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 are films that fail loudly, and then there are films that fail quietly; misjudged, misunderstood, and filed away under “not good enough” before anyone really figures out what they were trying to do. Awake belongs firmly in the latter category. Released in 2007 with a barely-there theatrical campaign, Joby Harold’s sleek medical conspiracy thriller…
The Oscars always tell you what kind of year it’s been – and the 2026 nominations just screamed it in neon: big swings rewarded, sacred cows ignored, and one film outright rewriting the record books. Because this morning belonged to Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, the blood-soaked, genre-bending juggernaut that didn’t just top the nomination leaderboard –…
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…
Australian systems change-makers and Indigenous storytellers Jack Manning Bancroft and Tyson Yunkaporta are inviting audiences to hit reset with Imagine, a bold, genre-defying animated feature landing in cinemas for special event screenings this January 26th across Australia. Co-created through the pandemic in an open, live Google Doc collaboration that brought together more than 400 contributors…
A brand-new trailer has dropped for Idiotka, a sharp and irreverent fashion comedy that skewers reality TV culture while keeping its heart firmly in the right place. The film, written and directed by Nastasya Popov, will hit select theaters in the United States from February 27th, 2026, via Utopia Distribution Led by Anna Baryshnikov as…
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…
There’s something quietly poetic about watching Addition under the open sky. Premiering in Australia at Sydney’s Westpac OpenAir Cinema ahead of its national release on January 29th – following its successful run at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival – the film’s gentle intimacy feels amplified by its setting. Numbers may govern Grace Lisa Vandenburg’s…
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….
Brazilian filmmaker Kleber Mendonça Filho has never been interested in subtle allegory when reality itself is this confrontational. With The Secret Agent, his latest politically charged thriller set during the final years of Brazil’s military dictatorship, the director once again fuses genre storytelling with cultural memory, paranoia and moral urgency. In a conversation with our…
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…
The Madison is finally starting to step out of the shadows, and Paramount+ is making sure fans of the Yellowstone universe are paying attention. The streamer has released a moody 30-second teaser that offers a tantalising glimpse of Taylor Sheridan’s latest expansion. The short preview leans heavily on atmosphere rather than plot, hinting at emotional…
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,…
Queer Screen has revealed the full program for the 33rd Mardi Gras Film Festival, returning to Sydney from 12th – 26th February, 2026 with two vibrant weeks of LGBTIQ+ cinema as part of the Sydney Gay & Lesbian Mardi Gras celebrations. Screenings will take place across key city venues including Event Cinemas George Street and…
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…
Maggie Gyllenhaal isn’t interested in playing it safe. At the global trailer launch for The Bride!, the writer-director-producer spoke with infectious passion about her radical reimagining of one of cinema’s most iconic monsters, revealing a film that’s punk, romantic, mythic, deeply personal, and unapologetically loud. Here’s everything we learned about The Bride! and the bold…
With What I Like About You arriving on Netflix Australia this coming Monday, 19th January, the early-2000s sitcom has a chance at a second life – one it arguably always deserved. In its original run from 2002 to 2006, the show rarely received the cultural spotlight afforded to its peers, yet it quietly delivered something…
When Scream arrived in 1996, the slasher genre wasn’t just tired, it was on life support. The once-mighty franchises of the ’70s and ’80s had collapsed under the weight of diminishing returns, self-parody, and cultural irrelevance. Friday the 13th had become a punchline. A Nightmare on Elm Street had turned Freddy Krueger into a merchandising…
Returning to a world that once redefined cinematic terror, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple doesn’t simply extend the legacy of Danny Boyle and Alex Garland’s vision – it interrogates it. Under Nia DaCosta’s direction, the film pivots away from the familiar terror of the infected and toward something colder and more unsettling: the ways…
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…
Sarah Snook’s extraordinary career is coming full circle this February, with the acclaimed actor returning home to headline a special In Conversation event at the 2026 AACTA Festival – and to receive one of the Australian screen industry’s highest honours. The Succession star will be awarded the prestigious AACTA Trailblazer Award at the 2026 AACTA…
Fresh from redefining modern horror with Evil Dead Rise, Lee Cronin returns with a daring new vision – one that takes on a legend as old as fear itself. Lee Cronin’s The Mummy isn’t interested in polite nostalgia. It’s a reinvention: darker, stranger, and far more unsettling than audiences might be ready for. And if…
Warner Bros. Pictures is bringing a little Hollywood magic home, announcing that two of Australia’s most celebrated talents, Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi, will return to Sydney to launch Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” in spectacular fashion. The film will open with a special Opening Night Celebration at the State Theatre on Thursday, February 12th, marking…
On a Brisbane soundstage transformed into open ocean, Killer Whale is quietly revealing itself to be far more than a creature feature. What the producers and creative team are building here is a film that blends old-school practical filmmaking, contemporary visual effects, and a pointed generational perspective – one aimed squarely at an audience rarely…
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,…
There’s something quietly radical about a family film that trusts gentleness over noise. Set in the self-proclaimed Pumpkin Capital of the World, Grow unfolds like a story many of us remember from childhood, one that invites laughter, warmth, and the comforting belief that people, at their core, are good. Stoic farmer Dinah Little (Golda Rosheuvel,…
In Hamnet, grief isn’t a rupture so much as a reorientation – a learning to carry love in a new, altered way. Chloé Zhao’s hushed, elemental adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s novel traces the aftershocks of unimaginable loss through Agnes and Will Shakespeare, as the death of their son Hamnet becomes both a private wound and…
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…
Hollywood’s current nostalgia cycle has moved beyond prestige remakes and into something far more interesting: reclamation. The success of Anaconda’s meta-leaning revival – powered by the pairing of Jack Black and Paul Rudd – signals a new appetite for films that don’t apologise for their origins, but interrogate them. The ’90s were an era of…
