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…
I make no secret of my love for 1 Hotels. I’ve stayed in several of the brand’s US properties to date (1 Hotel South Beach in Miami is my favourite), and see it as a necessary evolution for a hospitality industry constantly seeking new ways to be authentically eco-conscious. There are plenty of sustainability initiatives…
The team at Frontier Developments has officially lifted the lid on the highly anticipated sequel to its beloved zoo management sim, unveiling a world-exclusive first look at Planet Zoo 2 gameplay during this year’s PC Gaming Show. Promising a significant generational leap in both visual fidelity and gameplay depth, the title is slated to launch…
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…
Entering The Princess Theatre on a cold Friday night, the crowd pouring through the doors for Detroit rapper Danny Brown appeared curiously without a tribe. From the pink-haired to the balding, those dressed head-to-toe in black and others in bright neon, it was difficult to make sense of exactly who this audience was. The familiar…
XBOX has released their new showcase. After a massive shift in management over the last few months, we have seen new Asha Sharma come in and take the company back to its gaming core and win the fanbase back. Today’s showcase only affirmed the company’s new direction that will potentially take XBOX back to being…
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…
What begins as a simple story about a kid leaving his homework until the very last minute becomes something far more poignant in Last Minute. Set in 1989, before smartphones, Google, and instant answers, writer-director Michael Cusumano‘s charming short follows a single mother racing against the clock to help her son complete a major school…
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 an age where a single unread message can trigger a full-blown existential crisis, Drew van Steenbergen‘s Buckets taps into a painfully familiar modern phenomenon. The sharply observed short follows a man whose life begins to unravel after a late-night dating app match leaves him waiting for a follow-up text, spiralling through anxiety, self-doubt, and…
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…
It’s that time of the year again, and Summer Game Fest has rolled around to bring us all the latest video game announcements for the months and years ahead. While we miss E3, there’s no doubt the hype train keeps on rolling for us fans in June. So without further ado, let’s run through all…
With her feature debut Lucy Schulman, writer, director and star Ellie Sachs has crafted a charming, painfully relatable comedy about the dangers of building your identity around other people. Following a devastating breakup, Lucy returns home to live with her eccentric father and begins the messy process of figuring out who she is when she’s…
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…
Modest Mouse is an American rock band formed in 1993 by lead singer Isaak Brock. Their output is prolific, with well over a dozen albums and EPs released. In their latest release, An Eraser and a Maze, Brock explores the theory of time existing simultaneously. Which, of course, is an oversimplification of the fifteen tracks…
Want to know how to raise the temperature of the Metro Theatre on a cold winter’s night in Sydney? Send in Wednesday and watch the room sizzle like a hot North Carolina summer! What you see is exactly what you get! Wednesday’s sold-out Sydney show packed the venue so tightly that no one was moving independently;…
Sheltering at the Sydney Opera House is a triple-bill from the acclaimed Bangarra Dance Theatre. Bangarra’s unique style of dance fuses traditional First Nations movement and narratives with contemporary dance to tell stories that resonate and challenge the audience. Sheltering acknowledges and honours the theatre’s history through the work Sheoak, while looking forward to the…
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…
Neon lights, sweaty dancefloors, dangerous attraction, and a hero caught between duty and desire – Body Blow proudly wears the DNA of the classic erotic thriller. Yet beneath its stylish noir exterior lies a deeply contemporary exploration of queer identity, masculinity, and the institutions that shape both. Ahead of the film’s Sydney Film Festival premiere,…
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…
Seven years after her last studio album, Sara Bareilles returns to the recording studio surrounded by the friends and collaborators she trusts most. What begins as the creation of a new record soon reveals itself as something far more profound. In Sara Bareilles: Good Grief, director Josh Alexander captures an artist confronting loss in real…
