Year: 2025

While most of Brisbane was settling in for State of Origin on Wednesday night, the line to The Princess Theatre saw Maroon jerseys replaced with corduroy jackets and baggy jeans. Inside, the anticipation was building for Nashville-based indie rock artist Soccer Mommy (the alias of Sophie Allison), who was bringing her signature blend of shoegaze…

In The Edge, the dramatic feature film from debut filmmaker Jane Larkin (a former Australian representative sprinter), three young women (Larkin, Japanese paralympic swimmer Mei Ichinose and First Nations powerlifter Lily Riley) navigate life, love, education, and controversy while deeply embedded in the world of elite sport. The film is an honest and gritty portrayal…

It’s always a scary thing for me as a fan to put up my hand to review my favourite band.  What if it sucks? What if I can’t get into it?  This has been my first-world struggle as long as I’ve been a writer, and leading up to this week I’ve been back in that…

The Mitford sisters are amongst some of the most well known people in the United Kingdom, gaining notoriety in the 1930s. What caused this fame and widespread attention was not the affluent and aristocratic status of these women (although their status did lead them to be targets for scandalous headlines in the press), but the…

Can you believe it’s been over a decade since we’ve had a new Mario Kart game? But along with the Nintendo Switch 2, here we are. In many ways, Mario Kart World is an awesome follow-up to an almost perfect kart-racer that has stood the test of time. On the fresh hardware, it looks fantastic…

The crossover between Australian film legend George Miller and Japanese video game auteur Hideo Kojima may seem odd to people unfamiliar with the two beyond their main works, but to those who follow more closely, this is a relationship that stretches back more than a decade. And when you consider the careers and creative outputs…

There’s a romance to policing in fiction that real life rarely lives up to. The flashing lights, the procedural rhythm and the legend of a lone beat cop fighting against a crime-ridden city. It’s built for drama, as television has proven since the 1970s. The Precinct, from American Fugitive developers Fallen Tree Games, taps into…

From the beloved E. Lockhart book of the same name, We Were Liars is the highly anticipated Prime Video adaptation developed by Julie Plec and Carina Adly Mackenzie. With an all star cast featuring Emily Alyn Lind, Caitlin FitzGerald, Mamie Gummer, Candice King, Rahul Kohli, Shubham Maheshwari, Esther McGregor and Australian actor Joseph Zada, We Were…

As evident by its title, 28 years Later takes up such a time period from the virus that first unleashed itself across Danny Boyle‘s 2002 post-apocalyptic horror effort 28 Days Later.  That film centered around the days that followed the actions of a group of animal rights activists who infiltrated a laboratory in Cambridge, where…

We’re about to hit the shortest day of the year in the Southern Hemisphere, and the new music keeps coming. This week we’ve added ten more tracks to our Discovery playlist on Spotify and Apple Music, and our track of the week goes to Bleak Squad, a new Melbourne-based outfit featuring four Australian music legends,…

A cohesive storyline or if it makes you cry? Sometimes the personal success of a Pixar movie doesn’t always rely on the former, with many taking the latter as enough of a justification for its existence.  In such a case, Elio may be enough of a charming win for family audiences who could find themselves…

Spacey Jane tore through a sold-out show at Melbourne’s PICA on Wednesday night, showing the warehouse exactly why they’ve earned their place as one of Australia’s biggest live bands. From the moment they launched into “Through My Teeth,” the crowd was all in, singing, sweating, fully locked. They moved through a new set with ease,…

Tara Calaby’s second novel The Spirit Circle came out in January of this year and has followed hot on the heels of her debut, The House of Longing, which came out in 2023 – an impressive turnaround for historical fiction, which often requires extensive research. The result is an assured and atmospheric read featuring headstrong heroines, forbidden…

Sharon Van Etten returns to Australia this November, with her band The Attachment Theory showcasing their recently released self-titled debut album plus a selection of Sharon’s classic solo work. Sharon Van Etten’s music, known for its emotional rawness and lyrical vulnerability, often mirrors the psychological principles of Attachment Theory, a framework in psychology that explores…

The Fremantle indie rock band Spacey Jane have had huge success in their careers over the last five years; selling out shows, finding international acclaim, touring around the world, and debuting at number 2 on the ARIA charts with their third album If That Makes Sense. They are by far one of the most popular Aussie…

Over two decades ago, The Beautiful Girls were the soundtrack to salt-sprayed road trips, lazy Sunday afternoons and sun-soaked summers along the Aussie coast. This year marks the twentieth anniversary of their second studio album We’re Already Gone, and The Beautiful Girls have hit the road to celebrate. I had the pleasure of catching up…

Headstrong women and vibrant imagery take centre stage in Nadia Mahjouri’s debut novel, Half Truth, in which themes of belonging and identity meld with those of motherhood and family to create a rich and powerful story of a grandmother and granddaughter united in their uncertainty by the absence of one man. In 1999, Zahra begins…

Whilst there’s a certain unevenness to how writer/director Emily Abt presents her story in Thirsty, there’s no denying it manages to maintain a sense of interest as it navigates the world of politics, domesticity, and the woman trying to perfect both. That woman is Audrey (Jamie Neumann), a sharp, some may say ruthless, defense attorney…

In the immortal words of Jennifer Love Hewitt, “What are you waiting for?” Well, it’s not the latest trailer for I Know What You Did Last Summer, as the Jennifer Kaytin Robinson-directed slasher legacy sequel dropped its brand new visuals ahead of the film’s release this July. Hewitt and fellow series subsister Freddie Prinze Jr….

Delighting in the type of self-centred behaviour that more of us are guilty of than not, the character at the core of The Travel Companion, Alex Mallis and Travis Wood’s debut feature, sprouts lyrical to anyone who’ll listen (or tolerate) about his forthcoming directorial feature – an experimental, hybrid docu-fiction-travelogue about the cultural bridges and…

Lenny Kravitz is set to ignite stages across Australia with the long awaited return of his high-voltage live show, announcing the Blue Electric Light Australian Tour this November. Following the global success of his twelfth studio album, Blue Electric Light, Kravitz will bring his signature fusion of rock, funk, soul, and psychedelia to Australian shores…

Genre-defying alt-pop provocateur SOFIA ISELLA is heading to Australia this December for the highly anticipated YOU’LL UNDERSTAND, DICK tour, bringing her raw lyricism, cinematic sonics, and fearless stage presence to Australian audiences for the first time. Following a string of electric performances across North America and Europe and a support slot with Taylor Swift, the…

An education is viewed as an important thing. Former British PM, Tony Blair once ran on a platform where his party’s top three priorities were “Education, Education, Education.” The Shadow Scholars is a documentary that looks at the true cost of education and opportunity. First-time director Eloïse King shines a spotlight on the contract cheating…

If you’re a fan of sci fi/fantasy novels that are more on the cosy end of the scale, you’ve probably heard of TJ Klune – or at least heard of his novel The House in the Cerulean Sea and its highly anticipated sequel. But you probably haven’t heard of The Bones Beneath My Skin, which…

There are some of us who have been fortunate enough to eat at a fine dining restaurant. But at a place like Japan’s Tokito, this experience is elevated so high it’s  almost like a religious experience. The documentary Tokito: The 540-Day Journey of a Culinary Maverick plays out like a real-life example of the TV…

The age-old question around if a tree falling in the forest makes a sound is asked in quite a compelling, pressure-cooker type of way in A Tree Fell in the Woods, Nora Kirkpatrick‘s debut dramedy about the implosion of relationships between two couples across a New Year’s Eve getaway in the snowy forests of Utah….

Directed by Alexander Ullom, It Ends was originally a short film that turned into a feature (87 minutes, to be precise), which debuted at SXSW 2025. It tells the story of a group of college kids embarking on a road trip. However, when they miss a turn-off, they realise they are driving directly through a…

“Are you here for the boat or the tooth?” And with that sentence, writer/director Olivia Accardo welcomes us into the bizarre reality of Baby Tooth, a wild five minute short film screening as part of this year’s Tribeca Film Festival; it’s set to play before the feature The Trainer, as well as being included in…

Australia was introduced to Kisschasy in 2005, after the release of their debut record United Paper People, and the Aussie music scene was never quite the same again. The release of their sophomore album Hymns for the Nonbeliever had fans in a chokehold, and with two certified gold records under the belt, Kisschasy were on…

Whilst Everything’s Going to Be Great starts out a bit more eccentric and comedically minded than how it ends, the performances at the core of Jon S. Baird‘s dramedy, and the sense that it celebrates art and those that have always felt a little different in doing so, keeps it continually moving at an enjoyable…