the Curb

I'm calling it right now. Lesbian Space Princess is the film of the year.  I saw it in a sold out auditorium at the beautiful art deco Piccadilly cinema in Adelaide with an Adelaide Film Festival audience that lapped up every laugh, every tear, and every splash of neon bright queer celebration on screen.  Lesbian Space Princess is the animated feature debut of filmmakers Leela Varghese a...

Cinematographer James Hoare is a recent graduate from Curtin University, where he worked alongside director Christopher Paik-Swan and writer Max Joyce to bring to life their final year short film Don't Talk About the Monster on the Roof , a micro-budget horror short flick inspired by the look of Ozploitation films. It's an impressively taut thriller that is drenched in sweaty tension as a group of...

The joyous and jubilant documentary Sally! - the exclamation mark is deliberate - is a delightful and educational journey through the life and history of Sally Miller Gearhart: a professor of Speech, Theatre, and Women Studies; a fantasy writer; and most known as a lesbian feminist activist who helped transform the world for women and queer people alike.  If, like me, you haven't truly heard...

We Forgot to Break Up tells the story of fictional Canadian band The New Normals; an indie rock group that transcends labels and definition, and changes the scene of indie rock music. The New Normals is led by Evan (excellently portrayed by Lane Webber), a trans man singer-songwriter who has the big stage in mind all the while trying to navigate his relationship with his girlfriend Isis (June Lapo...

Gianluca Matarrese's gentle documentary Gen_ opens with overwhelming images of planets and stars. Or are they cells and aspects of human biology? As we lean in to the screen, curious about what we're seeing, the title, Gen, that's gen with an underscore, flits on screen, with a rotation appendage of possible word creations: genesis, genitals, genetics, generation, genealogy, gender, genes. Overlay...

If there's a minor blessing that has emerged from the pandemic, it's in the way that film festivals have shifted and persisted with online options. As one of the leading film festivals in the world, the Sundance Film Festival continues to bring selections of their festival to global audiences via their online and in person screening events. The 2025 festival is underway, with online screenings tak...

Jason Raftopoulous is a filmmaker who I owe my continued writing career to. In 2018, Jason released West of Sunshine , a drama about an average bloke, Jim, played by the excellent Damian Hill, scrounging through the back streets of Melbourne for money to pay back a loan shark. With a synopsis like that, West of Sunshine suggests that it'll another one of those crime-drama films with a bit of retri...

Let's take a moment to look ahead in 2025 to a few of the Australian films that will get people talking. Two particular films had their world premiere at the Adelaide Film Festival in 2024, where their lead actor and performer, Albert Mwangi, was in attendance. Kate Blackmore's Make it Look Real is a hybrid-documentary experience that explores the role of intimacy coordination on film sets. Albert...

Andrew F Peirce and Nadine Whitney head to prison with Colman Domingo and Clarence Macklin for the powerful drama Sing Sing , before taking a sojourn to the beach for Robert Connolly's adaptation of Alison Lester's children's book Magic Beach . The waters of Australia linger in Nadine's mind as she embarks on a trip through the history of Naples with Paolo Sorrentino's Parthenope . Film recommenda...

Andrew F Peirce and Nadine Whitney delve into the darkness of Robert Eggers latest horror Nosferatu , before diving onto the dance floor with Michael Gracey's Better Man . Time gets out of order with John Crowley's latest weepy, We Live in Time , followed by a soapbox chat about the AACTA award nominated adaptation of Paul Kelly's iconic song, How to Make Gravy . Listen to Andrew's interview with...

Die Bully Die is a short film built on the notion of retribution and exorcising the pain inflicted by a high-school bully. Actors and writers Matthew Backer & Drew Weston are directed by Nathan Lacey & Nick Lacey, and collectively they bring forth a horror comedy that shows in bloody fantasy sequences how a victim might just want to throw that pain back at their inflictor.  Die Bully...

Welcome to the first episode of The Curb review podcast, where Andrew F Peirce and Nadine Whitney catch up to talk through recent cinema, while also recommending a feature film from the past to catch up on. In this first episode, we delve into the relationships in William S. Burrough’s Queer , directed by Luca Guadagnino and adapted for the screen by Justin Kuritzkes, with Daniel Craig, Drew Stark...

For this final chat in the series, Andrew catches up with prolific Australian director Robert Connolly and celebrated children's author Alison Lester to talk about their new collaboration, Magic Beach . Magic Beach takes the Alison Lester's much-loved illustrated kids book and brings it to live with a series of vivid, vibrant, and invigorating animated shorts, made by some of Australia's finest vi...

For this chat, Andrew catches up with Irish director John Crowley to discuss his latest drama, We Live in Time.  We Live in Time is an utterly brilliant drama the follows the lives of Andrew Garfield's Tobias and Florence Pugh's Almut in an out of sequence format. We flit from the past, to the present, to the future, with each moment acting as a new memory laid upon the next. This burgeoning...

On this episode, Andrew catches up with Academy Award winning master of stop motion animation, Adam Elliot, and Emmy award and AACTA award winning screen legend, Sarah Snook, to talk about their mollusk-motion flick, Memoir of a Snail . Memoir of a Snail is driven by the delightfully dark sense of comedy and a relatable pathos, both of which bring the off-kilter world of Grace Pudel (Sarah Snook)...

Our second discussion is with Academy Award winning actress Kate Winslet who was recently nominated for a Golden Globe for her turn as photographer Elizabeth 'Lee' Miller in Ellen Kuras' Lee . We first meet Lee in the months before WW2 commences, where Lee worked as a fashion model before forging a path for women journalists in wartime as she became a war correspondent for Vogue magazine. Lee's ph...

Welcome to the first episode of our summer series of chats where Andrew catches up with filmmakers and creatives who are behind some of the years best films. From Saturday Night, to Lee, to We Live in Time, and Australia's own Memoir of a Snail, we've got some great film discussions to keep you going over this festive break. First off the rank is a chat with two of the creatives behind Saturday Ni...

Join Andrew as he gives his candid thoughts on the 2025 AACTA Award nominations. Sign up for the latest interviews, reviews, and more via https://www.thecurb.com.au/subscribe/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

With his feature documentary debut In the Trenches: The Making of Before Dawn , Benjamin Scotford has made a rare achievement within the Australian film industry: a behind the scenes documentary which follows the muddy and tough production of Before Dawn , Jordan Prince Wright's equally rare achievement, an indie war flick shot in the remote West Aussie landscape. Benjamin dives into the ditches o...

Director Imogen McCluskey continues her exploration of suburban Australia with the comedy-drama film Nugget is Dead: A Christmas Story . This delightfully relatable Aussie Xmas tale was written by Jenna Owen and Vic Zerbst, who both act in the film alongside Aussie screen legends like Gia Carides, Damien Garvey, Ed Oxenbould, Steve Rodgers, Mandy McElhinney, Kerry Armstrong, and Tiriel Mora, and m...

Welcome to a special Adelaide Film Festival round up discussion featuring myself, Virat Nehru, and Nadine Whitney. While we have known each other for years, the 2024 Adelaide Film Festival was our first opportunity to meet up in person, watch some films, and do what film critics do best: talk about them afterwards. The following discussion sees us traipse along a path of the highs and the lows of...

In the heart of Adelaide, a movement is changing the conversations about film and film culture. That movement is called moviejuice, a ground up driven collective of artists, filmmakers, film theorists and enthusiasts, who commune to watch, experience, and talk about film and art culture together. Created by Shea Gallagher, Daniel Tune, and Louis Campbell, moviejuice was born in the backyards of Ad...

Director Samuel Van Grinsven returns to our screens with his sophomore feature film, Went Up the Hill, a powerful drama about an abandoned child, Jack (Dacre Montgomery), attending the wake of a mother he never knew, and encountering her grieving widow, Jill (Vicky Krieps). As Jack and Jill navigate the fractured existence they find themselves in, Elizabeth's spirit emerges in curious and strange...

Kate Blackmore's feature length film debut, Make It Look Real , navigates the intricacies of utilising an intimacy coordinator on the set of a film. Kate follows intimacy coordinator Claire Warden as she embarks on the collaborative process of presenting sex on screen for Kieran Darcy-Smith's film Tightrope , which features three Australian actors who each are asked to simulate sex on screen in di...

Regular readers of The Curb will know that I have a particular soft spot for the work of Sally Aitken. Through her expansive filmography that tells stories that span the globe, from David Stratton, to Valerie Taylor, to The Wiggles, and now to Every Little Thing , a film about Terry, a wildlife carer in California who runs a rehab facility for hummingbirds, Sally has managed to provide a generous,...