Reviews

Film Review: Scream 7; nostalgia and camp abound in meta-heavy sequel

The road to Scream 7 has been so fraught with controversy that it could almost qualify as its own horror story. Following the success of 2023’s Scream VI – itself marked by the absence of franchise cornerstone Neve Campbell amid a pay dispute – the seventh entry endured director departures, cast exits, online backlash, and…

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Film Review: Idiotka is a sharp, stylish satire with a whole lot of heart

With her feature debut Idiotka, filmmaker Nastasya Popov delivers a spirited satire that skewers influencer culture and reality television while grounding the chaos in something surprisingly tender: family. At its centre is Margarita – or Margusya – played with precise comic timing and quiet vulnerability by Anna Baryshnikov. A young Russian American woman living in…

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Film Review: The Bluff; entertaining, though not revolutionary jaunt for audiences in the mood for swords and spectacle

The Bluff is a spirited dive into pirate-infused action, set against the jaw-dropping Cayman Brac, where towering bluffs and Skull Cave provide the perfect backdrop for a story about revenge, family, and redemption. At its heart is Priyanka Chopra Jonas as Ercell “Bloody Mary” Bodden, a woman dragged back into the violent world she thought…

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Film Review: The Testament of Ann Lee; you truly haven’t seen anything like Mona Fastvold’s assured spiritual fever dream

There’s a particular kind of audacity required to make a film like The Testament of Ann Lee. It’s a historical epic. It’s a spiritual fever dream. It’s a full-bodied musical about celibate 18th-century dissenters who worshipped by trembling and dancing themselves toward transcendence. And somehow, under the assured direction of Mona Fastvold, it coheres into…

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Film Review: How To Make A Killing proves that sometimes the sharpest comedies are the ones delivered with the straightest face

John Patton Ford’s How To Make A Killing arrives disguised as a revenge thriller, but what unfolds is something far more sly, strange, and darkly delightful. Loosely inspired by the 1949 classic Kind Hearts and Coronets, the 2026 film swaps aristocratic Britain for modern American excess and delivers a wickedly funny meditation on class, greed,…

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Film Review: EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert is a reminder of why Elvis still matters after all these decades

There’s something quietly poetic about Baz Luhrmann returning to Elvis Presley after the maximalist fever dream of his 2022 biopic. If that film was a glitter cannon aimed at the myth, EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert feels like Luhrmann lowering the lights and letting the man step forward on his own terms. Built from rediscovered…

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The Revenant returning to global theatres for 10th year anniversary engagement

Ten years ago, The Revenant arrived in theaters, redefining what audiences expect from physical and emotional endurance in cinema. Weight loss, weight gain, dangerous stunts, extensive prosthetics – these are just some of the extremes actors endure to inhabit a role. But few have pushed themselves as far as Leonardo DiCaprio did in this film,…

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Film Review: Jimpa is a warm and talkative portrait of queer family

Sophie Hyde has always been drawn to intimacy – the kind that sits in the uncomfortable pauses between people who love each other but don’t quite know how to speak plainly. With Jimpa, arguably her most personal film to date, she turns that lens inward. The result is a warm, thoughtful and occasionally over-explanatory family…

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Film Review: War Machine; sharp and muscular actioner leans into the tradition of macho action cinema of decades past

There’s something deeply comforting about a movie that knows exactly what it is. War Machine doesn’t pretend to be elevated sci-fi or a meditative treatise on artificial intelligence. It’s here to drop you in the wilderness with a squad of Army Rangers, unleash a skyscraper-sized battle droid, and let the bullets – and biceps –…

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Film Review: The Rose: Come Back To Me is a touching look at the power of connection and a reminder that genuine talent can be rewarded

One of the great things about documentaries such as The Rose: Come Back to Me is that it both provides further insight into a rock outfit for the legions of fans, as well as introducing uninitiated viewers into a world that proves endlessly fascinating.  I am personally of the latter, as going into this film,…

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Film Review: “Wuthering Heights”; Emerald Fennell’s horny and indulgent adaptation is a bold reclamation of Emily Brontë’s misunderstood prose

Few novels have been simultaneously romanticised and misunderstood as thoroughly as “Wuthering Heights“. Emily Brontë’s 1847 fever dream of obsession, cruelty, class resentment and emotional sadism has, over time, been softened into windswept yearning and tragic soulmates. Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” arrives not to preserve that illusion, but to tear it open. This is not…

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Film Review: Whistle; supernatural scarer never quite finds its own piercing sound

Corin Hardy’s Whistle wants to resurrect the kind of glossy, high-concept teen horror that flooded multiplexes in the early 2000s – and in some aspects, he succeeds. The problem is that it also inherits the era’s worst instincts. Riffing openly on Final Destination’s death-as-destiny mechanics and Smile’s trauma-tinged apparitions, the film follows a group of…

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Film Review: Crime 101 is a sleek exercise in neo-noir

A sleek exercise in neo-noir, Crime 101 knows exactly how cool it wants to be – and mostly earns it. Set along California’s Highway 101, the film uses its coastal sprawl as both a backdrop and thematic spine, turning beach towns and long asphalt stretches into part of the story’s DNA. Here, the geography matters:…

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Film Review: Shelter; latest action entry in the Statham canon is solid, if hardly groundbreaking

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…

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Film Review: We Bury the Dead; Daisy Ridley anchors emotionally laced survivalist horror effort

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…

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Silenced stands as a vital work of contemporary documentary filmmaking: Sundance Film Festival Review

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…

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Film Review: Is This Thing On? is Bradley Cooper’s most intimate film yet

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…

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The Musical; audacious musical circles anarchy without completely committing to the chaos: Sundance Film Festival Review

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…

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Big Girls Don’t Cry; New Zealand coming-of-age tale lingers with its own tender awkwardness: Sundance Film Festival Review

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…

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Hot Water; road-trip dramedy is rich in its promise, yet unfocused in its gaze: Sundance Film Festival Review

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…

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Union County; Will Poulter shines in quietly hopeful recovery drama: Sundance Film Festival Review

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,…

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Night Nurse; conceptually daring thriller is a tantalizing misfire: Sundance Film Festival Review

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…

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Rock Springs is an undeniably important, yet fractured work of storytelling: Sundance Film Festival Review

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…

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Josephine is a profoundly unsettling exploration of how violence reverberates long after the act is over: Sundance Film Festival Review

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….

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Run Amok; dark humour, pop anthems, and the exploration of avoided aftermath: Sundance Film Festival Review

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…

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Film Review: Cold Storage is gross, goofy, and gleefully unhinged

“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…

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Film Review: Send Help is a darkly comic, psychologically barbed dismantling of corporate masculinity and the systems that enable it

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…

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Bedford Park is heartbreaking, beautifully acted, and deeply personal: Sundance Film Festival Review

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…

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Film Review: The Wrecking Crew; Momoa and Bautista power energetic, violent buddy actioner

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…

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Film Review: Blue Moon; Ethan Hawke anchors Richard Linklater’s niche, intimate drama

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…

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