Author: Peter Gray

Seasoned film critic and editor. Gives a great interview. Penchant for horror. Unashamed fan of Michelle Pfeiffer and Jason Momoa. Contact: [email protected]

Interview: Lauren Call on navigating roles as lead actor and producer of Grizzly Night; “It’s terrifying, but also empowering.”

Lauren Call is, in many ways, used to navigating dual roles. A fourth-generation Californian born and raised in Costa Mesa, she has been in front of cameras and on stages since she was six years old – from local and regional theatre across the state, to honing her craft at Orange County School of the…

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On the AACTA Awards Red Carpet: Hope, Genre Dreams and the Future of Australian Screen

The AACTA Awards red carpet always feels like a curious collision of celebration and anticipation – part victory lap for the year that was, part tea-leaf reading for the year to come. Under the camera flashes and polished smiles, there’s often a deeper conversation happening about what Australian screen culture is becoming, what it values,…

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Series Review: The Artful Dodger Season 2 broadens its story in both scale and spectacle

The Artful Dodger debuted in 2023, serving as an inventive sequel inspired by Charles Dickens’ “Oliver Twist.” Rather than focusing on Dickens’ original orphan, the series followed the “Artful Dodger”, Jack Dawkins (Thomas Brodie-Sangster), as he forged a new life in the British Colony of Australia, balancing ambition, love, and the lingering influence of Fagin…

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Interview: David Thewlis on the second season of The Artful Dodger, his character’s motivations, and finding his own physical rhythm

Jack’s back – and so is the man who made him. With The Artful Dodger returning for an even darker, wilder second season, Port Victory’s most charming rogue finds himself staring down a noose, a relentless new lawman in Inspector Boxer, and an impossible love in Lady Belle that could get him killed. As the…

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Interview: Baz Luhrmann and Catherine Martin at the Gold Coast Premiere of EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert

When Baz Luhrmann went searching for Elvis Presley, he didn’t just find an icon – he found a voice. Premiering to Australian audiences at the AACTA Festival, EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert unveils long-lost footage painstakingly uncovered and restored by the Academy Award–nominated filmmaker, offering an intimate, unguarded portrait of the King that feels both…

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Interview: Dane Simpson on his greatest hits show, standing behind a decade of material, and why the chase of comedy still matters

After a decade of sold-out shows, viral punchlines, and becoming one of Australia’s most recognisable  – and reliably joyous – comedy voices, Dane Simpson is doing what few comedians dare: hitting shuffle on his own legacy. 100% Hits – A Decade of Dane Simpson’s Funniest Moments!, landing at the Adelaide Fringe in 2026 (running between…

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Ed Sheeran announces Pop Up Stores for Australian Loop Tour

Ed Sheeran has unveiled three exclusive pop-up stores across Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne, launching alongside the Australian leg of his highly anticipated Loop Tour. The global superstar is currently making his way around the country with a brand-new live show, kicking off in Perth before heading to Sydney, Brisbane, Melbourne and Adelaide throughout the month….

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Robyn announces The Sexistential Tour for 2026 across Europe, North America and Australia

Generational pop icon Robyn has announced her return to the road with a global 2026 arena run, The Sexistential Tour – her first major headline tour since 2019 and her most ambitious to date. Spanning Europe, North America, and Australia across 20 dates, the tour will feature Robyn’s biggest headline shows ever, including London’s 20,000-capacity…

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Zara Larsson announces Australian leg of her Midnight Sun World Tour

Swedish pop powerhouse Zara Larsson has confirmed she will return to Australia this October with her globally celebrated Midnight Sun tour – her first visit to the country in over a decade. The Australian run follows the release of Larsson’s acclaimed fourth studio album, Midnight Sun, which arrived in late 2025 and has since soundtracked…

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Interview: Stephanie McIntosh on returning to music and how being a mum shapes her creativity

Talking to Stephanie McIntosh at the AACTA Festival Awards Industry Gala, you’re reminded just how fluid her career has always been – and how thoughtfully she reflects on it. From her breakthrough years on Neighbours and her pioneering pop album, Tightrope, to the accompanying televisual journey The Steph Show that felt almost ahead of its…

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Win a double in-season pass to see Crime 101 starring Chris Hemsworth and Halle Berry

Thanks to Sony Pictures Australia, we have 5 double in-season passes (Admit 2) to see the star-studded crime thriller Crime 101, starring Chris Hemsworth, Mark Ruffalo, Barry Keoghan and Halle Berry, in Australian theatres from February 12th, 2026. Set against the sun-bleached grit of Los Angeles, Crime 101 weaves the tale of an elusive jewel thief (Chris Hemsworth)…

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Inside the First Night of the AACTA Festival: Homegrown Brilliance Honoured at the AACTA Awards Industry Gala

The Gold Coast glittered a little brighter on the first night of the AACTA Festival on Wednesday, February 4th – not because of Hollywood shine, but because of something far rarer and more meaningful: a genuine celebration of Australia’s own. This opening night wasn’t about red carpets for the biggest stars or the climactic awards…

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Opinion: Why Samantha Jade Has Always Been (Very) That Girl

Twenty years on from the release of “Step Up” – Samantha Jade’s glossy, Diane Warren–penned introduction to the pop world – it’s striking how aptly that title has come to describe her career. Again and again, Jade has stepped up: into new creative arenas, back into an industry that repeatedly underestimated her, and into her…

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Interview: Coach Chuck “Chico” Kyle, director Matt Waldeck, and NFL legend Joe Thomas on docuseries The Object of the Game

In a sport often defined by scoreboard lights, playoff runs, and Super Bowl glory, the new docuseries The Object of the Game turns its gaze back to where it all truly begins. Arriving February 4th on Prime Video (US) – timed for the most-watched week in American sport – the three-part series assembles an extraordinary…

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Win a double in-season pass to the new horror film Whistle

Thanks to Roadshow Films, we have 5 double digital in-season passes (Admit 2) to see the terrifying new horror flick Whistle, in Australian theatres from February 12th, 2026. A group of high school misfits inadvertently come across an ancient Aztec death whistle. Blowing it summons their future deaths to hunt them down. As the body count…

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Film Review: Shelter; latest action entry in the Statham canon is solid, if hardly groundbreaking

There is a strangely elegiac calm to the opening stretch of Ric Roman Waugh’s latest Jason Statham vehicle, Shelter – one that might catch viewers expecting immediate punches, car chases, and broken necks slightly off guard. For a while, this isn’t really a movie about violence so much as solitude: wind-battered cliffs, a creaking wooden…

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Film Review: We Bury the Dead; Daisy Ridley anchors emotionally laced survivalist horror effort

There is something almost old-fashioned in the way writer/director Zak Hilditch approaches the end of the world in We Bury the Dead: less as a spectacle of chaos, more as a slow, sad reckoning with what remains when everything familiar has vanished. His latest film feels heavy with mourning from its very first frames, suffused…

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Elle Fanning turns to “educational videos” for support in first teaser of Apple TV’s Margo’s Got Money Troubles

Today at the Apple TV 2026 Press Day, the stars of Margo’s Got Money Troubles, alongside prolific storyteller David E. Kelley, took the stage to unveil a teaser and shared a glimpse into the star-studded new series starring and executive produced by Oscar, Emmy and Golden Globe Award nominee Elle Fanning, Golden Globe winner and…

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Neve Campbell faces her past in Big Game Spot for Scream 7

It’s been an event thirty years in the making as Sidney Prescott faces her past in Scream 7. After sitting out the events of Scream VI, Neve Campbell is back facing the knife in the hotly anticipated sequel which sees original writer Kevin Williamson step into directing duties, three decades after the original film terrorised…

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Opinion: Britney Spears and the Grammys: A History of Cultural Impact Without Institutional Respect

Few artists have reshaped popular music as decisively as Britney Spears. From the moment she debuted in 1998, she redefined what a pop star could look like, sound like, and represent. Her influence is embedded in the DNA of modern pop – in vocal styles, production trends, choreography, and the marriage of image and music….

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Silenced stands as a vital work of contemporary documentary filmmaking: Sundance Film Festival Review

Silenced is a bracing, compassionate, and urgently necessary documentary that transforms complex legal battles into a deeply human story about power, credibility, and the precariousness of women’s voices in public life. Director Selina Miles delivers a film that is both rigorously investigated and profoundly felt, blending courtroom insight with intimate, vérité-style storytelling that keeps the…

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Film Review: Is This Thing On? is Bradley Cooper’s most intimate film yet

Bradley Cooper’s Is This Thing On? is a film about what lingers after the end of a marriage – not the explosive rupture, but the quieter aftermath where two people must confront who they’ve become once the life they built together begins to dissolve. Rather than framing divorce as a dramatic turning point, Cooper is…

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Interview: Will Arnett and Laura Dern on the quiet intimacy of Is This Thing On?

In Is This Thing On?, intimacy isn’t played for grand gestures or easy resolutions. It’s found in the quiet, uncomfortable spaces where love begins to shift shape. Directed by Bradley Cooper, the film observes Alex and Tess Novak as their marriage gently fractures, following two people forced to confront who they are beyond the roles…

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The Musical; audacious musical circles anarchy without completely committing to the chaos: Sundance Film Festival Review

The Musical is a prickly, uneven but intriguingly sharp first feature from director Giselle Bonilla, a film that clearly knows what it wants to be, even if it doesn’t always get there. Equal parts workplace satire, personal meltdown, and theatrical farce, the movie operates best when it leans into its absurdity, and falters when it…

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Big Girls Don’t Cry; New Zealand coming-of-age tale lingers with its own tender awkwardness: Sundance Film Festival Review

Set in rural New Zealand in 2006, Big Girls Don’t Cry revels in its own humid, jangling state of being. Writer/director Paloma Schneideman, emerging from Jane Campion’s orbit (the director serving as an executive producer), has made a debut that feels lived-in rather than observed, patiently slipping inside the skin of a 14-year-old girl who…

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Hot Water; road-trip dramedy is rich in its promise, yet unfocused in its gaze: Sundance Film Festival Review

Ramzi Bashour’s Hot Water arrives as a gentle, road-worn meditation on movement, belonging, and the complicated geometry of parent-child love. More interested in texture than plot, the film drifts across America with a perceptive eye, finding both beauty and banality in the stretch of highways that carry a Lebanese mother (Lubna Azabal) and her troubled…

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Valentine at 25: Appreciating The Slasher That Actually Listened To Women

When Valentine hit American theaters in February 2001, it arrived at a strange and unforgiving moment for horror. The post-Scream boom had peaked, critics were exhausted by the meta-wave, and studios were scrambling to find the next box-office darling. Into this atmosphere entered a stylish, glossy, almost defiantly straightforward slasher film – one that critics…

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Union County; Will Poulter shines in quietly hopeful recovery drama: Sundance Film Festival Review

Assigned to a county-mandated drug court program, Cody Parsons begins a fragile and hard-won journey toward recovery in the shadow of the opioid crisis that continues to ravage rural Ohio. From that premise alone, Union County could have been another familiar tale of addiction and despair, but what unfolds instead is something far more tender,…

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Night Nurse; conceptually daring thriller is a tantalizing misfire: Sundance Film Festival Review

Night Nurse arrives already cloaked in intrigue: a psychosexual thriller set not in a glossy penthouse or shadowy alleyway, but inside the pristine, hushed corridors of a luxury retirement community. It is, on paper, a promisingly perverse collision of caregiving, exploitation, and desire – a place where intimacy is transactional, trust is fragile, and vulnerability…

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Rock Springs is an undeniably important, yet fractured work of storytelling: Sundance Film Festival Review

Vera Miao’s feature debut, Rock Springs, is a film of undeniable importance, even when its storytelling struggles to cohere into a fully unified whole. Structured across three distinct acts – each with their own tonal and thematic weight – the film reaches for something vast: a reckoning with historical violence, inherited trauma, and the uneasy…

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