sharp: a group of strangers wake up in a field and quickly realise they're being hunted for
Country United States Of America
There's a moment in RoboCop where a corporate suit smugly presents a walking tank of a robot to a boardroom full of executives, it malfunctions spectacularly, and a man gets shot dead in front of everyone. The suits are horrified. Not because someone died. Because of the PR
Country South Korea
That corridor. You already know the one I mean. If you've seen Oldboy, it's probably the first image that flashes into your head. One man, a hammer, and a hallway absolutely packed with people who want him dead. No wirework, no quick cuts to spare anyone&
Rating: 3.5★
On paper, Blade Runner is exactly my sort of thing. A rain-soaked cyberpunk future, a moral puzzle at its heart, a premise that asks what it even means to be human. Ridley Scott's 1982 adaptation of Philip K. Dick imagines a world where bio-engineered humans called
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