Film

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…

From 20th Century Studios, Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere chronicles the making of Bruce Springsteen’s 1982 Nebraska album when he was a young musician on the cusp of global superstardom, struggling to reconcile the pressures of success with the ghosts of his past. Recorded on a 4-track recorder in Springsteen’s New Jersey bedroom, the album…

From 20th Century Studios, Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere chronicles the making of Bruce Springsteen’s 1982 Nebraska album when he was a young musician on the cusp of global superstardom, struggling to reconcile the pressures of success with the ghosts of his past. Recorded on a 4-track recorder in Springsteen’s New Jersey bedroom, the album…

Given this day and age where (mostly) everyone is traced to a social media presence and it’s not as easy to get away with saying who you aren’t, the premise of the original 1992 domestic thriller The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, where a sweet-natured mother essentially hires a stranger off the street to watch…

One of the most defining thrillers of the 1990s, The Hand That Rocks the Cradle terrified a whole generation into second-guessing who they invite into their home.  With the release of the 2025 reimagining, clearly a lesson hasn’t been learned, as a new progeny will learn “the help” have other plans for your supposed domestic…

The Adelaide Film Festival (AFF)  has continued to foster outstanding home-grown movies. With Diabolic, Adelaide director Daniel J. Philips has created an edge-of-your-seat horror thriller based on real-life events from co-writer Ticia Madsen‘s time in a fundamentalist Mormon church. Whilst the forbidden love story was real, the dark malevolent horror is pure blood-curdling fantasy. Walking…

Thanks to Paramount Pictures Australia and Superdream, we have 5 double in-season passes (Admit 2) to the new romance Regretting You, based on the best-selling novel from Colleen Hoover (It Ends With Us), starring Mason Thames, Mckenna Grace, Dave Franco, Allison Williams, Willa Fitzgerald and Scott Eastwood. Based on the bestselling book, REGRETTING YOU introduces…

With a title that can’t be misconstrued in all its obviousness, it makes sense as to why Held Hostage in My House adheres to a melodramatic, campy temperament. Despite the cheapness of proceedings, you have to hand it to writer/director Anna Elizabeth James (who seemingly has a penchant for blatantly titled thrillers, with Sinister Sorority…

A loud ticking clock accompanies the opening minutes of After the Hunt, Luca Guadagnino‘s topical #MeToo drama that presents the mundane actions of its central focus, Professor Alma Imhoff (Julia Roberts), as she goes about her day at Yale.  It feels as if perhaps the ticking is leading to something substantial – a revelation –…

Both rising forces in the film and television industry, expressing their passions for emotional, captivating storytelling, director Spencer King and actor Hunter Doohan have joined for the survivalist drama The Wilderness. Detailing a group of troubled teenage boys who are kidnapped from their homes and taken deep into the unforgiving Utah desert, where they are…

The Adelaide Film Festival opened the 2025 season in style with a pink carpet outside the Capri Cinema in Goodwood. Gilbert Street was closed off between the Capri and the Good Gilbert bar, giving a sophisticated European chic. There was an expectant buzz about the Australian debut of Jimpa, a film about an Adelaide filmmaker…

The Black Phone rightfully terrified audiences when it was released across theatres in 2022.  And now, just in time for the Halloween season, director Scott Derrickson is bringing the nightmarish void of his supernatural world back to the masses with Black Phone 2, where true evil transcends death…and the phone is ringing once more. As…

The Black Phone rightfully terrified audiences when it was released across theatres in 2022.  And now, just in time for the Halloween season, director Scott Derrickson is bringing the nightmarish void of his supernatural world back to the masses with Black Phone 2, where true evil transcends death…and the phone is ringing once more. As…

It’s not too far into the 95 minutes of David Moreau‘s Other that it becomes eerily evident that everyone aside from lead Olga Kurylenko has their appearance intentionally hidden or distorted from view.  Moreau himself stated that it was a visual additive that played into the loneliness and confinement of Kurylenko’s Alice, who spends the…

Nostalgia has proven a strong enough tool within the horror genre to revisit seemingly dormant franchises over the last few years (Halloween, Scream, I Know What You Did Last Summer, to name a few), but what about a particular subsect itself? For those craving the wince-inducing torture porn wave that swept the 2000s (thanks predominantly…

The Black Phone, released to theatres in 2022, was not the type of film that needed a sequel in any form.  It was a perfectly contained, suitably unnerving horror effort that made the most of its short story origins (Joe Hill wrote the original prose in 2004).  As we all know in the business of…

A true story that proves reality is so often wilder than fiction, Roofman, from director Derek Cianfrance (Blue Valentine), details the life of Jeffrey Manchester, dubbed the “Roofman” due to his modus operandi of breaking into his target locations (mostly McDonald’s restaurants) through their roofs.  After escaping prison and hiding out in a Toys “R”…

A classic case of truth being stranger than fiction, Roofman is the wild, almost unbelievable true story of Jeffrey Manchester, who earned himself the titular moniker due to the fact that he robbed a series of McDonald’s in the late 90s-early 2000s (45 locations, to be exact), entering the premises through their roofs.  Despite his…

\ Tied to a tree with no recollection of how he got there – or why – when Bark opens with its interesting set-up of seeming Average Joe, Nolan Bentley (Michael Weston), in this predicament, Marc Schölermann‘s horror effort wants us to question if he’s a victim or a perpetrator. Over the course of its…

Whilst there is a certain initial familiarity in Jessica Rothe portraying someone who’s in something of a cyclical environment in her latest horror effort, Affection, it becomes all too evident in the early minutes of BT Meza‘s genre outing that this is no retread of the more humorously minded Happy Death Day – the film…

The Tron series has always existed in an interesting space within cinematic history.  The 1982 original (Tron) and its 2010 sequel (Tron: Legacy) were more a cult phenomenon than box office successes, with the first film something of a visual revolution as it introduced audiences to the notion of entering a digital world, before Joseph…

An uncomfortable drama inspired by true events, Sovereign is a quiet, muscular outing from first-time feature filmmaker Christian Swegal, featuring a terrifying, layered turn from Nick Offerman at its core that speaks to the actor’s undeniable presence. Jerry and Joseph Kane were a father-son duo of anti-government extremists; Jerry was a self-proclaimed “sovereign citizen” who…

Inspired by true events, Sovereign stars Nick Offerman as Jerry Kane, a radicalised “sovereign citizen” who, with his 16-year-old son Joseph (Jacob Tremblay), gunned down two West Memphis police officers in 2010, sparking a deadly manhunt. Directed by Christian Swegal, and also starring Dennis Quaid, Nancy Travis and Martha Plimpton, Sovereign draws chilling parallels to…

Michael Stahl-David first burst onto the scene with his breakout turn in the seminal sci-fi horror hit Cloverfield. Since then, he’s built an impressively varied screen career, appearing in HBO’s Golden Globe winning Show Me a Hero, Netflix’s acclaimed juggernaut Narcos, the medical drama Good Sam, and Almost Family, an adaptation of the Australian series…

A sound reflection of the tranquil art of fishing, Looking Through Water is a calm, simple drama about the complicated relationships between fathers, sons and brothers. Now even more notable for being Michael Douglas‘s final screen role – the actor announcing his retirement earlier this year – Looking Through Water adopts a Princess Bride-like narrative…

If you could restore youthful beauty and guarantee longevity by committing to a few days of mysterious treatments, would you? Would you trust your life and health to science and technology that might be more hype than healthy?  Enter Shell. Samantha (Elisabeth Moss) is thinking it over. She’s a slightly unkempt, earnest, talented actress who…

Arriving not long after The Substance doesn’t bode well for something like Shell, Max Minghella‘s campy, body horror ode to trashy escapist 90s cinema that similarly explores the world of ageing in Hollywood and how far someone will go to maintain perfection.  With both films screening within a week of each other at last year’s…

One of the most talked about titles out of this year’s Toronto International Film Festival was the biographical sports drama Christy from acclaimed Australian filmmaker David Michôd (Animal Kingdom) and starring Sydney Sweeney in the titular role, one that generated Oscar buzz out of the festival last month; you can read our review here, where we…

No stranger to helming both action and comedy, director Luke Greenfield (The Girl Next Door, Let’s Be Cops) hilariously collides suburban dad life with high-stakes thrills, transforming an ordinary afternoon into an absurd action-packed adventure where minivan mayhem meets professional hitmen in Play Date, which Prime Video have revealed today through exclusive first-look images ahead…

The Japanese Film Festival (JFF), presented by The Japan Foundation, Sydney, marks its 29th year with a line-up of major new releases, literary adaptations, thrillers and anime features. Touring Canberra, Melbourne, Brisbane, Sydney and Perth from 27th October to the 19th December, the festival continues to highlight the best of contemporary and classic Japanese cinema….