“Edge of Life insists that dying is not an aberration but a rhythm within life’s score. Watching it, one feels both devastated and soothed—as if the film itself were guiding us through the ceremony, urging us to look directly at what we most avoid. The great lie, it suggests, is that we ever “get over” death. The truth, tender and terrifying, is that we live beside it.”

“For those of us outside the Springsteen nation—the Australians, the agnostics—the movie becomes an echo chamber of someone else’s nostalgia. You can feel the ache to honour a national treasure, but you can’t feel the pulse.”

“If you ever wished a slasher movie was set in an early episode of Home and Away, boy, do I have a movie for you.”

“Panahi’s mastery lies in the misdirection. His compositions look spontaneous, but every cut lands like a blade.”

“What Lanthimos understands—and few contemporary directors do—is that absurdity isn’t the opposite of realism, it’s its echo.”

“There’s craft here, not thrift: a sensibility that recalls street-level realism without fetishising hardship, a belief that audiences can meet a movie halfway.”

“Scenes slide between recollection and immediacy with the confidence of a director who trusts emotional continuity... a rapturous montage with the needle drop of The Japanese House’s “Still”— results in one of the most exalting moments in recent memory.”

In this episode, we talk to the CEO & Creative Director of the Adelaide Film Festival, Mat Kesting, about the identity and personality of the fest and its growing connection with the community.

“The film’s heart, belongs to Jacob Elordi’s creature. Towering, tender, and faintly bewildered, he carries the ache of every Del Toro outsider. ”

“At Adelaide Film Festival, programmed cheekily as the “party movie,” it played like a barometer: audiences stepped into the afterparty with awe still clinging to their faces, deciding in real time whether to dance through the unease or let it sit.”

“Aubrey Plaza and Coppola's Zoom audition is worth the price of admission alone.”