Metro

As anyone who frequents film festivals of any scale can attest, there’s a near-ritualistic approach to scheduling as one maps out the sequence of movies one hopes to see. Running times, venue locations, care factors – all come together in an often mu

In September 2018, a forty-year-old Sydney man allegedly drove to the home of a thirteen-year-old boy and sexually assaulted him on the front lawn. The attacker and victim had reportedly connected on a hook-up app, exchanging photos and personal info

Let’s get this out of the way early: I Am Mother (Grant Sputore, 2019) isn’t an especially original movie. To a degree, that goes part and parcel with its chosen genre, speculative sci-fi, given the long shadow cast by its predecessors over the last

‘I never set out to make a zombie movie, it kind of just ended up happening,’ Little Monsters (2019) writer/director Abe Forsythe told film website Den of Geek last year, ‘but it happened in a really organic way, because it just fed into this stuff a

A TALE OF COMMUNAL HEALING BETWEEN TWO EMOTIONALLY WOUNDED MEN, BEN LAWRENCE’S FICTION DEBUT TAKES AN INTIMATE PREMISE AND INJECTS IT WITH LARGER-SCALE SIGNIFICANCE, TACKLING ETHICAL REPORTAGE, MASCULINITY AND MENTAL ILLNESS, AS WELL AS INTERCULTURAL

No-one could accuse emerging Australian director Rodd Rathjen of a lack of ambition. They could, perhaps, accuse him of a little too much ambition. His soulful second short, Tau Seru (2013), depicts a young sheep-herder and his father eking out a liv

From its opening moments, the four-part 2019 Foxtel miniseries Lambs of God feels different. With its dilapidated convent at the top of a steeply plunging cliff on an island, it presents an immediate juxtaposition – the sheer logistical scope of such

The first production to come out of the Accelerator POD program – an initiative of Screen Canberra, Odin’s Eye Entertainment and The Film Distillery1 – The Furies (2019) is a brutal, relentlessly paced slasher-horror film. Inspired by both Richard Co

With the growing prevalence of subscription video-on-demand services such as Netflix, Stan and Amazon as well as the increase in online-only content on broadcast affiliates like ABC iview, what characterises a ‘web series’ remains up for grabs. For t

‘They don’t just want to take my body. They want to take my soul!’ An actress (played by Wu Ke-Xi) finally lands her breakout role after a series of false starts and insubstantial ‘extra’ parts. But there’s a catch. She must submit to full-frontal nu

Shahrbanoo Sadat was born in Tehran in 1990, but she’s not Iranian. For the first eleven years of her life, she had no official national identity. The child of Afghan immigrants – who’d left Afghanistan after it was invaded by Soviet troops in 1979 –

The personal often sits at the centre of the political. In One Child Nation (Nanfu Wang & Jialing Zhang, 2019), the Sundance US Grand Jury Prize–winning documentary that takes a skewering look at China’s state-introduced one-child policy, this sentim

The final act of the sporting career of Adnyamathanha and Narungga Australian Football League (AFL) player Adam Goodes served as a focal point for a … well, the polite term would be ‘discussion’ about racism – not just on the footy oval, but in Austr

Morgana (Isabel Peppard & Josie Hess, 2019) recounts the true story of a middle-aged, clinically depressed housewife who reinvents herself into an internationally award-winning auteur known as ‘Morgana Muses’. Boundary-pushing and explicit – and this

‘I think Black Mirror got it right,’ says director Justin Krook. ‘Technology is a reflection of ourselves.’1 The filmmaker is speaking at a Q&A after the world premiere of his documentary Machine at the 2019 Melbourne International Film Festival, ans

Lili (2018), the latest documentary by writer/director Peter Hegedus, begins not with new or archival footage, but with historical re-enactment. In grainy, flickering black-and-white, the film lingers on the face of a small blonde girl, eight years o

There is a scene in Once upon a Time … in Hollywood (Quentin Tarantino, 2019) in which Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt), an underemployed stunt performer, finds himself on the set of 1960s TV series The Green Hornet with Bruce Lee (Mike Moh). The Lee of the f

‘So often, in movies, violent characters are portrayed as […] supernaturally evil or there’s [… an] ideological justification for everything they do,’ suggested director Andrew Dominik prior to the release of Chopper (2000), his debut film about the

Dark Place (2019) is an anthology work comprised of five short films that variously represent the horrors of the Australian settler-colonial mythscape. Premiering at the 2019 Sydney Film Festival, the shorts – all made by Indigenous filmmakers – expl

In March 2019, a special screening of the newly digitally restored version of Charles Chauvel’s Sons of Matthew (1949) took place at Home of the Arts (HOTA) on the Gold Coast. The event marked the seventieth anniversary of the film, much of which was

Once upon a time, short films were seen as the key to a successful Australian filmmaking career. Ideally, at the start of your professional trajectory, you’d make a stunningly crafted short film that would win awards locally or receive recognition in