He has fearlessly sat through the good, the bad and the ugly, and written  thousands upon thousands of movie reviews for more than half a century. It’s time Dougal Macdonald took a star turn. Reporter NICK OVERALL puts him in the spotlight.

DOUGAL Macdonald might very well be Australia’s oldest, most-experienced film reviewer and “CityNews” couldn’t be prouder of him. 

The 88-year-old Bungendore local has been sharing his sharp-witted observations of the silver screen for some 57 years – longer even than celebrated film critic Roger Ebert wrote for the “Chicago Sun-Times”.

“The first film I reviewed was in 1965 and here I am,” says Macdonald, who still gets to the cinema twice a week.

“There’ve been a lot of good films, a few bad ones and the number of stars is my language for expressing good, bad or indifferent.”

Originally from Queensland, Macdonald still remembers his first trip to the movies as a young boy that would spark his interest in the big screen for decades to come.

“My mother took me to see ‘Gulliver’s Travels’ in the early 1940s and that’s where it started,” he says.

The cel-animated musical was based on Jonathan Swift’s classic novel and one that at the time excitedly promoted itself as being “in technicolor”.

The film’s impact on Macdonald would play a small part in what would one day become more than half a century of writing on film  – a venture that started with “The Canberra Times” in the mid ‘60s.

“I actually first reviewed books for four or five years and then a reader wrote to the editor saying there’s no information on the movies being shown other than information supplied by the makers of the movies,” says Macdonald. 

“That’s a bit of a bias isn’t it?

“From there I gave the book reviews up and went with the movies. The first film I reviewed had Gina Lollobrigida, Sean Connery and Ralph Richardson in a thriller called ‘Woman of Straw’.”

From then on Macdonald would find a new passion for writing about the pictures, one that would turn into him sometimes seeing up to five films a week.

When asked how many movies he thinks he’s seen over all the years Macdonald says it’s a figure he’s never even tried to count.

“Put it this way, it’s three computers ago that I started,” he says.

In more recent years, Macdonald’s reviews have become a popular staple of the “CityNews” Arts and Entertainment section for their droll manner and no holds barred style.

Take his recent breakdown of “Top Gun: Maverick”, one of the most popular films of 2022 that Macdonald unapologetically panned as “twaddle”.

“What idiot would ride a powerful motorbike bare-headed – no helmet – and wearing Levis, not leathers? Maverick would!,” Macdonald wrote of Tom Cruise’s iconic character.

He’s been unafraid to label some of today’s most beloved franchises such as the Marvel Cinematic Universe as “juvenile nonsense”, the James Bond saga as a “seen one, seen all” type-deal, and even declared that he fell asleep for most of “Godzilla vs. Kong.”

“I don’t write what anyone expects me to write, I’m writing what I think,” he says.

The unrestrained approach has made Macdonald’s praise of those rare, special films all the more meaningful.

Take his five-star review of last year’s sci-fi satire “Don’t Look Up”, a film Macdonald observed as “a message movie firmly grounded on the present time, populated by people who may be fictional but whose provenance and purposes we recognise in our daily media diet”.

Another to recently garner Macdonald’s infrequent five-star rubber stamp was the Australian film “The Drover’s Wife” – an adaptation of Henry Lawson’s famous short story that he described as “a masterpiece of just about every element of the filmmaker’s craft.”

“As a writer, Dougal Macdonald is a pain in arse,” says “CityNews” editor Ian Meikle, with a smile. 

“He writes brilliantly; like he’s knitting words and when sometimes there’s a necessity to abridge his copy because of, say, a space problem, it’s a nightmare to winkle them out.  

“Get it wrong and you get a call or worse, an email… in red letters guiding you back to the straight and narrow! 

“But he is a masterful wordsmith and writes with the adjectival passion of a 30-year-old – he’s naughty and nuanced, and has this constant, cheeky campaign to devise a context that will beat me into allowing him to use, shall we say, colloquialisms that might make an editor blush. 

“And don’t get him going on why he’s not a critic…” 

Too late: Macdonald says: “A critic analyses, a reviewer describes. My life in reviewing has been sitting in a cinema then helping readers to make their go or no-go decisions about what to see,” he says.

“I see what’s coming and pick those with little accompanying fanfare.”

When asked what he thinks may be the greatest film of all time, Macdonald doesn’t believe there’s an answer.

What he can say though, is that he’s quick to know when he’s seen a film that’s worthy of that rare, five-star seal. 

“It’s one that sends me out knowing that I’ve seen something that touched in here,” he says, pointing to his heart.