I find it hard to objectively critique Australian films, particularly when you’re at the premiere and the audience is jam-packed with people who worked on the film and their friends and family.
Continue readingWestgate (2025)
StandardTag Archives: 2.5 stars
Sanatorium (2025)
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I’m not sure if it’s just that I hit the day five morning crash of MIFF but I struggled to keep my eyes open in this Irish-made, quietly languid documentary about a Ukrainian health sanatorium that seems stuck in the 80s.
Continue readingThe Legend of Ochi (2025)
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Should we hold children’s films up to the same standard as adult films? That’s what I was left asking myself after this super-saturated fable that felt like Wes Anderson meets Disney meets a Grimm’s fairy tale.
Continue readingThe Room Next Door (2024)
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I have a patchy relationship with Pedro Almodóvar. From loving his early films, I lost my way with some of his more recent dry melodramas, like Julieta. He won me back though with Pain and Glory and so I was tentatively excited to see his latest.
Continue readingDrive-Away Dolls (2024)
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It’s a swing and a miss from Ethan Coen‘s first solo film without his brother Joel.
Continue readingRumours (2024)
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Either I’m too uneducated in contemporary western politics to understand the nuances of this not absurdist enough satire or it’s a stylish mess.
Continue readingHesitation Wound (2023)
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I’m not sure how I feel about this Turkish film by Selman Nacar. It ended with me feeling that I had missed some political or cultural context, seeing repeated motifs that perhaps had meaning but went over my head.
Continue readingBlackout (2023)
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Late night B grade horror is a bit of a MIFF treat but I think I knew 10 minutes in that this one was not going to be a ‘so bad, it’s good one’.
Continue readingShe Sat There Like All Ordinary People (2024)
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Shut Eye (2022)
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A mental health crisis and ASMR collide to create a portrait of two lonely people in Auckland at night.
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