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…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
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….
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…
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…
The Rose Byrne-led dramedy, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, has been announced as the official Opening Night film of the 2025 Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF), with tickets now on sale. The blistering second feature from US writer-director Mary Bronstein will make its Australian Premiere this August, hot off a rapturous reception at…
A self-awareness regarding certain specifications in getting his film made along with a universality in conjunction with its narrative, writer/director Alireza Khatami goes beyond genre conventions with The Things You Kill, a twisted thriller that breaks apart what it is to transform. At one point in the film, the language professor at the centre of…
On the initial surface, Cooper Raiff‘s television series Hal & Harper appears to be a sibling drama about two children and their single father. And whilst that is the case in the most basic of manners, when the film presents its grown-up cast (Raiff as Hal and Lili Reinhart as Harper) as the seven-and-nine-year-old iterations…
Sensitively handling the queer love story at its core, Mathias Broe‘s Sauna explores the fluid possibilities of connection, further exacerbating its impact through the filmmaker’s own relationship with his transitioning partner. The sauna of the title refers to the place of work for young Johan (Magnus Juhl Andersen), a barely-legal, zero body fat-type twink who…
A self-awareness regarding certain specifications in getting his film made along with a universality in conjunction with its narrative, writer/director Alireza Khatami goes beyond genre conventions with The Things You Kill, a twisted thriller that breaks apart what it is to transform. At one point in the film, the language professor at the centre of…
There’s a certain frustration felt when watching Predators, a 96 minute documentary centering around the series To Catch a Predator, itself an offshoot from NBC’s Dateline. In the early 2000s, the show lured audiences in as it highlighted online predatory behaviour – primarily older men meeting underage boys and girls for the intention of sexual…
Given how she made history as the first deaf person to win an Academy Award for acting, one might think the documentary Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore would be something of a straightforward and celebratory profile on the actress. Shoshannah Stern – who, like her subject, is also a deaf actor and director – certainly…
There’s a certain bittersweetness in watching OBEX (the title specifically capitalised) only weeks after David Lynch’s sad passing, as Albert Birney‘s truly bizarre odyssey feels like a kindred spirit to Lynch’s Eraserhead, with the hallucinatory anxiety and surrealist mentality playing into a personality that is perversely into its own weirdness. Set in a pre-internet 1987,…
Audiences today, specifically modern queer audiences, may not quite understand the gravity of shame and fear expressed throughout Plainclothes, a 90s-set drama that sets itself around the gay cruising scene that honed a far-more secretive temperament than what is experienced today. By no means is Carmen Emmi‘s enveloping film an alienating experience, but freedom in…
Today, the nonprofit Sundance Institute announced the 87 feature films and six episodic projects selected for the 2025 Sundance Film Festival, revealing a lineup full of bold independent storytelling. The Festival will take place from January 23–February 2, 2025, in person in Park City and Salt Lake City, Utah, with all of the competition films…
There’s something of a full circle moment experienced with Am I OK?, Tig Notaro and Stephanie Allynne‘s co-directorial feature debut. The real-life couple, who met on the set of a Sundance selection title (2013’s In A World…), returned to the festival as married women detailing their own journey of self-discovery and acceptance with a film…
Thanks predominantly to RuPaul, and, more specifically RuPaul’s Drag Race, drag culture has firmly wedged itself in the mainstream. It’s always been there, it’s just more readily acceptable, or at least visible, and Amrou Al-Kadhi’s assured debut feature as both a writer and director, Layla, furthers such with its playful, authentic personality that drives home…
Though there’s an initial graphicness to the manner in which sex is depicted in the opening minutes of Sebastian, Mikko Mäkelä‘s explorative drama shouldn’t be dismissed as just another recent example of queer cinema that leans into sexual explicitness for the sake of shock or organic representation. Yes, the sex on hand is a realistic…
There’s universally strong performances across the board and lush cinematography throughout, but one can’t help but wish there was more plotting to Good One for the understated drama to truly land the emotional impact it aims for. The set-up in India Donaldson‘s film is simple, with 17-year-old Sam (Lily Collias, an absolute breakout) gearing up…
There’s a uniqueness to Desire Lines that writer/director Jules Rosskam (and co-writer Nate Gualtieri) implements to set the film as an open line of communication regarding the LGBTQIA+ community and their placement within their own culture. A narrative-driven drama that combines documentary pieces and talking head confessionals, the film’s hybrid mentality may not always work,…
The complexities of forgiveness and accountability against a familial backdrop laced with tension, regret and one’s own personal demons, Exhibiting Forgiveness is a thought-provoking drama, and one that bides its time in surrendering to its emotional explosiveness. Written and directed by Titus Kaphar, marking his feature debut, Exhibiting Forgiveness focuses on Tarell Rodin (André Holland),…
The controversial historical treatment of Australia’s native people by white settlers and the continuing generational trauma within the Indigenous communities weigh heavy on the narrative themes of Jon Bell‘s The Moogai. There’s a ripe premise to lean into horror genre sensibilities – “moogai” is the Bundjalung language for a malevolent child-stealing entity that is the…
Though its working with the elements of a dark comedy, a political thriller and topical social commentary, Bruno Mourral‘s Kidnapping Inc. manages to navigate its multiple themes and transition quite successfully from its farcical opening to its more stirring, sobering close. Set in the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince (the film utilising both the Creole and…
Though it leans into the action/thriller genre with a supreme wink, Thelma, Josh Margolin‘s frequently hilarious, always poignant ode to his own grandmother (and, clearly, a love of the action genre), is never spoofing the films it so evidently is earning its laughs from; and it’s that sweetness and keen sense of reinvention that helps…
Today the non-profit Sundance Institute announced the 82 films, eight episodic titles, and a New Frontier interactive experience selected for the 2024 Sundance Film Festival. The Festival will take place January 18–28, 2024, in person in Park City and Salt Lake City, with a selection of titles available online nationwide from January 25–28, 2024. This…
