Category: Film

★★★☆☆ Ah, the royals; they really are the gift that keeps on giving. So many millions of pages, billions of bytes, bloviation and bollocks. For every small, incisive examination, so much dire drivel. Wading into this milieu come director Mike Newell and screenwriter Louise Fennell, bringing something unexpectedly quite interesting.  …

★★★★☆ T.S. Eliot once wrote, ‘it ends as it began, not with a bang but a whimper.’ The film Pressure does so as well, opening on the catastrophe of Operation Tiger, the full dress rehearsal in the weeks leading up to the now famous D-Day, Normandy Landings in 1944. Expanded…

★★★★☆ In the middle of a hilly, picturesque Northern Yorkshire English town lies an independent girls’ boarding school called The Grafton School For Girls. There are mammoth buildings. Majestic hallways with old, wooden lockers. Wide-brimmed classrooms filled with antique-style world globes residing over creaky timber desks. A Great Communal Dining…

Conceived by English playwright Noël Coward in 1925, Fallen Angels is a quicker-than-quick 90-minute knockabout comedy, set in 1930s London. Two affluent women, best-friends Julia Sterroll and Jane Banbury, engage in a fizzly, champagne-filled romp over the course of one night. But for not the reasons you’d think. After their…

★★★★☆ La Bola Negra tells the story of three men whose lives are intimately connected through desire, pain and inheritance, across three different eras – 1932, 1937, and 2017.  La Bola Negra (The Black Ball) is an imaginative, narrative triptych about three different gay Spanish men in three very different…

★★★★★ Amy Goodman follows a Trump official through a climate conference, microphone extended, questions flowing. He keeps walking. She keeps asking. Eventually, he reaches a door he can close. Goodman continues addressing the other side. It’s a funny, infuriating, and efficient introduction to a journalist whose career has involved refusing…

★★★★☆ Political careers are terminal. Monuments are built to outlive them. That promise has rarely looked more seductive, or dangerous, than it does now, as leaders again reach for arches, towers and grand public works to project permanence beyond the next election. Stéphane Demoustier’s The Great Arch returns to François…

★★★★☆ Can an 80-year-old, 4th-grade-educated shepherd stand up against a pushy multimillion-dollar juggernaut and win? Riccardo Milani’s Life is Life (La Vita va Cosi), a Best Comedy winner at the 2026 Nastro d’Argento Awards, poses just that. Written by Ricardo Milani and Michele Astori, the film was inspired by the…

★★★★½ Pif needs only three letters. When a satirist becomes so familiar within a nation that even his shortened name needs no explanation, he earns unusual freedom. He can approach the sacred without immediately being accused of sacrilege. In Italy, few institutions are more sacred than the Catholic Church. Food…

★★★★★ All too often, the rush of life and the obligations of society demand our constant attention. Margherita Spampinato’s exquisitely rendered debut film, Sweetheart (Gioia Mia), asks us to stop and hold the moments in between, however fleeting. Inspired by Spampinato’s own childhood, the film follows Nico (Marco Fiore), a…

★★★★★ Wile E. Coyote has spent decades falling from cliffs, swallowing explosives and being crushed by anvils. Now he has finally realised who should pay for it. The film Coyote vs. Acme has already survived its own encounter with corporate power. Warner Bros. Discovery completed it, then shelved it in…

★★★★½ We hear about the French Resistance, and rightly so, but what happened to the French military after France fell? What exactly was Free France, who fought for it, and how did those forces contribute to the eventual Allied victory? Until watching De Gaulle: Résistance, I realised I really didn’t know.…

★★★½ Full of energy, affection and personality, Digby & Camille is a sweet slice-of-life documentary about a couple living with Down syndrome, making its world premiere at Melbourne International Film Festival. Tender, funny and unabashedly affectionate, Digby & Camille captures an intimate portrait of a relationship that has spanned eight…

A story of grief and female trauma, The Latcher tells the story of a midwife haunted by an entity that materialises after the loss of her baby postpartum. Paralysed with fear, Alice, the film’s protagonist (Lucy Lovegrove), tries to find a way to get back with her husband and patch…

Let’s address the obvious question first. Why would anyone pay to watch cat videos on the big screen when they can spend hours watching them for free online? The answer is surprisingly simple. Because CatVideoFest isn’t really about the videos themselves; it’s about sharing them. Part compilation film, part celebration…

★★★★½ Obsession, the newest offering by Curry Barker, leans into the age‑old warning to be careful what you wish for, delivering an unexpected fusion of romance/horror that challenges the viewer’s assumptions about the nature of fixation. The film follows Bear (Michael Johnston), a music store employee who stumbles upon a…

★★★★☆ A hilarious yet surprisingly tender family drama, The Last Viking is an absurd journey of acceptance and the development of unconditional love. It’s also about a gaggle of folks with dissociative personality disorder who believe themselves to be the members of The Beatles. They attempt to form a band,…

★★★★☆ There are certain places in the world that fascinate me despite never having visited them, and Russia is one of them. Its snow-covered forests, imposing cities, complex history and political intrigue have always drawn me in. I had just finished reading Red Notice by Bill Browder, an extraordinary account of the…

★★★★★ The first time we see Pene Pati, he is not standing beneath a chandelier in one of Europe’s grand opera houses. He is wearing shorts and a singlet, pulling a lawnmower from a shed. With the physique of a rugby forward or UFC heavyweight, he does not immediately resemble…

★★★½ There’s something viscerally beautiful about a film so grounded in time and space. In our current cinematic landscape dominated by elevated horror, big blockbusters and financially safe remakes, seeing an understated film laced with raw honesty is a refreshing change. Set in the pristine, frosty white lands of Sápmi,…

★★★½ Set in Helsinki in 1930, The Kidnapping of a President, funnily enough, tells the story of exactly that: the kidnapping of President Stahlberg. What ensues is a series of incompetent events. An alcoholic Lieutenant Colonel, Eoro, drunkenly issues the call for a revolution early, enlisting a team of ragamuffins…

★★★½ The sea is calling… or more accurately, Disney is calling audiences back to cinemas with its live-action remake of Moana. Since its release in 2016, Moana has become Disney’s most-streamed film on Disney+. Between 2020 and 2025 alone, audiences streamed 37 billion minutes of the beloved adventure, cementing its place as one…

★★★☆☆ There is something undeniably appealing about Glenrothan. Set against the breathtaking landscapes of Scotland, it centres around family, regret, forgiveness, and identity. Directed by Brian Cox in his feature directorial debut and starring Cox alongside Alan Cumming and Shirley Henderson, the film has all the ingredients for an emotional crowd-pleaser.…

★★★★★ Reach for the sky…or a screen. In Toy Story 5, the rise of technology can only mean one thing…extinction for toys and relegation to a dreaded place: long-term storage. Writer-directors Andrew Stanton and McKenna Harris, alongside the team at Pixar Animation Studios for Walt Disney Pictures, have put together an…

★★★½ There’s a scene in Marta Díaz de Lope Díaz’s Another League which would be hilarious were it not so cringeworthy. A class of teenage girls receives a visit from a well-coiffed speaker, looking a lot like Margaret Thatcher. She represents the bizarrely named “Women’s Section” of the Spanish government.…

★★★★½ Directed by Juan Carvajal, La Salsa Vive is a pulsating and insightful documentary that tells the story of two cities that share a common bond – the rhythm of salsa – from its roots in New York City to its current location in Cali, Colombia.  Through more than five…

★★★★☆ There was a cinematic trend in the eighties and nineties where it was near impossible to kill off the villain. In Cape Fear, Sleeping with the Enemy and Fatal Attraction, the enemy simply refused to die easily – or sometimes appeared to die twice. Echoes of the syndrome appear…