Reviews – Rating Frames

The President’s Cake is a Vital Watch

April 3, 2026Darcy Read

In 1990, Iraq faced strict UN-backed sanctions, which led to extreme poverty and shortages of food and medicine. Despite this, Saddam Hussein required all Iraqis to celebrate his birthday. Set two days before the president’s birthday, either during or on the verge of the Gulf War, The President’s Cake (2025) follows nine-year-old schoolgirl Lamia (Baneen Ahmad Nayyef), who is anxious about being selected for the terrible honour of baking a cake for the day.

Filmmaker Hasan Hadi contracts a world from Lamia’s perspective outward through childlike framing and camera movements, grounding us in the surreal circumstance she finds herself in on the morning of the draw to decide who will have to bake the cake. The scene is an entire film in a bottle. We see Saeed (Sajad Mohamad Qasem), Lamia’s close friend, has to write his name five times to be placed in the draw as punishment for his lateness to class. A boy reminds the teacher that his father fixed his bicycle, and his name is not written down for the draw. When Lamia is called to draw the cake, an ultimate punishment, we collapse on her face, slammed with despair, but not broken. She learnt this from her grandmother Bibi (Waheed Thabet Khreibat).

Without parents and raised on the outskirts of the city by her frail but spirited grandmother Bibi, Lamia must scrape and scrounge to acquire the funds to obtain the basic ingredients needed for the cake, which, if she doesn’t present it on the day, will be punished by being dragged through the street and possibly killed.

Baneen Ahmad Nayyef as Lamia in *The President’s Cake.*

The film is littered with pensively powerful moments, like Bibi giving Lamia a shopping list for the cake while sorting through personal family items they will have to sell to acquire the ingredients. The crippling weight of political forces bears down on each individual we see. The dictatorship and UN-backed sanctions are visibly fraying the knot of community in this Iraqi village and city.

Once the film separates Bibi and Lamia on their trip to the city to collect ingredients in several heartbreaking sequences, the story blooms. Lamia is driven to acquire the ingredients and persevere, while Bibi is trying to give her granddaughter a better life as she grapples with the limitations of herself as her guardian. As the film is primarily focused on a child’s perspective of the world in a state of turmoil, this bifurcated narrative is purposely unbalanced, which can lose some audience members while engrossing others.

We see the crippling rule of dictatorship through a child’s eye and how that perspective ripples through others. As Lamia and her friend Saeed encounter various strangers on their journey for eggs, flour, and sugar, we see the callousness the regime has instilled in people, where even the sharing of small kindnesses seems impossible.

(From left) Sajad Mohamad Qasem and Baneen Ahmad Nayyef as Saeed and Lamia in *The President’s Cake.*

Baneen Ahmad Nayyef as Lamia is one of the best child performances in years. She carries with her a pathos that never derails her fierce determination to succeed despite her situation, making her a vital screen presence in a film that too easily could’ve sunk under the weight of its circumstances.

What also allows the film to float above the muck is the gorgeous work of cinematography by Tudor Vladimir Panduru. The President’s Cake maintains a propulsive energy, never luxuriating in the search for that one perfect shot that derails all too many films.

A film about the futility of a stable life under a cripplingly arrogant dictatorship, Hadi savvily avoids the potholes of despair with a gliding approach from scene to scene, focusing on the childlike goals at hand that ground the story in the familiar despite the circumstances. Too often, films of this nature root themselves too heavily in the past and its specifics, which feel bound by their circumstances, allowing the audience to separate their lives from the ones we see on screen. That is not the case here, and it is all the more powerful for it.

A vital and poignant film that collides with the madness of oppression with a child’s resilience, Hadi’s film is indebted to classic Iranian filmmakers like Jafar Panahi and Abbas Kiarostami while still matching contemporary urgency with a reflective look at the past. As the children move through the city ravaged by poverty through recent sanctions, all in a desperate search for money and supplies to get through the president’s birthday, we reflect on each passing individual and how they are forced to look out for themselves instead of these desperate children.

The President’s Cake is in select theatres now.

Dance For Your Life Brings the Docuseries to the Big Screen

March 29, 2026Darcy Read

The audition of a lifetime. 100 dancers, 1 contract. An expansion of the television docuseries Dance Life (2024), the documentary feature Dance For Your Life (2026) is an intimate look into the world of modern professional dance through two dance companies: Sydney’s Brent Street and London’s Shapehaus led by revered choreographer Dean Lee. 100 dancers will have the opportunity to prove they have what it takes to obtain the single contract up for grabs in the notorious London company.

The question Dance For Your Life asks across its 100-minute runtime boils down to whether this is an extended TV episode or a work of cinema. While starting on rocky footing with an extended first act in Sydney, the film blooms into a wonderful work of resilience and passion once the group of ten finalists arrive in London, which benefits from the space given by the feature-length runtime. All great works of documentary in this vein ultimately require compelling characters, something Dance For Your Life takes its time cultivating beyond simple introductions during the trial stage in Brent Street. Once we begin to see the Australian dancers interact and learn from Lee, the world begins to open up, and we see what these young artists are capable of achieving.

Spending the first 45 minutes locked in Sydney was crucial to establishing the world and stakes of the film before the lucky ten arrived in London. We are introduced to many impressive dancers, with the knowledge that only a few will make it to the final performance at the end of the film, so it is only once the final ten are selected that the audience can settle into which individuals to give emotional weight to.

Dance For Your Life sends ten Sydney dance students to London for the shot at a single professional contract. — Dean Lee (centre) and Brent Street dancers in *Dance For Your Life* (2026). Screener courtesy of Mushroom Group

What director Luke Cornish and cinematographer Geoff Blee understand about filming dance is the potency of a locked-off wide shot, allowing the dancers to power the scene. Like most creative subject documentaries, the film thrives when we are given space to watch these incredible performers do what barely anyone else on the planet can do. Dance For Your Life is given more space to breathe and explore the works in London, working through Dean Lee’s choreography that will be the basis for the film’s final performance.

The tension between personal gain and camaraderie is at the heart of the film and allows the competitive engine to keep the audience invested in the story and these dancers. In a climate of economic uncertainty in live performing spaces at scale, the stakes feel impossibly high for these young people trying to survive in a creative industry seemingly set up for them to leave.

Dance as a ruthlessly athletic medium of artistic expression is unlike any other art form, but is potently absent from the competition element of the film. When we watch the ten in these wonderful rehearsal scenes, we are not viewing it as an artistic pursuit but as a fellow judge, picking up on minimal mistakes and alterations from the group. When this shift in viewership excels, it is in the lead sequence as Lee is deciding between Max and Connor, watching the piece back to back, noticing what each individual brings to the part. Expressing themselves within the framework in place is electric to watch, with the knowledge that ultimately only one will be selected.

Dance For Your Life has Dean Lee at its heart. It works more effectively as an exploration of modern professional dance and those who are excluded and marginalised from that space, rather than a competition that ultimately feels secondary to the journey the dancers go on at Shapehaus.

The final dance performance, which the entire film has been building towards, is a feat. The access for filming allowed the sequence to excel beyond a simple documentary or competition television film. The medium of dance allows for a litany of great cinematic moments when performed at the highest level, something Dance For Your Life achieves in this finale.

There is a wisdom to not linger in the final contract decision at the film’s conclusion for long, knowing the audience has seen the growth of these performers across the film as more important than this one opportunity. While only one lucky person received the contract, no one walked away empty-handed.

Dance For Your Life is in select theatres from April 2nd.

Project Hail Mary is a Charming, Wholesome Buddy-Up Space Adventure

March 16, 2026March 15, 2026Arnel Duracak

Project Hail Mary preview screening provided by Sony Pictures

If you’re like me and you’ve recently added Andy Weir’s hit novel, Project Hail Mary, to your Audible library, thinking that listening to it beforehand or reading the physical version might be the best way to first experience this story, well the 2026 screen adaptation might just quell those thoughts. That’s because directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller have taken a screenplay by The Martian (2015) screenwriter, Drew Goddard, and imbued it with their signature warmth and whimsicality to the point where this might be the only version of this intellectual property that you’ll need (and want) to experience.

After all, a premise about a school-teacher-turned-world-saving-astronaut who befriends a rock alien in the depths of space (who also happens to be on a mission to save his planet), isn’t really a hard sell, especially when Ryan Gosling is involved (think of it as an appetiser for the upcoming Mandalorian and Grogu film). But beyond that, Lord and Miller have managed to make a 2.5 hour runtime feel breezy and unique, especially at a time where films that take place out beyond our world have tended to play to familiar story beats — I’m looking at you, Predator: Badlands (2025) and Alien: Romulus (2024).

Of course, without Gosling’s signature charm and dry wit, the bright tone of this film would not shine through nearly as much. He plays science teacher Ryland Grace (referred to as Grace throughout) who we meet while he’s waking from a coma in the depths of an outer-space mission. From here, Goddard’s screenplay oscillates between the past and the present, giving us insights into how our protagonist found himself light years away from Earth. It turns out mankind is on course to being wiped out as the sun is being cooled by what is known as the Petrova Line (a line of radiation between Venus and the Sun) that is comprised of sun-eating “astrophage” or an organism that is, for reasons I won’t spoil, cooling the sun. So, yeah, things aren’t looking too great for Earth dwellers.

Ryan Gosling stars as Ryland Grace and Sandra Hüller as Eva Stratt in *Project Hail Mary*

Cue Project Hail Mary, a secret mission that only the world’s top minds who have any familiarity with what’s at stake, are privy to. While much of his life is quite unexplored for the majority of the film (namely, why he’s without anyone significant in his life from family to friends), Grace ends up becoming central to the mission after being recruited by a secret government operative, Eva Stratt (Sandra Hüller), with Lord and Miller finding a decent balance between showing you the events leading up to Grace’s being in space, and the being in space.

Grace’s mission is far from straightforward though as he is tasked with finding out why one particular planet some 11 years away is the only star in the solar system that isn’t being cooled by these infectious astrophage. Grace’s one saving grace (pun intended) is that he’s not the only one who has ventured out to this star, with a crab/spider shaped rock alien scientist (whom Grace fittingly names Rocky) also looking to see what’s coolin. It’s in their unusual connection that Lord and Miller’s film stops itself from becoming another by-the-books-Earth-saving-mission. For starters, Rocky is lovable and really grows on you to the point where you can’t help but buy into the idea of these two learning how to communicate with one another through some tinkering on a sophisticated translation software before becoming best buds.

Project Hail Mary brings to mind the great unlikely friendship films from history like E.T. (1982) and The Iron Giant (1999) and offers a wholesome, heart-tugging buddy-up adventure that leaves you feeling all warm and fuzzy by the end. If there’s any criticism that comes to mind it’s that sometimes less is more, especially in the film’s closing sequence which feels like it could have ended at about 3 different points, but beyond that, Goddard’s screenplay and Lord and Miller’s knack for creating thought provoking moments amidst the craze of a situation is second to none. Sure, the significance of what’s at stake (the extinction of mankind) takes a backseat at times to just let you enjoy being in the company of Grace and Rocky, but it’s really through their friendship and “every little thing is gonna be alright” energy that Project Hail Mary finds its groove.

Project Hail Mary opens nationally from Thursday 19 March.

The Testament of Ann Lee is Revelatory

February 27, 2026Darcy Read

Melding powerful and emotive choreography with rhythmically propulsive music built out from recontextualised hymns, The Testament of Ann Lee (2025) is an intoxicating musical biopic like no other, creating a singular theatrical experience that will have you asking more from the genre. Centred on the fascinating movement of the Shakers, the 18th-century religious group known for their ecstatic dancing, Mona Fastvold’s exploration into humanity, ambition, and religion in a moment of turmoil and potential is an unexpected revelation in cinema this year.

The film operates as a probing look into personal religion and how it can be expanded into a community, with Fastvold exploding the potential of the story into a wild and emotive musical that feels grounded in the power of the Shaker movement through its choreography and music. At the heart of it all is the titular Ann Lee, the rare female religious leader whose story is easily worth an emotive and expressionistic biopic starring one of the industry’s best actors in Amanda Seyfried. Spurred by unimaginable grief and some notable, potentially queer subtext, Ann is devoted to becoming a prophet of the Shakers she has found herself the leader of, seeing the act of celibacy as a key tenet of driving away sin, even as the movement is built on the overwhelming sense of religious community born out of dance and bodily movement.

Ann’s decision to shift the movement towards celibacy can only be accepted for so long by the large community in Manchester, as well as her husband, Abraham (Christopher Abbott), a simple man who will walk with her to the edge of his faith, but not beyond his human desires. Staying by Ann’s side through it all is her brother William (Lewis Pullman) and close friend Mary (Thomasin McKenzie), who also serves as the film’s narrator in one of the best uses of lengthy expositional narration in years.

Stacy Martin and Amanda Seyfried in *The Testament of Ann Lee* (2025).

Remixed from Shaker hymns, composer Daniel Blumberg follows up award-winning work on Fastvold’s previous film, The Brutalist (2024), with a starkly different collection of music, combining beautifully with the ensemble’s choreography that always stays within the realm of absurd realism that the Shakers are known for. Seyfried allows the melodies to transcend the screen, using the repetitions of the hymns as a hypnotic bedrock to build out some exalted musical numbers.

Working previously as a co-writer on her partner Brady Corbet’s standout film The Brutalist, Fastvold’s film works as a fascinating companion piece of equal quality. Both Ann Lee and The Brutalist are fixated on ambitious figures that see potential in the pursuit of America, believing themselves to be called to a higher purpose in some form, with the faith that this purpose will shield them from the dangers that lie ahead. While Corbet’s film echoes its protagonist’s mode of deliberate architecture (as its namesake) to tell its wider story of faith, religion, and pursuit, Fastvold’s film moves with the grace of fresh silk and dance.

The Testament of Ann Lee transcends the bounds of its screen when the small group manage to obtain passage by boat to New York, with an extraordinary piece of montage, choreography and music as good as any you’ll find this decade. Fastvold’s exploration of the newly American striver through the unique lens of an upstart religious sect in England, stymied by the lack of progressive thinking at home, is swept up in the power of the musical genre at its best, with Seyfried commanding the helm with a mixture of mania and overwhelming grace.

Amanda Seyfried and Lewis Pullman in *The Testament of Ann Lee* (2025).

She contends with this part of the film in a complex understanding of many sides to the Shaker history of driven American conquest. The group see America as untoiled land, perhaps more accepting of a female preacher and of their unconventional worship practices. As they arrive in New York, however, they are almost immediately confronted by a slave auction, which Ann sees as barbaric sin; she is here to cleanse in her mission to expand the movement.

A story of finding divine ambition in community and connection, Ann Lee feels powerfully tied to many period-set ‘Great Men’ films like There Will Be Blood (2007), but shown through a woman’s lens. With a pivotal montage of the Shakers building their housing and village, we see Ann less as a wise prophet and that of project manager and architect, reflecting many scenes in The Brutalist, bathed in hopeful sunlight and warm wooden surroundings. Rarely have we seen such a powerful set of companion stories, especially ones filmed so similarly and with equal ambition.

But this is not just a film of personal ambition built on grief and personal turmoil; it is crucially a film driven by ideas of faith and religion. This may steer off many an agnostic cinemagoer in ways Fastvold and Corbet’s previous film didn’t (although that film is as Jewish in nature as this film is Christian); to open your heart to the story is no different than the task given to an audience in many films.

As difficult a proposition as this film is for audiences, the lack of Academy recognition Fastvold and her collaborators received this awards season is surprising. It is especially difficult to reckon with as The Testament of Ann Lee is a more intelligently woven story of ambition and grief than the walloping Hamnet (2025), which received eight nominations. For those crying out for individual voices still striving to work with Hollywood studios, you simply have to witness this fascinating and engrossing film from a truly singular voice.

The Testament of Ann Lee is in select theatres now.

Blue Moon: A Character Study that takes a While to Find its Grove

January 27, 2026January 28, 2026Arnel Duracak

Blue Moon preview screening provided by Sony Pictures

There’s a lot of talking in Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon, a film focused around a single evening in a single location that has been described as something akin to a theatre experience on screen. It’s fitting that in such a film there is a lot of talking since, if the film’s title hasn’t given it away, it revolves around Blue Moon creator Lorenz Hart (played enigmatically here by Ethan Hawke), a serial conversationalist (often to his own detriment) as he works to convince himself and those around him that he’s holding it together while his past collaborator, Richard Rogers (Andrew Scott) and his new lyricist Oscar Hammerstein (Simon Delaney), are heaped with praise following the successful opening of their Oklahoma! musical.

Setting a film entirely around the bar and lobby of a hotel while subjecting the audience to one man’s incessant talking is no easy feat, but audiences familiar with Linklater’s work (especially those that are diehard fans), will lap this approach up. For starters, Ethan Hawke does a fantastic job of carrying the weight of the film, no matter how small he is framed by Linklater (Hart was 5 feet tall; Hawke, by comparison, is 5″10). For such a small individual, Hart’s voice echoes the farthest here, with Hawke capturing his larger-than-life persona tremendously, and he’s deservedly received an Oscar nomination for it.

The film starts off rather shaky though, showing Hart on the evening of his death in a back alley, a major fall from grace for someone who was so revered, before jumping back some months to that opening night of Oklahoma! and the mingling that ensued post-show. Sure, this shows the stark difference between a man who had countless people adore him and the man who would die alone, but just as soon as this opening pops up, it’s just as quickly gone from the mind. The shakiness continues though as side characters are established like Eddie the bartender (Bobby Cannavale) and E.B. White (Patrick Kennedy), but like in any function you may have ever been to where small talk happens, they serve merely to keep you entertained until the real guests you want to speak to arrive.

(L-R) David Rawle as George Roy Hill, Margaret Qualley as Elizabeth Weiland and Ethan Hawke as Lorenz Hart in *Blue Moon*.

One such guest is Elizabeth Weiland (Margaret Qualley), a young 20 year old college student who Hart has been selling those side characters the narrative that he has something deeper and more meaningful going on with her. In truth, she views him as just a really good friend, someone who she loves but “just not in that way,” a line that comes at a crucial moment in the film, contextualising Hart’s erratic, borderline needy behaviour. The other guest is the star of the show, Richard Rogers, someone we (or those, like myself, who are not familiar with theatre at all) learn Hart created some legendary plays with. Their relationship holds strong, and while we learn it’s had testing moments (alcoholism from Hart’s side playing into that), their dynamic is by far the most interesting given their history and the insights that it gives into why Linklater chose this night of all nights to focus on.

On the surface, Linklater frames Hart as a man who craves attention, both intentionally and unintentionally because his disposition permits he does so. As the film unfolds, his flaws creep up, including his insecurities and desire to not fade in the background given he has become so used to being the centre of attention. It takes a good 70 minutes to get to that part though as Hart becomes almost smaller by the frame, especially after paying to have some alone time with Elizabeth in a cloak room where he shows interest in her sexual escapades, like some voyeur who gets off on the idea of another person’s pleasure. You begin to pity him more than anything, with Hawke really showing the fragility of the man when he’s not in an open space around others — a place where he uses his talking as a shield to maintain this facade of composure that he’s built.

Blue Moon knows what audience it’s for, so if you’re unfamiliar with theatre like I am, the humour and references will more than likely fly over your head and make it difficult to engage with or care for these people and their line of work. That said, as a character study it offers a wonky but gradually clearer insight into Lorenz Hart, even if it takes a while to get to any deeper unraveling of this broken side of him.

Blue Moon opens nationally from Thursday 29 January.

The Secret Agent is a Biting and Playful Political Thriller

January 23, 2026January 23, 2026Darcy Read

Set in the Northeast of Brazil in the city of Recife in 1977, just as the country’s military dictatorship rounds third base, Kleber Mendonça Filho’s relaxed but probing political film The Secret Agent (2025) is like nothing else you’ll encounter in a cinema this year. Able to open a double feature with either Dazed and Confused (1993) or Army of Shadows (1969), the film wears many hats that in less assured hands would appear frayed and confused. Thankfully, Filho has levelled up as a filmmaker and storyteller, letting his playful tendencies heighten the moments of potent tension and violence that in less capable hands would beguile an audience.

Centring a former professor and widower with a political target on his back, Armando (an exceptional Wagner Moura) returns to Recife to collect his son from his in-laws, seeking refuge in the warm embrace of a small community of political refugees helmed by Dona Sebastiana, in one of the year’s best supporting performances by Tânia Maria that feels achingly real.

Wagner Moura’s work shifts elusively from room to room as Armando quickly surveys his surroundings to uncover how he needs to respond to each interaction. The highly regarded actor is given the role of a lifetime and is set to acquire several awards, as a man with a committed goal, but never stops living his elusive life, even as the violence around the corner draws nearer.

Wagner Moura as Armando in *The Secret Agent* (2025).

By placing this political and community-based struggle in the veins of a hangout film, Filho supports Moira’s performance with an outstanding cast that gives life to the past by giving a beating heart to this community of political refugees of his own country.

Echoes ripple through buildings, but the truth in history is something that must be searched for. Filho explores his country’s past and the people who inhabit those histories not as vessels for political tropes and ideologies, but as human beings who pass away long before their heroism is uncovered. The secondary narrative device of university students seeking to uncover the truth through tape recordings of our central story is surprising when it first appears, but it allows a dense exploration of ideas to occur. Filho’s way of shooting these scenes gives what could’ve been a contrived narrative crutch a potent level of emotional intimacy, allowing the film’s final sequence to sing.

In voicing The Secret Agent in the language of De Palma and Pakula, masters of the genre and time period the film is based, Filho is placing his film in conversation with the genre of political thrillers that most audiences are familiar with, allowing a discourse to occur across the screen between time and continents, ideas that are very much at the heart of the narrative. Alongside this, the film is a Cinema Paradiso (1988) level love affair with cinema itself, playing out in large swathes at a theatre, set against the backdrop of the sweltering summer backdrop of Jaws (1975) and the way it took the world by storm. Opening the film is the beguiling discovery of a leg inside a shark being studied at a local university, sweeping us up in the strange and playful mode Filho builds the world around, all while leading us down deeper and deeper with an unnerving sense of impending violence.

Like his previous film, Bacurau (2019), a rhythmic playfulness quickly sweeps an audience into a story, but a moment of visceral violence and aggression can pierce through that world like a stray bullet. With The Secret Agent, Filho’s eye is sharper and more directed, but playfulness is still the engine that drives his work. People do not stop living as the plots of his films take place; everything and everyone is transient, a poignant concept to maintain in a political thriller of this kind.

(From left) Robério Diógenes, Wagner Moura, and Igor de Araújo in *The Secret Agent.*

While the political thriller genre is defined by American filmmakers like De Palma and Pakula, peaking in the conspiratorial aftermath of Watergate and the Nixon administration, in recent years, the genre has been defined by international cinema. The Secret Agent asks much of its audience in terms of prior knowledge of Brazil’s military dictatorship, but in a modern climate of authoritarian spot fires around the globe, many audiences will see themselves in the images Filho shows us. Scenes of political refugees commenting on the limited groceries that are handed by a local farmer trying to assist them are as keenly observed as the moments of shocking violence.

Returning to the present day with the students weaving themselves into the stories of the past, we are in a constant meditation with ideas of bearing witness through aural recollection and the intimate but limited way of history being investigated. A pivotal scene in the film’s movement towards the thriller genre plays out when Armando and Elza (Maria Fernanda Cândido) discuss getting his family out of the country and the hit being put on his head, all while recording the conversation. This gripping scene is shown alongside Flavia (Laura Lufési), a heavily invested student, probing the moments we are shown, trying to glean insight into this moment and what may have occurred in that room outside of the captured audio.

What does it mean to tell a story of such darkness with this level of lightness? The film’s Godardian level of bounce and freedom activates a unique form of scene-to-scene tension not often seen in the political skin that Filho’s film wears. But, while the tension of these genre moments is usually played for excitement, The Secret Agent conditions us to find these moments profoundly reflective, peering into these lives with an open heart and a wry smirk of the absurdity of buffoonish political violence. A high-wire act that appears shockingly relaxed.

The Secret Agent is in select theatres now.

No Other Choice is the Work of a Master

January 16, 2026Darcy Read

A showman like no other, Korean visionary Park Chan Wook elicits more joy and wonder out of an audience from a perfectly timed cross-dissolve than most car chases filmed this decade. A filmmaker who is constantly looking to find the tipping point of extremity without falling into the world of camp, Park has cultivated a devoted fanbase that expands with each new entry, especially in recent years, with his fearlessness to work in the grime of modern life

Upon exiting No Other Choice (2025) in a delirium, it is clear that Park is the greatest modern visual stylist. While his stories can vary in interest and quality, as a filmmaker who is obsessed with the power of the art of editing, you will always leave his films satisfied. Adapted from the legend Donald Westlake’s The Ax from 1997, Park’s screenplay makes the key decision to maintain the protagonist’s occupation and narrative arc, showing how, as time passes, the crushing weight of modern capitalism has only increased. Centring a literal paper pusher, we walk hand in ham-fisted hand, gliding on the back of whip pans and transitions that will make film students furiously scribbling notes.

After being made redundant after the acquisition of the paper company by an American conglomerate, Man-su (Lee Byung-hun) is sent to a support group for the newly unemployed, selling self-worth and virtue as its own reward. But, after tasting mild success and a bountiful life with his family, Man-su is after a return to cold, hard reward.

Built on the late capitalist mindset that success can only be achieved through the pain of another, Man-su’s plan ultimately lands in Park’s wheelhouse, getting rid of the more hireable paper men in town, so he is all that remains. Amongst all the extremity and chaotic joy gushing out of wild filmmaking choices, the story elicits an overwhelming sense of pain as we see a group of men that should be in community with one another, forced to compete for what will ultimately be a hollow prize.

Lee Byung-hun as Man-Su in *No Other Choice*.

Sitting somewhere between Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Cloud (2024) and Tokyo Sonata (2008) as modern tales on the devolving psyche of work culture and living under the cruel thumb of capitalism. That Neon in a marketing push sent an open invite to the fortune 500 company CEO’s says everything about how pointed the film aims to be at its primary villain.

Lee’s performance holds down the film’s extremity, preventing it from turning into a circus. His desperation exudes from him as a flop sweat, gritting his teeth through every moment, anxious that the moment he stops to consider the repercussions, it will all crash down. In moments where the world appears to react based on Man-su’s emotions, anything seems possible in this farcical satire that moves with a feverish pace. There is a fleeting moment when a potential final victim offers a job that we feel an unexpected glimmer of hope that we can get off the road. But as is the case with most Park Chan Wook films, that road, once entered, is one-way.

Park is in a tier above all when it comes to pushing the visual medium forward with a fever pitch and an unmatched style. Like his idol Alfred Hitchcock, Park sees his role as both old school entertainer and cinematic visionary who asks what is possible in the medium they have devoted their life to. In his recent work, Park has devoted an enormous amount of time to uncovering ways to use the reflective world of phone and computer screens to tell a story that is still compelled by the characters holding them. When we see Man-su’s reflected face alongside his screen as he drives himself further and further into his doomscroll, we so easily see ourselves. These scenes are comedic but intensely revealing, and make almost all contemporary filmmakers look like cowards for hiding in period filmmaking.

(From left) Son Ye-Jin as Miri and Lee Byung-hun as Man-Su in *No Other Choice*.

Always veering into doing too much, Park hides as much in its maximalist frames as he shows. Many have criticised the filmmaker for over-directing his screenplays, never allowing the writing to gleam through the forest of his craft, which I believe to be a false and overly simplistic reading of his work. In his very best films, whether original scripts or adaptations like in No Other Choice, he highlights the power and potency of the writing by its sheer ability to stand alongside some of the most visionary filmmaking this century through iconic characters and set pieces. It is only in his films like Stoker, with lesser scripts, that become mostly known for a scene transition (show hair transition scene from YouTube).

What allows Park to ride so close to the edge of camp absurdism without toppling over is his ability to play to a crowd, both in enjoyment and the collective experience of being surrounded by strangers, all uncertain of what will happen next, which makes live sports an enduring event. With all respect to the perfect chase scene at the conclusion of One Battle After Another (2025), the legend of the final act, Park Chan Wook’s No Other Choice, has the finale of the year. A glorious send-up of modern late-stage capitalism as a ‘be careful what you wish for’ fairy tale that blends melodrama into a living nightmare into the best satire in years. It is a farcical screed of capitalism that gloriously blooms into something unexpectedly transcendent in its conclusion.

The poetic irony in its final moments play like the deterministic singularity point that all modern art about the crushing weight of capitalism arrives at, there is literally no other choice. How Park doesn’t arrive at a place of crippling nihilism in its final moments but of cruel irony and humanity is nothing short of astounding. His revenge fables are without equal in modern storytelling, with No Other Choice arriving into this extended canon in surprising ways.

No Other Choice is in select theatres now.

Sentimental Value is The Moving Family Drama to See

December 26, 2025Darcy Read

Arriving on Australian shores on Christmas Day, Joachim Trier’s follow-up to the Millennial instant classic The Worst Person in the World (2021) follows a family collision of artists that may be the perfect film for the holiday. Sentimental Value (2025) is a film about artists unable to articulate their feelings but are able to embody them and translate it to a captive audience. Trier and frequent collaborator Eskil Vogt have moved from dense single-character explorations into a wider canvas of a family, allowing their humanist writing style to weave between the said and unsaid.

Centred is Nora Borg, played by another frequent collaborator in Renate Reinsve, a respected theatre actor suffering from immense stage fright; Agnes (a remarkable Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas), her younger sister who has escaped the arts to make a more grounded life for herself; Gustav (a tremendous Stellan Starsgård), a well respected arthouse director and their distant father; and Rachel (Elle Fanning), an American star who aches to work on more meaningful work.

The film focuses on the return of Gustav, who has written a script that explores the past and present of the family’s history, set in the old family home, most of where Sentimental Value is set. He believes this script will launch him out of the retrospective tour space and back into the forefront of modern cinema; he just needs his estranged daughter, Nora, to agree to collaborate with him and star in the film. When she refuses to work with her father on the film, Gustav, after a chance encounter at a film festival, asks the young star Rachel to perform the role instead.

The act of writing a lead role for a loved one is something the film does not take lightly, whilst never allowing the work to unfold into a navel-gazing melodrama. A shaggy family drama about the film business and artistry would quickly implode, but Trier and Vogt’s script has a dedication to the central three family members that always feels generous.

Renate Reinsve in *Sentimental Value* (2025.)

While a gut punch on first viewing, upon multiple viewings, it becomes clear that this is a generational performance by Skarsgård. This is made all the more extraordinary due to his health and his inability to memorise lines post-stroke. It is too rare where a character and performer to become as intrinsically linked as Skarsgård and Gustav do here, as an aging artist looking to the past, present, and future of their family line to understand themselves and those around them.

Bergman is always on the mind while interpersonal scenes float from moment to moment. The film dances between influences in Persona (1966) and Vertigo (1958) with Fanning’s character Rachel, arriving at an equal power through a balance of influences. While Hitchcock’s complicated masterpiece wields the weight of comedically heightened mirroring and Bergman’s film of duality that revel in never fully eliding its meaning to the characters, Trier’s mirroring achieves its power through its late decision to voice itself clearly and openly.

A key scene of mirroring occurs in a pair of scenes that opens up the film into a world of collective humanity that is often the goal of Trier’s films. On one side of the glass is a monologue rehearsal scene with Rachel (after dying her hair to more closely resemble Nora) and Gustav, who is struggling to reach the impossible place he is searching for. On the other, a gorgeous scene where Nora finally reads the script after being given it by her sister, after she also finally reads it. After finally reading the script and releasing the intimacy that Gustav is pouring onto the page — something he would never articulate to them personally — the sisters are profoundly moved, and a point of familial understanding overwhelms them.

(from left) Renate Reinsve and Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas in *Sentimental Value* (2025.)

Whether the film too neatly arrives at its climaxes is up to personal taste, but much needs to be credited to Trier and Vogt for the level of clarity and emotional weight they give to the struggle artists have with connecting to those they love without using their art. And the exploration Gustav has in writing extends as an olive branch to Nora, to tell her he sees her struggles, but gives her the medium of her art to explore them together.

It is in these moments of generous openness and charged, yet elided, dialogue that Sentimental Value becomes a beautifully emotive family drama. Trier and all his creative collaborators understand that to create is to bridge an ocean of the unsaid, even if that means building a replica of your generational family home on a soundstage, only to have it hidden on the 18th page of the Netflix arthouse section. Trier and Vogt understand deeply how, even through that artifice, true openness and connection can be translated into a final, powerful image of understanding but not resolution.

Sentimental Value is in select theatres now.

Anaconda Struggles to Swallow the Weight of its own Ambition

December 24, 2025December 24, 2025Arnel Duracak

Anaconda preview screening provided by Sony Pictures.

It’s been almost 30 years since Luis Llosa’s Anaconda (1997) hit cinemas, a film which I’ll remember for it having traumatised me as an unsupervised five year old who shouldn’t have had access to the remote after 10pm. Tom Gormican’s 2025 remake/reboot/spiritual successor pays homage to the Jennifer Lopez led cult classic while carving out its own little corner, one that is tonally all over the place, incredibly self-aware and yet had me giddy in moments.

In fact, Anaconda finds an odd equilibrium between comedy, action and horror as it uses its funny star duo of Jack Black and Paul Rudd to present itself as a comedy, while keeping you guessing at every turn through conventional jump scares that sometimes land while falling flat at other times. Gormican’s last film, The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent (2022) took a similar approach but in the opposite sense by using an often serious actor in Nicolas Cage to play a fictional Nicolas Cage while building the comedy around him and his seriousness.

Incredibly self-aware in its presentation of events, Gormican chooses to focus on a group of childhood friends who used to make short films together, and while they still concern themselves with filmmaking in their adult lives, they aren’t exactly doing what they love. For starters, Doug (Jack Black) shoots weddings, Ronald (Paul Rudd) is a struggling actor, Kenny (Steve Zahn) is a cinematographer who gets rowdy and drunk, and Claire (Thandiwe Newton) more or less is doing better than the rest of them. It’s not until Ronald acquires the rights to the Anaconda intellectual property that he begins to make everyone believe they’re sitting on success.

After some convincing (namely of Doug), the group decide to go and shoot a reboot of the 1997 classic in the Amazon where they become embroiled in a game of cat and mouse with a real anaconda as well as a wider subplot of illegal gold miners. If this sounds like the sort of silly Hollywood blockbuster that tends to cap off the year, well it is. But this silliness (mostly) works, namely because the central cast are all so damn charming and likeable that it’s hard not to have a cheeky grin when something totally irrelevant to the plot happens, like Kenny getting over his peeing-in-public fear to piss on a supposed spider bite that Doug has sustained. There’s plenty of similar brain-dead humor that might leave you scratching your head, but what more can you expect with Jack Black leading the pack?

Anaconda isn’t groundbreaking by any stretch of the word, and it often calls attention to the lack of creativity in Hollywood, poking fun at its own studio in the process. That said, Anaconda becomes the very film it seeks to mock, with dialogue for dialogue’s sake and references to real world people and events. The film will probably be swallowed up by audiences in the moment with chase sequences and explosions all around, but when all is said and done, it’ll just as quickly be regurgitated.

Anaconda opens nationally from Boxing Day.

Avatar: Fire and Ash Has Pandora Starting to Feel Familiar

December 17, 2025December 24, 2025Darcy Read

Returning to Pandora after just three years, James Cameron’s third entry into his one-of-a-kind franchise, Avatar: Fire and Ash (2025), is closely linked to its previous chapter, Avatar: Way of Water (2022), giving the film its first sense of stagnation. But that is not to say Fire and Ash is a regression. The film is overwhelming and unwieldy, and in a normal year would be the best in a lacklustre slate of Hollywood blockbuster filmmaking with its incomparable visual style and boundary-pushing ingenuity that still convinces global audiences to leave the house and wear 3D glasses. But with the releases of Sinners (2025)and One Battle After Another (2025), two of the year’s films, should audiences start asking more from the stories coming out of Pandora?

Taking place one year after Way of Water, the Sully family is still mourning the loss of Neteyam (Jamie Flatters), all in different ways. As a Na’vi, most are still in a mourning period, especially Neytiri (Zoe Saldana), who feels lost in her grief. Jake (Sam Worthington), however, introduces the human concept of never addressing your feelings and pushing through in the hope of progress to the community.

There is little time to settle back into Pandora before the action starts. Spurred by the adults’ desire to remove Spider (Jack Champion, their sort of adoptive son and only human protagonist left in the franchise) from their community, much to the rage of the rest of their young and growing family, the Sully clan are ambushed by the Mangkwan clan, or Ash people, are they are known. A brutal Na’vi group headed by Varang (Oona Chaplin), a war chief who leaps off the screen and gives this long film the jolt it needs to sustain itself, even if we are constantly let down by a lack of development.

Oona Chaplin as Varang in Avatar: Fire and Ash.

While Varang is a viscous and instantly captivating antagonist, entering the canon of Cameron villains, we are constantly seeking more depth behind the violence and destructive tendencies. What does it mean for a leader of a seemingly nomadic group of Na’vi styled like the Comanche to so easily join the colonising oppressive humans, and what does it mean that these questions are not explored? While appreciating that screenwriters Cameron, Rick Jaffa, and Amanda Silver explore different sides of their Native American and colonist sci-fi allegory, the lack of depth or curiosity in its own writing falls flat, underwhelming what should be an explosive final act.

With a script and thematic conceptions decades out of date and technological cinema spectacle decades ahead of its competitors, James Cameron’s Avatar films live outside of time, allowing us extended peaks at this bizarre yet captivating place. What has allowed these films to thrive after all these years is their commitment to elemental storytelling, and not just in its commitment to adding elements like its naming brother, Avatar: The Last Airbender (2005) (definitely adding an earth tribe next). The family dynamics are overwhelmed with melodrama, deeply intertwining friend and foe with children and lost families, all with a growing connection to the land and its creatures, the more time they spend there, to a point where the climax of the film is weighted equally to the Na’vi as the Tulkan (whale creature added in the previous film) Payakan.

Cameron’s franchise expands in surprisingly organic ways, closer to a sweeping fantasy novel series than a film franchise spinning its wheels and playing the hits. Heroes and villains remain as the story is almost solely fascinated by their evolution as characters in a shifting world rather than having an expanding world smash up against rigid, established characters. As a double-edged sword, however, this does mean that at a runtime of 197 minutes we are focusing a lot of time and resources on the story of Spider, a mildly interesting but repetitive character, and his two fathers, Jake and Quarich (Stephan Lang).

Sam Worthington as Jake Sully in Avatar: Fire and Ash

While the script and characterisations continue to lack, we still marvel at the film’s visual palette and stunning sound design. With its use of high frame rates, something that takes time to settle into, water and elemental scenes really soar, while the textured sound design grounds the world in the familiar, a delicate balance that allows each scene to grip you even if the storytelling falls away. Unfortunately the score by Simon Franglen still remains uninspired in these films, with preplanned swells that stir less emotion than is required for a film of this scale and craft.

Where films like The Creator (2023) seem designed to offer its cinematic approach to CGI filmmaking to future films in the genre, Cameron’s Avatar films strive for the visual Pantheon to be worshipped not emulated. We marvel, moment to moment at scenes of lush forests and dense reef ecosystems, fully immersed in a world of human creation, even as we get swept up in an expansive story about our need to protect and connect with nature. Like going to the aquarium and spending all day in the VR room.

But at what stage does it feel greedy to ask for more from a franchise now 551 minutes into its on-screen runtime? As we round the corner to home plate and the James Cameron payoff machine starts working its gears, it’s hard not to be hit by a pang of sadness that this fascinating cultural item at the heart of a medium in a state of panic doesn’t strive for something more human or poetic. Audiences may never stop returning to Pandora once invited, but they may begin to ask for something under the surface to sustain them.

Avatar: Fire and Ash is in theatres now.