Author: Peter Gray

Think of it as Shakespeare for the TikTok generation, The Lovers, courtesy of lyricist Laura Murphy, injects the same type of energy Baz Luhrmann laced his Romeo & Juliet telling with across the Midsummer Night’s Dream narrative, reimagining the classic chaos of the original love story with a serious pop sensibility. The core story itself…

An acquired taste in cinema, but one that proves important regardless of how you personally react to his esoteric, boundary-pushing temperament, Paul Thomas Anderson has been responsible for some of the most important and, arguably, brilliant films across cinema the last four decades; Boogie Nights, Magnolia, There Will Be Blood, The Master, and Licorice Pizza,…

Five Star Cinemas are proud to announce the program for the 4th annual New Farm Queer Film Festival (NFQFF). Running from October 2nd – 12th at Brisbane’s New Farm Cinemas, the festival will present premiere screenings of award-winning titles from Sundance, Berlin, Cannes and Locarno, and brand-new restorations. The festival will open with the QLD…

The Strangers are back to finish what they started. She survived the first night.  But the real terror is just beginning. Thanks to Kismet Movies, to celebrate the release of The Strangers: Chapter 2, in Australian cinemas from September 25th, 2025, we have three digital double in-seasons to giveaway. THE STRANGERS are back – more brutal…

When it was revealed that Maude Apatow (daughter of filmmaker Judd Apatow and actress Leslie Mann) had helmed her first feature film, and one that starred the likes of Cooper Hoffman (son of the late Philip Seymour Hoffman) and Nico Parker (daughter of actress Thandiwe Newton and filmmaker Ol Parker) to boot, the “nepo baby”…

Though it’s been a story told countless times before, you can’t help but still be monstrously excited at the prospect of Guillermo del Toro adapting Mary Shelley’s classic Frankenstein.  His name above the title just feels correct, and not just because the director has been talking about helming his version of the story for close…

Whilst the story behind how Whitney Wolfe Herd both co-founded Tinder and its eventual competition, Bumble, is exciting and full of suitable intrigue, Swiped, with its understandable embellishments, never quite graduates beyond surface level interest.  It’s an entertaining film, without question, with another committed Lily James performance at its core, but The Social Network this…

The Jewish International Film Festival (JIFF) returns from 19th October through to the 21st December 2025, presenting 50 new films, documentaries, shorts and a television series. Screening in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Hobart, Canberra and Perth, the festival brings together the best Jewish-themed stories from around the world. Together they span history and contemporary life, the…

One of the most poignant lines of Eleanor the Great is “Talk about the things that make you sad,” and it’s with such a notion that Scarlett Johansson‘s affecting dramedy takes it on as a throughline.  A film that so easily could have been about deception becomes something far greater and more profound, transforming itself…

There’s a quiet sense of artistic rage that lingers under the surface of Alice Winocour‘s delicate Couture, a small drama that looks at the intersecting lives of a trio of women in Paris, all working in one capacity or another around the fashion industry.  Creation and the unexpected interruptions that can derail one’s own process…

Comedy, action, horror and nostalgic pop culture have fused together for the experience that is Zombie Plane, a wild new Australian feature that has everyone from Sophie Monk and Chuck Norris, to Sir Bob Geldof and Vanilla Ice teaming up as they have to save themselves from a plane overrun by zombies. Directed by Lav…

After proving he’s just as adept at helming fear as he is farce, director Paul Feig (Bridesmaids, A Simple Favour) takes on another thrillingly entertaining best-selling novel for The Housemaid, a film that plunges audiences into a twisted world where perfection is an illusion, and nothing is as it seems. Starring Sydney Sweeney and Amanda…

Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the Amazon… Doug (Jack Black) and Griff (Paul Rudd) have been best friends since they were kids, and have always dreamed of remaking their all-time favourite movie: the cinematic “classic” Anaconda. When a midlife crisis pushes them to finally go for it, they head deep…

Director Kogonada (After Yang) and screenwriter Seth Reiss (The Menu) ask a lot of their audience with A Big Bold Beautiful Journey.  It’s a hopeful romance of sorts that intends to utilise its magical realism to sweep viewers away into its odyssey of fantastical nature, with the added bonus of proven charm inhabitants Colin Farrell…

There’s been no shortage of sequels thus far across cinema screens in 2025. And, for the most part, they’ve all proven themselves worthy of existence (Freakier Friday), been a satisfactory entrant in their franchise (The Final Reckoning), or, at least, gone for broke in their attempt to distance from their predecessor (M3GAN 2.0). So where…

Kangaroo is a heart-warming family comedy about ex TV personality Chris Masterman (Ryan Corr), who becomes stranded in an Outback town outside Alice Springs. There, he teams up with 12-year-old Indigenous girl Charlie (Lily Whiteley). The pair form an unlikely friendship and work together to rescue and rehabilitate orphaned joeys in the remote but stunning…

Kangaroo is a heart-warming family comedy about ex TV personality Chris Masterman, who becomes stranded in an Outback town outside Alice Springs. There, he teams up with 12-year-old Indigenous girl Charlie. The pair form an unlikely friendship and work together to rescue and rehabilitate orphaned joeys in the remote but stunning Outback community – an…

Skilled filmmaker and whodunnit expert Rian Johnson has, once again, subverted the expectation of what should constitute a Knives Out mystery.  Whereas the first film in this now continuing franchise was a tight riddle and the sequel (Glass Onion) indulged in its vacation villainy, Wake Up Dead Man takes its cues from such gothic fiction…

Selected for the Toronto International Film Festival’s Short Cuts program, Dust to Dreams, courtesy of actor Idris Elba flexing his directorial muscle once more, is a soft meditation on on love, music, and reconciliation, set against the backdrop of Lagos, Nigeria. There’s such a rich tapestry of narrative and the emotional outlay that comes from…

Inspired by Adam Baldwin’s song “Lighthouse in Little Lorraine”, and based upon on a true story of a cocaine smuggling ring that ran through the eponymous small Nova Scotian town in the 80s, Little Lorraine is a harrowing dramatic thriller that served as one of the prime Canadian spotlight titles at this year’s Toronto International…

A TV series follow-up to the 2019 box office smash hit Top End Wedding, Top End Bub is a heart-warming eight-part series that sees Miranda Tapsell (Love Child, The Sapphires, The Artful Dodger) and Gwilym Lee (Bohemian Rhapsody, The Great) reprise their roles as Lauren and Ned. The couple are living their best lives in the city, which is…

Despite his absolute monstrous size at the time of his career and just how brutal he proved in the ring of mixed martial arts, Mark Kerr was – and still is – a figure that defied the expectations many would presumably put upon him from a personal standpoint.  Softly spoken, with an emotional sense that…

There’s something rather amusing about what constitutes an “A24” movie.  There’s an expectation placed upon the studio as of late regarding the type of film it releases into theatres, and within its own genre, the A24 comedy has rarely been as wholesome as what Eternity projects.  Between the the darker fare of Sorry, Baby and…

A white-knuckle ride through one of America’s deadliest wildfires, The Lost Bus is the real-life story of a wayward school bus driver and a dedicated teacher who battled the elements to save 22 children from a terrifying inferno. Starring Academy Award winner Matthew McConaughey and Academy Award nominee America Ferrera, The Lost Bus – a…

She’s a lesbian.  She’s in space.  She’s also a princess.  And she’s voiced by Shabana Azeez. After surviving the bachelor party weekend from beyond hell in Birdeater, and navigating the ins and outs of the medical world in HBO’s relentless new series The Pitt, Australian actress Shabana Azeez is, once again, throwing herself in a…

Paul Greengrass is a filmmaker who over the course of his career has quite masterfully tackled both the action and biographical genres; The Bourne Supremacy, The Bourne Ultimatum and Captain Phillips just a slew of examples.  For his latest, The Lost Bus, he comes close to blending the two together, looking at the everyday man…

As confident as it is a little unsure of its tone, California Schemin’ serves as the directorial debut of James McAvoy, who takes the rather wilder-than-fiction tale of a duo of Scottish rappers (Silibil N’ Brains) who faked American accents in a bid to secure a record deal that they believed they wouldn’t have secured…

A rougher slog to get to his directorial “debut” as a feature filmmaker than he would have liked, Aziz Ansari – seven years after he was accused of sexual misconduct and three years after his planned first feature, Being Mortal, was shut down over the inappropriate behaviour of its lead actor, Bill Murray – finally…

Despite being headlined by Seann William Scott (best known as Stifler from the American Pie films) and advertising itself as an action-comedy, Michael Diliberti‘s Bad Man leans into more of a sense of seriousness overall.  It isn’t without its chuckles, but it doesn’t have quite an entire hold of blending both genres, leaving the film…

Looking at the premise of Carolina Caroline on the surface, it’s all too easy to compare it to something like Bonnie & Clyde.  Sure, Adam Carter Rehmeier‘s focuses on a loved-up couple and their cross country crime spree, but Tom Dean‘s script is far deeper than that set-up.  For starters, the initial “criminal” of the…