Feeling trapped in his job as a teacher in the small outback community of Tiboonda, John Grant (Gary Bond) is glad to get to the end of term, so that he can travel to Sydney to spend the festive period with his girlfriend. In order to catch a flight onwards, he must first take the […]
On October 19th, 2003, in the town of One Season, Jack (Jack Rawlinson) goes for a swim and disappears beneath the waves. Three weeks later, he returns without an explanation and no knowledge of what has happened to him in the intervening time. Four years on, Jack is eking out a reclusive existence, but the […]
With the incredible levels of social media saturation now possible – often moving from cute pet videos to real-life ordeals in an easy move – then you could be forgiven for thinking that there’s no overarching controls out there, but apparently, there are. Margot (Barbie Ferreira) works for the Kino video app, attaching content warnings […]
By Adam Page I want to put my position on the table before a frame of this comes up on the screen, as I think you should know where I stand before I tell you this documentary is really quite good. In my considered and totally unrepentant view, Exorcist II: The Heretic is a bad […]
On the outskirts of a drab Australian town, we meet new boy Naim (Joe Bird). After what can be gleaned to be a period of isolation, he seems pleased to be hanging out with someone from his school, Ryan (Stacy Clausen) – Ryan seems older and tougher, although he’s a classmate, and he’s definitely got […]
It feels like a while since we had a really good, honest-to-goodness zombie flick. For a while there, there were enough of them that we could debate whether zombies should be able run or not; with a few exceptions, though, the genre has stalled since the ferocious Train to Busan a decade ago (despite the […]
“This is a true story…sort of.” Wasting no time in getting its players on the board and establishing its own sardonic spin on Americana, Valley View Motel (2026) is a love letter to the 70s crime genre cinema with which it shares its setting. We start with what looks like a robbery gone very wrong […]
“You picked Haddaway?” 2012: Jerry’s, somewhere in the boonies, is the self-proclaimed ‘best bar in town’, with a thriving karaoke night taking place – right up until a drunk stumbles over and yanks out the machine’s power cable, blasting the literal eyeballs out of the current performer. I like it when a film makes a […]
There’s a popular line of films and television which consists of finding an idyllic (or idyllic-seeming) retro America, and then menacing it with something bloody horrible – as if to say it was never that good, not really, but also because once you’ve created a weird feeling of audience deja-vu over the clothes, toys and […]
A nightmarish (and as-yet mysterious) opening scene segues into what appears to be something like normal life, as we get started with Night After Night (2026): this is a false impression which persists as a motif throughout this alienating, unsettling film. We meet security guard Andy (Scott Poythress) and his buddy Willis (Johnny Sibilly). They […]
São Paulo party planner Malu (Martha Nowill) has a lot to do, toilet breaks notwithstanding. She has a cake to worry about, there are last-minute arrangements to make, and her twins’ father hasn’t come to pick them up as arranged, which is unhelpful, so she optimises a spare moment by helping to yank out her […]