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…
Set against the intensely competitive backdrop of professional tennis, Fault is less interested in the sport itself than the emotional and psychological battles raging beneath the surface. Written and directed by Misha Calvert, this powerful short film delivers an unflinching exploration of abuse, trauma, and the vastly different ways survivors learn to cope with their…
A summer night around a dinner table becomes the launchpad for a murder mystery in Kids Like Me, as 12-year-old Oliver enthusiastically assigns character roles to friends and family with the confidence of a seasoned director. “You’re the jealous mistress, you’re the corrupt cop…” he declares, transforming an ordinary gathering into a sprawling whodunit powered…
For decades, The Asylum has occupied a peculiar corner of the film industry. The studio responsible for titles like Sharknado, Transmorphers, and countless other opportunistic genre knockoffs has built an empire on speed, thrift, and a keen understanding of audience curiosity. Their films are rarely mistaken for prestige cinema, but they endure because they know…
Masters of the Universe has never been a franchise built on subtlety. It is swords, sorcery, muscles, monsters, skull-faced villains, cosmic castles, absurd character names and declarations of power shouted toward the heavens. The smartest thing Travis Knight’s live-action reboot does is understand that trying to sand down that ridiculousness would be a mistake. Instead,…
John Carney has spent much of his career proving that music in film works best when it feels lived-in rather than manufactured. From Once to Sing Street and Begin Again, his stories understand how songs can become emotional lifelines, time capsules, or the language people use when words fail them. With Power Ballad, Carney once…
Kane Parsons’ Backrooms understands something many horror films about internet mythology completely miss: the fear was never just the monster. It was the feeling. The wrongness. The sense that you’ve stepped somewhere familiar that suddenly no longer obeys reality. Expanding a concept as abstract and collaborative as the Backrooms into a feature-length narrative was always…
André Øvredal has proven himself capable of delivering horror with atmosphere and restraint. Whether it was the creeping dread of The Autopsy of Jane Doe, the gothic ambition of The Last Voyage of the Demeter, or the gateway scares of Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, his work usually contains at least a few…
For a franchise built on cinematic awe, Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu arrives with surprisingly small ambitions. Expanded from the enormously successful Disney+ series The Mandalorian, the film technically delivers everything fans have come to expect: dusty space-western imagery, blaster-heavy action, adorable Grogu reaction shots, and endless lore connective tissue. What it struggles to…
There’s always a risk when a successful streaming series makes the leap to a feature film that it will feel like an extended episode rather than a cinematic evolution. Fortunately, Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan: Ghost War threads that needle with confidence, delivering a slick, character-driven thriller that works both as a continuation for fans and…
Romantic comedies live and die by chemistry, sincerity and the audience’s willingness to believe two people are destined to collide at exactly the right moment. Finding Emily, the charming new feature from director Alicia MacDonald, understands that formula completely. Rather than trying to reinvent the genre, the film leans into what has always made these…
Jing Ai Ng’s Forge slips into the art world through the side door. There are no velvet ropes, champagne-soaked auctions, or globe-trotting thieves in tuxedos here. Instead, the film plants itself in the sticky Miami heat, inside cramped motel rooms and a family-run dim sum restaurant where exhaustion hangs heavier than ambition. What emerges is…
Guy Ritchie’s In the Grey feels like the filmmaker maintaining the exact groove he knows best – fast-talking criminals, swaggering operatives, tangled negotiations, and men who communicate affection through insults, loyalty, and violence. After several years spent bouncing between blockbuster experimentation and franchise filmmaking, Ritchie once again returns to the kind of slick, dialogue-driven crime…
Birthright is the kind of film that feels painfully recognisable, even as it spirals into increasingly absurd and unsettling territory. Writer-director Zoe Pepper takes the all-too-relatable anxiety of moving back in with your parents as an adult and turns it into a viciously funny social satire about class, entitlement, and the widening emotional divide between…
