7 stars

dir: Potsy Ponciroli

2026

So, about a hundred years after they made the first movie with sound, and dialogue etc, being The Jazz Singer in 1927, someone decides to make a violent action movie without any dialogue.

What’s it like? It’s like watching a continuous music video clip for about 103 minutes.

That probably sounds like a lot, but that’s probably the average amount of time I spend watching rage on the ABC each weekend before falling asleep on a Friday or Saturday night…

If I tell you the film, whether it has dialogue or not, is a tale of revenge, you might quite rightly say to me “then despite the lack of dialogue it is like almost every action film that has ever been made”, and you would be right. The benefit in this instance is that we are not forced to listen to bored actors going through the motions with rote dialogue. Instead what we get is quite unsettling.

There are clips I’ve seen on social media where people take sections of classic films and edit out all the dialogue. Sometimes they do it to famous sequences with famous lines, like cutting it just before Tom Cruise is about to berate Jack Nicholson’s character in A Few Good Men, and before Jack launches into his famous moments where he derides Lieutenant Kaffee’s truth-handling abilities. It can be funny and weird to see such sequences, which usually don’t go that long, where you’re seeing their expressions just before they launch into something, and their faces afterwards as well. There’s a confusing aspect to it, and it can be frustrating, triggering to be constantly thwarted in getting the thing we expect, nay, demand.

A whole film of it is another thing entirely. I mean, what would the dialogue or a voice over really gotten us that we can’t have figured out ourselves? We understand the wanting, at least, the wanting of things, of people, of vengeance.

I am not sure if it helps or hurts that the lead character is played by Alan Ritchson, best known for playing know-everything man mountain Reacher in the series of the same name. Ritchson is known for his massive physique, not for his acting prowess, and a film without dialogue I guess relies on lots of face acting or physical presence, Mostly this results in people doing the kind of acting that used to be mocked on sketch comedy shows of people sitting on stools or staring out a window nodding portentously as a scene would end before a commercial break.

dir: Natalie Erika James

2026

Food itself is horrifying to some people.

I get it: so many people have eating disorders, I appreciate that and I’m not making light of it. People in my family, dear friends, so many people I know have been touched by the spectre of eating disorders that have impacted terribly upon their lives at some stages. Thankfully, most of them are still alive.

It’s an interesting place to start from for the premise of a horror flick, because in tandem with that is also society’s obsession with being thin as both a beauty ideal and a moral manifestation of what is “right” or good or proper. People who are thin are intelligent, disciplined, capable of self-restraint and delaying gratification, and are therefore good and reasonable people. Fat people lack moral fibre, can’t control themselves, and are therefore weak and bad people, under this logic. Our fear of varying, of not fitting in is universal, and we’re constantly being told what we should look like if we want people to think of us in particular ways, which is almost always unattainable for most of us, and how we’re worthless pieces of shit for not achieving that.

And all the endless scrolling on our phones doesn’t make a goddamn thing better, not for a second. So, eventually, that external ‘voice’ becomes an internal one.

Yes, this is a long-arse preamble – I can see that there’s a section of viewers, or a sub-section, for whom watching a person eat food enthusiastically would be inherently horrifying / disgusting.

I am not one of them. I was keenly aware of this as I watched the main character eating food with a bottomless, insatiable hunger, that I wasn’t the target audience. And yes this flick might be disturbing, but then I find a lot of romantic comedies disturbing too, mostly about how they still treat gender roles.

I never really found it scary, frightening, horrifying or other words a thesaurus would be happy to supply given how little it impacted me in that way, which is unusual for a horror film. But I was generally always interested in it, curious as to where it was going.

It’s still an interesting flick, is what I’m saying, even if it’s not particularly successful as a horror flick. Maybe I’m looking at it from the wrong genre perspective / lens. There are a heap of people, women, those identifying as women or non-binary, who would probably get a lot out of this flick who will never hear of it or ever see it because it’s a horror flick, and that’s a damn shame, I reckons.

dir: Dylan Southern

2025

“What” is the Thing with Feathers, you could be forgiven for asking with such a title, and the answer would be “Grief”. Grief is the thing with feathers. Not “Hope”, from the Emily Dickinson poem. No, she lied to us.

Grief. It makes other people uncomfortable. The critics, how shall I say this, fucking hated this flick, even though it has a Cumberbatch in it, and critics are usually well-disposed towards Cumberbatches. Maybe it is a shit film, and I just can’t see it, because I’m blinded by…something.

I feel like I got a lot out of it. I find it fascinating that there are so many films recently about people grieving in their own demented ways, with birds of different types playing such a key role in the story. H is for Hawk famously has a hawk in it, being Mabel the goshawk, but is more about Helen grieving for her father. Tuesday has a macaw standing in for Death Itself, as a mother pre-emptively grieves for her dying daughter. The recent abominable Crow remake, like all iterations of the franchise, has a character brought back to life to avenge the death of a beloved. By a puffin. No, sorry, I meant a crow.

Look, I get that we associate crows and ravens with death, but really, now it’s any and every bird standing in for the Grim Reaper.

And I think I recall watching a recentish Melissa McCarthy movie that had a bird standing in for her lost daughter in The Starling, or grief, or the general shittiness of life, something.

Birds equal death and grief and loss. Such a burden for such tiny shoulders.

Cumberbatch plays a grieving dad, a “sad dad” as he is mocked, later on. He has two young boys to look after, and he is not coping well. His wife, their mother, we never really see or get to know. Her absence leaves a tremendous void, an unfillable void. That is one of the many ways we understand grief as experienced by this character.

We like saying to people “so sorry for your loss, if there’s anything you need, I know people say that, but I really mean it, anything you need, just ask” but then we understand, you’re meant to leave it there. You did your duty, now leave the grieving person / people alone until they sort their shit out. If you do have to chat with them, make sure to make awkward jokes to try to lighten the mood or change the very uncomfortable subject to something else.

Grief is vast, yes, I’ve written that many times before, and different for different people at different times. This flick tries to go out of its ways to show the heaviness of trying to carry on and do all the ‘normal’ everyday stuff when you’re drowning in grief. One could say “no-one wants to see that”, and in truth it’s uncomfortable to watch. It is uncomfortable watching someone spiralling further and further down. It is the opposite of what people generally go to a cinema to watch.

dir: Simon McQuoid

2026

Terrible, just terrible. But enough about my weekend.

Mortal Kombat II manages to build on the “success” of the first of the reboots that came out during the awful covid era, and actually has some kind of tournament, the result of which is meant to dictate who rules this world or that world, so us humans are meant to have a stake in what happens. It’s no credible way to establish a civil or economically stable society, but compared to the current messes going on, it couldn’t possibly be worse.

It is utterly silly foolishness, but I’ve played most if not all of the games, up until Mortal Kombat 11, and then the one that came out immediately after that, mysteriously titled Mortal Kombat 1. Mathematics and pulling people’s spines out through their mouths do not mix.

Earth needs a new hero to defend it from, um, supernatural people, so naturally the ‘Elder Gods’ decide a washed up action movie actor called Johnny Cage (Karl Urban) should do it.

Karl Urban is not a washed up anything, probably having the time of his life and starring in all sorts of series and franchises, but he can perfectly easily play an arrogant jerk who also keeps whining about not having any powers like the people he is confronted with / by.

Complicating things further, very arbitrarily, a necromancer called, uh, Quan Chi? resurrects whoever the makers want to be alive at any given time, including a guy who I was so glad died in the first flick, being Kano (Josh Lawson). Even as I thought we were safe from his ozzie ozzie ozzie oi oi oi type of being painfully Australian, he’s back swearing even more than ever! It is a remarkable bit of casting. Lawson has proven to be the most annoying character in at least 6 films I’ve watched, and that’s no mean achievement.

He goes for absolute gold here, though he in no way makes Australia proud.