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…
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,…
Most aspiring filmmakers spend years imagining the moment someone finally says “yes.” For Australian filmmaker Anthony Frith, that moment came courtesy of The Asylum, the notorious studio behind Sharknado and countless mockbusters. What followed was an offer to direct a dinosaur adventure in suburban Adelaide with just six days to shoot it. On paper, Mockbuster…
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…
The crossover between Australian film legend George Miller and Japanese video game auteur Hideo Kojima may seem odd to people unfamiliar with the two beyond their main works, but to those who follow more closely, this is a relationship that stretches back more than a decade. And when you consider the careers and creative outputs…
An education is viewed as an important thing. Former British PM, Tony Blair once ran on a platform where his party’s top three priorities were “Education, Education, Education.” The Shadow Scholars is a documentary that looks at the true cost of education and opportunity. First-time director Eloïse King shines a spotlight on the contract cheating…
There are some of us who have been fortunate enough to eat at a fine dining restaurant. But at a place like Japan’s Tokito, this experience is elevated so high it’s almost like a religious experience. The documentary Tokito: The 540-Day Journey of a Culinary Maverick plays out like a real-life example of the TV…
Directed by Alexander Ullom, It Ends was originally a short film that turned into a feature (87 minutes, to be precise), which debuted at SXSW 2025. It tells the story of a group of college kids embarking on a road trip. However, when they miss a turn-off, they realise they are driving directly through a…
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…
As far as hair-brained schemes go, Beat The Lotto has this down pat. The story of how a syndicate in Ireland tried to rig the lotto, this documentary is an absolutely thrilling spectacle that will leave you guessing right up until the very end. Ross Whitaker does an excellent job of telling this stranger than…
It feels inevitable that something like Together will earn comparisons to last year’s The Substance, purely off the fact that the horror it indulges in – that would be the body variety – escalates considerably leading into its wild climax. Sure, The Substance being a great example of body horror is all well and good,…
The feeling that your childhood ride-or-die will remain so is something that many of us – if not all – have experienced. But whether it’s through distance or altering priorities, it’s a common practice that adulthood (and everything that comes with growing up) can wedge itself between even the strongest of connections, and it’s that…
It is incredible to think that Edna O’Brien grew up in a house with no books. It was an oppressive Catholic childhood in a small Irish town, but that didn’t stop this formidable woman from becoming a literary great. Blue Road – The Edna O’Brien Story is an intimate documentary and portrait of her life, which…
Screening as part of the ‘Freak Me Out’ programme strand for Sydney Film Festival, Redux Redux is a self-reflexive blend of science fiction and horror, coming in fresh from its 2025 SXSW premiere. Quite simply, the film tells the story of Irene (Michaela McManus), who travels through parallel universes to find her daughter’s killer. Directed…
What sets itself up as something of a meet-cute between two grieving men who form an unlikely friendship in the midst of their trauma, James Sweeney‘s Twinless ultimately reveals itself as something else – a particularly pitch-black dramedy that asks its audience to stay with its morally bankrupt lead as it shifts from an original…
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…
Rita Walsh is an award-winning producer based in Los Angeles, but working between Australia and the USA, on a series of cross-fiction and non-fiction filmmaking projects embodying a strong directorial vision. Her most recent collaboration is with director Gabrielle Brady on the hybrid feature The Wolves Always Come at Night, which premiered in Platform Competition…
In the 1960s models went to deportment school and were all rather alike – read cookie cutter – in appearance. That was until Lesley Hornby a.k.a. Twiggy was discovered. Now known as Dame Lesley Lawson, she was told she was too short and too slim to be a model. Yet, as this eponymous documentary shows,…
As ridiculous a sport racewalking may seem – Aussies are sure to have images of Jane Turner and Glenn Robbins powerwalking with all their might come to mind – writing/directing duo Phil Moniz and Kevin Claydon lace such with a tenderness and respect that allows audiences to laugh with the sport’s quirk rather than at…
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…
Author Stephen King and filmmaker Mike Flanagan have made careers predominantly out of their affinity for horror. With The Life of Chuck, they have decidedly pivoted and leaned into another of their shared strengths; broadcasting emotional stories. The result, however schmaltzy it may threaten to be, is a beautiful, weird celebration of life and all…
There’s a certain bittersweetness in watching OBEX (the title specifically capitalised) following 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, and expressed…
As this year’s Sydney Film Festival program goes live (read all about it here), with 201 films from 70 countries on the bill, including 17 World Premieres, 6 international premieres and 137 Australian Premieres, bringing together hundreds of new international and local stories, festival director Nashen Moodley spoke with our Peter Gray about his vision,…
The 72nd Sydney Film Festival (June 4th – 15th, 2025) program has officially launched, with Festival Director Nashen Moodley unveiling an exceptional line-up, including 15 films direct from the Cannes Film Festival, including Jafar Panahi’s It Was Just an Accident and Kelly Reichardt’s 1970s-set art heist drama The Mastermind. Other major highlights include The Life…
The 72nd Sydney Film Festival (4–15 June) has today revealed a sneak peek of 16 bold new films set to screen this June, offering a taste of the 2025 program ahead of the full Festival announcement on Wednesday, 7th May. “This first look offers a cross-section of the bold storytelling and distinctive voices that can…
A character losing themself to nature in order to find solitude or correct the course of their life is not a road seldom travelled on screen. And in the case of The Outrun, it’s the windswept Orkney Islands off the northeastern coast of Scotland that serve as a place of rejuvenation for Rona (Saoirse Ronan,…
The prospect of being stuck in a cab for 90 minutes with a driver that isn’t afraid to wax lyrical about the dynamics of men and women doesn’t exactly sound like the most pleasant experience. And whilst that it is the entire premise of Christy Hall‘s conversation-provoking Daddio, audiences pre-empting their annoyance at such a…
