The Melbourne International Film Festival is over for another year. I always feel equal parts exhausted and sad that it’s over, feeling like 12 months is a long time to wait for the next one.
Continue readingMIFF 2024 wrap up
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A New Kind of Wilderness (2024)
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This one is a bit of a weepy. I went in thinking it was about off grid living and homeschooling – raising children in nature – but it’s actually as much about grief.
Continue readingSweet Dreams (2023)
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You will understand the irony of the title in the closing scenes of this acerbic, stylised allegory of colonisation.
Continue readingLike My Brother (2024)
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Santosh (2024)
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Santosh (Shahana Goswami) is a young Indian widow cast adrift by the death of her policeman husband. Her in-laws hate her so her best option, as a woman, is to take a compassionate position as a police woman, symbolically replacing her husband.
Continue readingSeptember Says (2024)
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First time director Ariane Labed almost makes this darkly gothic tale work but fumbles its tricksy reveal.
Continue readingDahomey (2024)
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The Substance (2024)
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I think what threw me about this often delightful, often gross body horror was the expectation from reading the synopsis that it was feminist. It has made me muse on what my expectations are when that term is applied to a film, and I think it is about more than putting women’s stories at the centre, It’s about stories of women’s power and autonomy.
Continue readingGreen Border (Zielona Granica) (2023)
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I sat in the front row of the Capital cinema for the first time to watch this intensely emotional epic from Agnieszka Holland as a man across the aisle from me was chewing on something that sounded like a hard lolly with his mouth open for the first 10 minutes of the film and I couldn’t handle it. The front row was a good choice as it enveloped me in the austerity and complexity of this story of asylum seekers in Europe.
Continue readingThe Moogai (2024)
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Director Jon Bell has expanded his award-winning short film of the same name into a feature horror that enjoyably blends horror tropes with Indigenous history.
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