A dinner party where everyone decides to be honest. Is there anything more dangerous? That deceptively simple premise powers The Invite, Olivia Wilde‘s sharply observed adaptation of Cesc Gay’s The People Upstairs, and what initially resembles an awkward comedy of manners gradually evolves into something richer, sadder and surprisingly profound. Restricting itself almost entirely to…
Saccharine arrives with one of the strongest horror premises of the year. In an era where Ozempic, body positivity, calorie counting and algorithm-fuelled beauty standards dominate everyday conversation, a ghost story built around weight-loss pills made from human ashes feels both deliciously grotesque and eerily timely. It’s exactly the sort of concept that seems tailor-made…
For more than four decades, the Evil Dead franchise has survived by refusing to stand still. Every new filmmaker handed the Book of the Dead has found a different way to unleash hell, from Sam Raimi’s manic inventiveness to Fede Álvarez’s unrelenting brutality and Lee Cronin’s apartment-block nightmare. With Evil Dead Burn, French filmmaker Sébastien…
Disney’s live-action Moana arrives with the kind of built-in affection most remakes would envy. The 2016 animated original was vibrant, heartfelt and visually intoxicating, a film that made every drop of water and grain of sand feel alive. It was familiar in structure, yes, but it owned its optimism with such sincerity that its message…
You can’t help but see how fitting the notion of a proud homemade production is when it comes to Hamilton House. A film about struggling artists desperately trying to create something extraordinary from almost nothing mirrors the circumstances of its own creation, writer-director Jordan Rowe never shies away from that parallel. Rather than disguising its…
Following the colourful optimism and unapologetic comic-book exuberance of Superman, the next chapter of DC Studios’ cinematic universe takes an unexpectedly darker turn. Directed by Craig Gillespie (I, Tonya, Cruella), Supergirl is less concerned with saving the world than it is with the emotional cost of surviving one. Drawing heavily from Tom King and Bilquis…
There was a point where it felt as though the Minions had exhausted every conceivable avenue of chaos. After multiple Despicable Me entries and two standalone adventures, these yellow agents of destruction seemed destined to endlessly recycle the same collection of slapstick gags, gibberish conversations and increasingly frantic set pieces. Minions & Monsters doesn’t entirely…
The first generation of children raised alongside tablets are now old enough to have their own nostalgia. That reality makes Toy Story 5 feel less like an unnecessary sequel and more like a franchise finally catching up to the world around it. For years, Pixar’s beloved toys have wrestled with obsolescence. They survived the arrival…
Religion and horror have long shared a common language. Both deal in fear, temptation, guilt, and the consequences of transgression. Adrian Chiarella‘s Leviticus understands that connection intimately, using supernatural terror not simply to frighten its audience but to examine the emotional violence inflicted upon queer people by institutions that claim to offer salvation. Set within…
One of the great joys of documentary filmmaking is its ability to introduce audiences to worlds they never knew existed. Joe Kowalski‘s Micronations does exactly that, plunging viewers into a community of self-declared kings, queens, emperors, and presidents who have carved out their own sovereign states in backyards, villages, deserts, and forgotten corners of the…
The title That Friend immediately suggests a familiar archetype. We all know someone who can turn a quiet evening into an all-night adventure, someone whose enthusiasm is both infectious and exhausting in equal measure. What makes Alex Wall and Will Sterling‘s comedy work so well is that it never settles for the easy joke of…
A decade after redefining modern zombie cinema with Train to Busan, filmmaker Yeon Sang-ho returns to familiar infected territory with Colony, a frenetic, blood-soaked thriller that trades speeding trains for a towering Seoul skyscraper. While it never quite reaches the emotional highs or cultural impact of its predecessor, it remains an entertaining and inventive genre…
As someone who lost their father at a young age, Honeyjoon connected with me almost immediately. Not because it tries to manufacture tears or deliver grand speeches about grief, but because it understands something far messier: losing someone doesn’t necessarily bring people together. Sometimes it creates distance. Sometimes it leaves people speaking entirely different emotional…
In Disclosure Day, Steven Spielberg returns to the skies, but not simply to repeat the wonder of Close Encounters of the Third Kind or the terror of War of the Worlds. This is not an action-centric spectacle, and anyone expecting a relentless alien invasion thriller may be surprised, perhaps even disappointed. Instead, Spielberg has crafted…
David Wain has never been a filmmaker interested in subtlety. From Wet Hot American Summer to Role Models and Wanderlust, his comedy thrives on committing fully to absurd ideas and pushing them well beyond the point of reason. With Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass, he may have delivered his most gloriously ridiculous film…
Ira Sachs has long been a filmmaker more interested in emotional truth than conventional storytelling. His films often ask audiences to meet them on their own wavelength rather than the other way around, and The Man I Love continues that tradition. The problem is that, for much of its running time, it feels as though…
Dario Russo’s The Fox is the kind of film that feels impossible to predict from one scene to the next. Part dark fairytale, part relationship satire, part small-town Australian absurdist comedy, it unfolds with the confidence of a filmmaker who is less interested in playing by conventional rules than seeing just how much strangeness an…
In an industry built on trends, commerce, and relentless reinvention, threeASFOUR: FULL CIRCLE shines a spotlight on a fashion collective that has spent more than two decades refusing to play by those rules. Directed by Sean Ono Lennon and Brian C. Gonzalez, the documentary follows avant-garde New York design trio Gabi Asfour, Angela Donhauser, and…
“All this shit actually happened.” That opening declaration lands with a sting, immediately setting the tone for Stacey Sargeant’s sharp, funny, and quietly infuriating short film Stand Clear ’ the Closing Doors. It’s a deliberately blunt replacement for the more familiar “based on a true story,” and it perfectly captures the film’s mentality: exhausted, self-aware,…
Grief, closure, and control collide in Holo, a quietly unsettling sci-fi short from Alexander DeSouza that feels unnervingly close to our present reality. Built around a deceptively simple concept – a company offering artificial encounters with the dead through performance and facial technology – the film quickly reveals itself to be something far more intimate,…
There’s an undeniably sharp hook at the centre of Deepfake – a near-future (or arguably present-day) world where friendship, identity and self-worth can be outsourced with the tap of an app. It’s a premise that feels both heightened and uncomfortably familiar, tapping into a culture where validation is currency and the lives we curate online…
A very specific kind of panic defines Last Minute – the kind born from a pre-internet world, where deadlines couldn’t be solved with a quick search and “doing homework” often became a family-wide emergency. Set in 1989, the short leans into that pressure with warmth, humour, and an undercurrent of genuine affection for a time…
In a city already bursting with energy, colour and larger-than-life personalities, it takes a particularly special creature to stand out. Enter Kaboom, a fluffy pink force of magical chaos who descends upon New York City in ChikaBoom!, a delightfully inventive animated short that combines heart, humour and a striking visual style. At its centre is…
Packing a full emotional spiral, character study, and sharp comedic pivot into under ten minutes is no small feat, yet General Admission pulls it off with an impressive control and confidence. Writer Sarah Adina and director Kaily Morgan Smith craft a deceptively simple setup – a woman attending a support group to reclaim her sense…
Addiction dramas are rarely designed to be “enjoyable,” and Cotton Fever understands that from its opening moments. Daniel Blake Schwartz’s debut feature is an emotionally heavy, deeply intimate portrait of people trapped in cycles of dependency, survival, and recovery, refusing to romanticise the realities of addiction or soften the damage it leaves behind. The result is…
In the age of dating apps, where a single delayed reply can send even the most rational person into a tailspin, Buckets captures a very specific form of modern anxiety with remarkable honesty, humour, and self-awareness. Writer-director-editor Drew van Steenbergen turns the camera on himself as a man who spirals over the course of 48…
In one of the earliest moments of Lucy Schulman, Lucy (Ellie Sachs) reflects on her childhood obsession with mallards. While other kids loved trains or Barbies, she was fixated on the idea that these birds seemed to mate for life – and that when one died, the other often wasn’t far behind. To Lucy, that…
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 two, Kyle Gallner‘s Oliver, justifies his…
There was a time when erotic thrillers ruled video store shelves. Sleazy, sweaty and unapologetically pulpy, they thrived on dangerous attraction, moral compromise and characters making terrible decisions while bathed in neon light. Dean Francis‘s Body Blow isn’t simply paying tribute to that era – it dives headfirst into it, embracing every deliciously trashy convention…
Seven years after releasing the Grammy-winning Amidst the Chaos, Sara Bareilles returns to the studio not simply to make another record, but to process a life irrevocably altered by grief, transition, and time. In director Josh Alexander’s deeply moving documentary Sara Bareilles: Good Grief, the creation of an album becomes something far more intimate: a…
