What’s bracing is the film’s refusal to settle into a single, comfortingly moral angle. Instead, it asks: who benefits from the stories we tell about these boys, and what do those narratives let everyone else off the hook for?

Rebuilding is not a film of grand catharsis. Its beauty lies in accumulation: the glances exchanged, the chores shared, the small kindnesses that form a scaffolding around trauma.

To celebrate the Australian Premiere of BROKEN VOICES at the Brisbane International Film Festival, I talk with director Odrej Provaznik about the incredible lengths he took to make this film safe for his astonishing troupe of non-actors, despite the confronting subject matter.

To celebrate the Australian Premiere of BRIDES at the Brisbane International Film Festival, I talk with director Nadia Fall and writer Suhayla El-Bushra about playing with time, teenage gravity, and so much more.

To celebrate the 25th anniversary screening of BRING IT ON at the Brisbane International Film Festival, I talk with director Peyton Reed about working with great cinematographers, the rhythm of comedy, being a Peter Weir completist, and so much more.

Mendonça Filho builds his thriller out of dissonances: beach parties trembling under portraits of despots, bursts of music that curdle into menace, streets that look festive until you notice who isn’t smiling.

To celebrate the Australian Premiere of FOLLIES at the Brisbane International Film Festival, I talk with co-writer/director/star Eric K. Boulianne about influence as divergent as ‘mumblecore’ and Manchester By The Sea, being open to not understanding non-monogamy, confessional Q&As, and so much more.

Broken Voices could have been punishing or moralistic; instead, it is quietly devastating, resisting exploitation by emphasising systems rather than scandals, the collective habits that allow atrocity to persist unseen.

To celebrate the Australian Premiere of SILENT FRIEND at the Brisbane International Film Festival, I talk with 'Golden Bear'- winning director Ildikó Enyedi about reckoning with COVID, working with Tony Leung, editing according to the senses and the sensual, and so much more.

If We Bury The Dead’s premise sounds grim, its execution pulses with life: needle drops that shouldn’t work but do, pockets of absurd beauty amid ruin, and a finale that detonates with something like grace.

“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.”