Moon (2024) starts in a cage fighting arena: old favourite Sarah Reisinger (Florentina Holzinger) seems to have unexpectedly lost her spark. Losing the fight seems to mean losing her career, too. The whole faded fighter idea might be a recurring motif in film, but the way it’s handled in Moon is altogether more existential, using […]
Peacock (2024) opens with a scene both oddly quaint and chaotic, and as such gives us an early, handy symbol for what is to follow: there’s a lot of quaint chaos here. In a rolling, sunlit golf course, we see a burning golf buggy. This attracts the attention of a young couple who come to […]
“Our younger selves sing on in our hearts. We hear them still.” Thirty years ago, Luo Tong was a member of a choir which achieved a short-lived period of fame during the 1990s, thanks to their performances on a national stage. Now a filmmaker, Tong reunites with her fellow singers and teachers to reflect on […]
*THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS* For this year’s mystery Celluloid Screams grindhouse screening, we were promised something equally as bonkers as the previous year’s Lady Terminator. I was also advised by someone on the CS programming team that I’d probably seen it, which somehow meant to fellow Screamers that I would be able to pluck the […]
Small-time drug dealer Wes (James Nelson-Joyce) has a good thing going in his hometown of Dennings, with a growing stream of punters getting hooked on a form of ecstasy called “Clown.” He’s in a stable relationship with Zoe (Olivia Frances Brown), they’ve recently welcomed a son into the world and, longer term, they’re looking to […]
After being beamed up into an invading force’s spacecraft, a mischievous and resourceful Gigantopithecus called Rufus escapes his captors and hijacks an ongoing scientific procedure, resulting in a dinosaur receiving the brain of a long dead insurgent and becoming Trexx, a courageous T-Rex (well, obviously) who has to deal with a stream of alien thoughts […]
“Never take for granted when someone remembers you.” Beryl Hsu’s maternal grandmother suffers from mild dementia, diagnosed ten years previously. To keep her engaged and active, her family often pulls together to create and perform various skits in which the still formidable nonagenarian plays a starring role. Their latest project is something of a step […]
Angel City, the year 2247. Trooper Jak Deth (Tim Thomerson) is a gruff cop whose dogged, extracurricular pursuit of the last remaining members of a zombie-like cult has landed him in hot water with his superiors. Detective McNulty (Art La Fleur) warns Jak that trancer hunting is out of bounds, so Jak reacts in the […]
“Everything I have said and done has been in the hands of God”: a young woman, lying on her bed, intones this sentence over and over, like a mantra, as Saint Clare (2024) begins. This is apparently a Joan of Arc quotation, but it’s hopefully no spoiler to point that Joan figures but little in […]
A wonderfully desolate beach and the surrounding countryside clash with a ramshackle nearby house and its sole occupant (Nick Searcy), whom we see frantically writing – against the clock, as some kind of supernatural phenomena seems to be goading him, making him hallucinate, fear for his sanity. So who is this letter for? We get […]
If Broken Bird (2024) begins unusually literally, then it soon becomes something far more complex and symbolic than that: its depiction of the nervy, prim Sibyl (Rebecca Calder) suggests from the earliest moments that something about this character is barely restrained, and that we will discover more anon. But in getting there – despite a […]