Film

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….

Whether we’ve taken notice or not, but, much like your James Bonds, Jack Ryans and Jack Reachers, the character at the centre of Shane Black‘s Play Dirty – Parker – is a cinematic mainstay who has appeared in films dating back to the 1960s, portrayed either directly or taken inspiration from by a multitude of…

There’s an odd satisfaction that comes from watching genre films that use the narrative of stolen children.  It’s a horrific, harsh reality, but Hollywood knows how to take the weighted drama of such and merge it with a revenge-cum-saviour mentality, creating the type of story where justice prevails in a way to make the escapism…

Directed by Louis Mandylor and written by and starring Scott Adkins, Prisoner of War tells the story of a soldier captured by the Japanese and held in a Philippine POW camp. Before the entire colony embarks upon the Bataan Death March, Wright and his fellow prisoners are forced to compete in brutal death matches for…

From Oscar winner Jordan Peele and Monkeypaw Productions, producers of the landmark horror films Get Out, Us, Candyman and Nope, comes a chilling journey into the inner sanctum of fame, idolatry and the pursuit of excellence at any cost, Him, featuring an electrifying dramatic performance from Marlon Wayans and a star-making turn from Tyriq Withers….

Much has been said about Jordan Peele‘s attachment to Him.  Though, like Peele’s own directorial efforts (the thematically complex Get Out, Us, and Nope), Justin Tipping‘s film bathes in its horror elements and topical commentary, it’s more in tune with other producorial efforts (Nia DaCosta’s Candyman and Dev Patel’s Monkey Man), proving a feature that…

A two-time UFC Heavyweight Tournament Champion, World Vale Tudo Championship tournament winner, and a PRIDE FC competitor, Mark Kerr, a former wrestler, is one of the greatest mixed martial artists to ever emerge from the sport. Following his coverage as a subject in the documentary The Smashing Machine, which detailed his fighting career, director Benny Safdie adapted…

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…

With the release of last year’s The Strangers: Chapter 1, a retreading of Bryan Bertino’s 2008 home invasion chiller The Strangers, director Renny Harlin and screenwriters Alan R. Cohen and Alan Freedland delivered a largely uninspired, familiar horror effort that hoped it would justify its existence by promising to be the essential springboard for a…

And now whatever way our stories end, I know you have rewritten mine by being my friend… Last year’s global cinematic cultural sensation, which became the most successful Broadway film adaptation of all time, now reaches its epic, electrifying, emotional conclusion in Wicked: For Good. Directed once again by award-winning director Jon M. Chu and starring…

Adulthood, directed by Alex Winter, stars Josh Gad and Kaya Scodelario as a duo of siblings who uncover a dead body in the basement of their parents’ house.  Understandably, the situation spirals comically out of control, leading the two to resort to desperate, drastic measures to keep things under wraps. Now available on VOD in…

One of the biggest box office hits of the 1990s, and one that instilled a certain paranoia among live-in caretakers and homeowners, Curtis Hanson’s The Hand That Rocks the Cradle was a terrifying cautionary tale for would-be nannies and the families hoping to hire them.  Starring Annabella Sciorra and Matt McCoy as a loving couple…

Guillermo has his Frankenstein.  Gyllenhaal has her Bride. From Maggie Gyllenhaal (Academy Award-nominated writer/director of The Lost Daughter) and starring Academy Award nominee Jessie Buckley and Academy Award winner Christian Bale comes The Bride! A bold, iconoclastic take on one of the world’s most compelling stories. A lonely Frankenstein (Bale) travels to 1930s Chicago to…

Grace Lisa Vandenburg (Teresa Palmer) counts everything – the letters in her name, to the poppy seeds on her orange cake. She counts because numbers hold the world together. But when a chance encounter with Seamus (Joe Dempsie) turns her world upside down, Grace’s meticulously ordered life starts to unravel. A film about accepting who you are and celebrating the…

Following its premiere at this year’s Venice Film Festival, where star Julia Roberts has been praised for her performance – some calling it one of the best of her career – the new trailer for Luca Guadagnino‘s After the Hunt has been released. From the visionary director of Call Me By Your Name and Queer,…

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…

Two years after the wildly popular spin off of The Boys, the highly anticipated series Gen V premiered the first three episodes of season 2 on September 17 2025, hitting the ground running from the get go. Developed by Craig Rosenberg, Evan Goldberg, and Eric Kripke, the Prime Video series serves as the fifth instalment…

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…