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: Cédric Klapisch on Colours of Time, memory and cinema’s relationship with the past

When Cédric Klapisch makes a film about time, he doesn’t treat it as something fixed or distant. Instead, it becomes something fluid – memories bleeding into the present, generations speaking to each other across decades. His latest film, Colours of Time, screening at the Alliance Française French Film Festival, begins with a simple discovery: in…

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Gold Coast Film Festival 2026: Bold stories, big oceans, and a fierce local spirit

Gold Coast Film Festival returns from 22nd April to 3rd May, 2026, and if this year’s opening and closing night films are anything to go by, it’s shaping up to be one of its most emotionally charged editions yet. Fresh from critical acclaim at the Berlin Film Festival, Warwick Thornton’s Wolfram will open the festival…

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Film Review: The Bride! is a beautiful, baffling monster of a movie

There’s something undeniably thrilling about watching a filmmaker swing this hard. From Maggie Gyllenhaal – whose directorial debut The Lost Daughter announced a fierce and precise new voice – The Bride! arrives as a bold, operatic reimagining of Mary Shelley’s mythos. On paper, it’s intoxicating: a 1930s Chicago-set fever dream starring Jessie Buckley and Christian Bale,…

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Interview: Max Norman and his champagne-fuelled alter ego Coco the Time Travelling Tart on their Adelaide Fringe show; “I’m interested in joy and irreverence.”

History has always belonged to the victors – but Coco The Time-Travelling Tart would like a word. Logging on to meet London’s self-proclaimed “Champagne enthusiast” and historical menace, our Peter Gray was immediately thrown into her gloriously unhinged orbit. Fresh from sold-out gallery tours and 30 million-plus online views, Coco is bringing her chaos Down…

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Interview: Sophie Power on breaking the shame cycle with her confrontational Adelaide Fringe cabaret show

*Interview contains adult language and references After completely sold-out runs at Melbourne International Comedy Festival and Melbourne Fringe – and taking home the award for Best Comedy – Sophie Power isn’t so much returning to Adelaide Fringe in 2026 as she is staging a full-scale uprising. Her debut solo show, CVNT, is exactly what it…

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The Wayans Brothers are back to cancel the Cancel Culture in first-look Scary Movie trailer

Twenty-six years after outrunning a suspiciously familiar masked killer, the Core Four are back in the killer’s crosshairs and no horror movie IP is safe. Marlon Wayans, Shawn Wayans, Anna Faris, and Regina Hall reunite in Scary Movie alongside returning favourites and fresh faces to slash through reboots, remakes, requels, prequels, sequels, spin-offs, elevated horror, origin…

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Interview: True South director Dave Klaiber and creator Will Alexander on the cost of endurance

For 80 years, the Sydney to Hobart Yacht Race has occupied a rare place in Australian cultural life – a spectacle of endurance that unfolds each summer as the nation watches the fleet charge south into the Bass Strait, one of the most volatile stretches of water on earth. It is a race built on…

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From page-turner to prime time: The power of the crime adaptation

There’s something deliciously ironic about the fact that, in an age obsessed with spoilers, audiences are flocking to stories where many already know the ending. Prime Video’s “Crime On Prime” slate isn’t just ambitious – it’s strategic. With adaptations of novels by James Patterson, Patricia Cornwell, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and Catherine Ryan Howard launching…

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Film Review: Dolly; grimy hicksploitation horror flick is a feral love letter to the genre

There’s a particular kind of grime that clings to the best grindhouse horror – the sense that if you wiped your hand across the screen, it would come away sticky. Dolly, directed by Rod Blackhurst, leans into that filth with feral enthusiasm. This is not polite horror. It’s blood-caked, sun-bleached, and proudly nasty; a love…

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Film Review: Solo Mio is a breezy, lush romantic comedy grounded by the surprising softness of Kevin James

Romantic comedies don’t usually hand the microphone to the guy who gets left at the altar. Solo Mio does, and that alone gives it a slightly different flavor. Kevin James has flirted with the genre before (and memorably scene-stole in Hitch), but here he steps fully into leading-man territory. Reuniting with the Kinnane brothers (Directors…

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Interview: Nick Corirossi and Armen Weitzman on the value of sincere comedy with The Napa Boys; “It feels like we’ve forgotten what movies used to feel like.”

If legacy sequels are supposed to coast on nostalgia, Nick Corirossi and Armen Weitzman clearly missed the memo. With The Napa Boys – the entirely fabricated “fourth chapter” of a wine-soaked comedy franchise that never actually existed – the longtime collaborators have pulled off something both mischievous and oddly sincere. Co-written by Weitzman and Corirossi,…

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Melbourne International Comedy Festival unveils 40th Anniversary Program

The laughs feel a little different in 2026 – fuller, louder, maybe even a touch sentimental – as the Melbourne International Comedy Festival celebrates its 40th birthday. What began in 1987 as a relatively modest gathering of funny people has grown into something that now feels woven into the city’s DNA. For four decades, every…

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Film Review: Scream 7; nostalgia and camp abound in meta-heavy sequel

The road to Scream 7 has been so fraught with controversy that it could almost qualify as its own horror story. Following the success of 2023’s Scream VI – itself marked by the absence of franchise cornerstone Neve Campbell amid a pay dispute – the seventh entry endured director departures, cast exits, online backlash, and…

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Film Review: Idiotka is a sharp, stylish satire with a whole lot of heart

With her feature debut Idiotka, filmmaker Nastasya Popov delivers a spirited satire that skewers influencer culture and reality television while grounding the chaos in something surprisingly tender: family. At its centre is Margarita – or Margusya – played with precise comic timing and quiet vulnerability by Anna Baryshnikov. A young Russian American woman living in…

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Ten years of changing the frame: Melbourne Women in Film Festival celebrates a landmark anniversary

The Melbourne Women in Film Festival (MWFF) is marking a major milestone in 2026, unveiling its tenth-year program with a bold and celebratory lineup championing women and gender-diverse filmmakers from Australia and beyond. Running March 19th – 23rd across ACMI and Federation Square, the festival continues its decade-long commitment to amplifying underrepresented voices on screen….

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What’s your favourite opening scene?: Ranking the Scream franchise

With Scream 7 stalking its way into cinemas this week, there’s no better time to revisit the franchise’s most sacred tradition: the opening kill. From subversive fake-outs to era-defining terror, the first ten minutes of a Scream movie are its thesis statement – laying out the rules, the tone, and the body count to come….

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Interview: Jordan Giusti on Floodland, climate reckoning and the meaning of home

Lismore has long worn its floods as a badge of resilience – a town that rebuilds, again and again, along the banks of a river that refuses to be tamed. But in Floodland, director Jordan Giusti looks beyond the mythology of grit and endurance to ask a far more unsettling question: what happens when resilience…

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Interview: Director Frank E. Flowers on The Bluff and crafting a fierce female-led action adventure

In the adrenaline-charged action-adventure The Bluff, Priyanka Chopra Jonas stars as Ercell “Bloody Mary” Bodden, a former pirate forced to confront her violent past to protect her family. Director Frank E. Flowers spoke with our Peter Gray to discuss bringing the Cayman Islands’ rarely seen history to life on screen, the meticulous authenticity behind the…

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Film Review: The Bluff; entertaining, though not revolutionary jaunt for audiences in the mood for swords and spectacle

The Bluff is a spirited dive into pirate-infused action, set against the jaw-dropping Cayman Brac, where towering bluffs and Skull Cave provide the perfect backdrop for a story about revenge, family, and redemption. At its heart is Priyanka Chopra Jonas as Ercell “Bloody Mary” Bodden, a woman dragged back into the violent world she thought…

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Interview: David Maler on Zumeca and rewriting the story of conquest through love

History is often told in sweeping gestures – conquest, empire, survival. But in Zumeca, David Maler narrows the lens. Set against the violent collision of worlds in the early days of the Americas, the film reframes the so-called “discovery” of the New World through something far more intimate: the relationship between a Spaniard, Miguel, and…

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Film Review: The Testament of Ann Lee; you truly haven’t seen anything like Mona Fastvold’s assured spiritual fever dream

There’s a particular kind of audacity required to make a film like The Testament of Ann Lee. It’s a historical epic. It’s a spiritual fever dream. It’s a full-bodied musical about celibate 18th-century dissenters who worshipped by trembling and dancing themselves toward transcendence. And somehow, under the assured direction of Mona Fastvold, it coheres into…

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Interview: Amanda Seyfried and director Mona Fastvold on the ecstasy, grief, and radical power of belief of The Testament of Ann Lee

From the outside, The Testament of Ann Lee might sound like an unlikely cinematic proposition: a period biopic about the founder of the Shakers, structured as a musical, rooted in ecstatic song and movement rather than spectacle. But in the hands of writer-director Mona Fastvold and star Amanda Seyfried, the film becomes something far more…

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Interview: John Patton Ford on How To Make A Killing and turning moral chaos into comedic gold

When How To Make A Killing hits screens, audiences meet Becket Redfellow, a charmingly ruthless heir-in-waiting determined to reclaim the fortune his estranged, high-society family denied him at birth. Disowned and raised in the working-class world of New York, Becket (Glen Powell) will stop at nothing – and kill anyone in his way – to…

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Film Review: How To Make A Killing proves that sometimes the sharpest comedies are the ones delivered with the straightest face

John Patton Ford’s How To Make A Killing arrives disguised as a revenge thriller, but what unfolds is something far more sly, strange, and darkly delightful. Loosely inspired by the 1949 classic Kind Hearts and Coronets, the 2026 film swaps aristocratic Britain for modern American excess and delivers a wickedly funny meditation on class, greed,…

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Interview: Joel Johnstone on faith under fire in Grizzly Night; “Conviction was the spine of the character for me.”

In 1967, two grizzly bear attacks nine miles apart shattered the illusion that America’s national parks were a perfectly managed wilderness. Nearly six decades later, Grizzly Night revisits that harrowing evening with a human-first lens – less creature feature, more reckoning with faith, fear and fragility. Directed by first-time feature filmmaker Burke Doeren and written…

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Live Review: A liberated Kesha self-celebrates on her Tits Out Tour – Brisbane Riverstage (19.02.26)

There are pop tours that feel like victory laps – and then there are the ones that feel like reclamations. On the opening night of her Australian Tits Out Tour in Brisbane, Kesha’s return to the stage felt firmly like the latter: messy in places, minimal in production, emotionally raw – and undeniably hers. The…

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Win a double in-season pass to see Ghostface burn it all down in the slasher sequel Scream 7

Thanks to Paramount Pictures Australia and Superdream, we have 10 double in-season passes (Admit 2) to the anticipated slasher sequel, Scream 7, starring Neve Campbell, Courteney Cox, Isabel May, Jasmin Savoy Brown, Mason Gooding, Anna Camp, Joel McHale, Mckenna Grace, Michelle Randolph, Jimmy Tatro, Asa Germann, Celeste O’Connor, Sam Rechner, Ethan Embry, Tim Simons and…

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Album Review: Hilary Duff balances romance with realism on clever statement LP luck…or something

On her new LP luck…or something, Hilary Duff sounds completely at ease with herself – no vocal acrobatics, no trend-chasing detours, just a confident embrace of her range and a sharp focus on songwriting. The album’s greatest strength is how naturally it balances humour with anxiety, and romance with realism. These songs live in the…

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Interview: Director Brad Anderson on navigating parenthood and the end of the world in Worldbreaker

The end of the world has rarely felt this intimate. In Worldbreaker, the earth is split apart by an event known as The Stitch, unleashing feral, mutating creatures called Breakers and reshaping the balance of survival itself. With men most susceptible to infection, women lead the fight for humanity’s future. Amid the chaos, a battle-scarred…

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Film Review: EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert is a reminder of why Elvis still matters after all these decades

There’s something quietly poetic about Baz Luhrmann returning to Elvis Presley after the maximalist fever dream of his 2022 biopic. If that film was a glitter cannon aimed at the myth, EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert feels like Luhrmann lowering the lights and letting the man step forward on his own terms. Built from rediscovered…

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