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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
Sexual assault is one of cinema’s most fraught subjects. Not because it can’t be depicted, but because it so often can be mishandled. Films either flinch away from its reality, overtly depict the act with an almost exploitative lens, aestheticise it into something palatable, or frame it through adult comprehension that dulls its true terror….
Run Amok announces the arrival of a filmmaker unafraid of discomfort. In her striking debut feature, writer-director NB Mager tackles one of the most fraught subjects in contemporary American life – the aftermath of a school tragedy – and does so with a form that feels almost provocatively unexpected. The premise is deceptively simple yet…
“The Skylab space station fell out of orbit in 1979. During its mission, it had been home to hundreds of scientific experiments. Most of the debris burned up on re-entry, but some of it crashed to Earth. NASA thought it had recovered every piece. They were wrong.” Pay attention. This shit is real. That’s how…
Send Help announces itself as a survival thriller, but Sam Raimi’s latest is something far more subversive: a darkly comic, psychologically barbed dismantling of corporate masculinity and the systems that enable it. What begins as a familiar plane-crash setup quickly mutates into an unsettling power study, one that weaponizes genre expectations against the audience with…
Bedford Park announces Stephanie Ahn as a filmmaker unafraid of emotional exposure – sometimes to a fault, but more often to devastating effect. Set between the push and pull of cultural obligation and personal survival, the film traces Audrey, a Korean American woman shaped by sacrifice as a love language, and Eli, an ex-wrestler whose…
The Wrecking Crew knows exactly what kind of movie it wants to be, and it’s in that confidence that it reveals its greatest asset. Directed by Ángel Manuel Soto (Blue Beetle), this sun-drenched, bruising action comedy channels the spirit of 80s/90s-era buddy chaos, pairing Jason Momoa and Dave Bautista as estranged half-brothers pulled back together…
Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon is the kind of film that knows exactly who it’s for, and makes no attempt to dilute itself for anyone else. Set almost entirely over one night inside Sardi’s restaurant on the opening of Oklahoma! in 1943, the film unfolds less like a traditional biopic and more like a rueful, jazz-inflected…
There’s something weirdly refreshing about a horror movie that doesn’t posture, doesn’t smuggle in a lecture, and doesn’t pretend it’s “elevated” because someone mutters words of perceived depth between splatter sequences. Director Johannes Roberts understands the assignment with almost admirable single-mindedness with Primate: deliver a gory creature feature with a breezy, old-school sensibility and enough…
Mercy wants to be a slick, near-future morality play about the creeping dominance of artificial intelligence in modern life and, specifically, in the justice system. Instead, it plays like a film that can’t decide whether it fears technology, worships it, or just wants to use it as a convenient set of shiny props. Set around…
Primate is an 88 minute horror movie about a chimpanzee companion who is bitten by a rabid mongoose, which inevitably infects him with rabies and, ultimately, turns him from a loving member of a family to a violent animal. The film opens up with a particularly gruesome scene, setting the tone of the movie near-immediately….
Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent is the type of film that doesn’t merely ask for attention, it commands it. Set against the suffocating backdrop of Brazil’s military dictatorship in 1977, the film unfolds during Recife’s Carnaval, where colour, music and movement become both camouflage and provocation. What should be a time of collective release…
Marty Supreme is exactly the kind of big, brash, slightly unhinged swing that feels tailor-made for co-writer/director Josh Safdie and for Timothée Chalamet at this precise moment in his career. A kinetic, sweaty, frequently overwhelming sports comedy-drama, the film barrels through 1950s New York and far beyond with the same single-minded obsession as its protagonist,…
Joe Carnahan’s The Rip arrives with the familiar Netflix sheen, but beneath that polish is something tougher, meaner, and far more cinematic than the algorithm usually allows. A pressure-cooker crime thriller steeped in mistrust and moral rot, the film leans hard into character before letting violence and paranoia take the wheel. It’s a throwback with…
It Was Just an Accident is a quietly devastating triumph, a film that proves how little spectacle is needed when moral tension, lived experience, and cinematic restraint are in perfect alignment. Working with an almost disarmingly simple premise, writer/director Jafar Panahi crafts a thriller that unfolds largely through conversation, hesitation, and silence. Yet the film…
Nia DaCosta’s 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple takes the world Danny Boyle and Alex Garland built and flips it on its head, and the result is both shocking and mesmerizing. While it shares some of the DNA of its predecessor, this is very much DaCosta’s film: audacious, unflinching, and surprisingly beautiful. The story expands…
Grow is the type of film that sneaks up on you. On paper, a family-friendly film about competitive pumpkin growing doesn’t exactly scream “essential viewing”, but director John McPhail clearly understands that sincerity, when handled with confidence, can be quietly disarming. By the time the film settles into its rhythm, pumpkins aren’t just the subject,…
Hamnet is a film that feels less like it’s being watched than lived alongside. It moves with the hush of grief, the ache of memory, the strange, half-lit space where love continues after loss has shattered its original shape. From its opening scroll – a simple historical truth that “Hamnet” and “Hamlet” were once interchangeable…
Sydney Sweeney has really been doing a commendable job of proving that, as an actress, she’s so much more than what we see on Euphoria. Whilst there have been the expected streaming filmic choices (a Netflix horror effort, an Amazon sex thriller) and a dip into the superhero subsect (farewell Madame Web, we hardly knew…
Until the Sky Falls Quiet is not an easy film to watch, and that is precisely why it matters. Filmed largely in real time and through the doctors’ own cameras, directors Erica Yen-Chin Long and Jason Korr deliver a raw, urgent documentary that refuses distance or comfort. Following Western Sydney doctors Dr Siraj Sira and…
Song Sung Blue brings a gentle, often disarming dignity to the art of imitation. Inspired by Greg Kohs’ 2008 documentary of the same name, it largely sidesteps the trap of becoming a jukebox curio thanks to Hugh Jackman and Kate Hudson’s open-hearted performances, which ground the film in emotional sincerity rather than novelty. What begins…
