Alexander Justin Gonzales’s "Mean Boys" is a high school movie that pretends to be glossy teen drama but hides something far more unsettling beneath its carefully polished exterior. It opens with Ira Scholsberg, a social outcast whose desire to belong pulls him into the gravitational field of the school’s most powerful clique. On the surface, it’s a familiar story of status, seduction, and survival. But Gonzales isn’t interested in recycling archetypes. He’s after something slipperier—a portrait of youth shaped less by rebellion and more by performance, where even guilt is choreographed.

There’s a moment in Inside—brief, still, almost imperceptible—when Mark Shepard, a lifer whose name still echoes in the headlines of Australia’s darkest tragedies, stands in the prison chapel and stares into space. Not at the cross. Not at the men. Not at himself. Just space. It isn’t remorse. It isn’t peace. It’s something emptier. A vacancy. And that, more than any single plot point, is what Inside wrestles with: what remains when the reckoning is supposed to be over—but isn’t.

There’s a sickness that festers quietly in forgotten parts of the country. Not just poverty, or trauma, or politics, but something deeper — the sense that nobody is listening, that systems were built not to help you but to swallow you whole. Sovereign is a film about what happens when a man lives too long with that silence. And then begins to speak.

After decades of watered-down shark films, "Dangerous Animals" rips the genre wide open with something far more terrifying than teeth. What begins as a standard cage-diving trip uncoils into a brutal, meticulously staged nightmare at sea—where the real predator isn’t circling below but standing on deck, charming, calculating, and holding a camcorder. Director Sean Byrne weaponises the open ocean with surgical cruelty, delivering a film that doesn’t just revive the creature feature—it strangles it, guts it, and feeds it back to you raw. This isn’t a survival story. It’s a snuff performance, and you’re locked in from the first frame.

There are films that tiptoe into absurdity and there are films like "Sunlight" that stomp on its throat and throw it in the back of a van. A suicidal radio host barely has time to tighten the noose before a stranger dressed head-to-toe as a monkey crashes through his misery, prevents his suicide, kidnaps him, steals his wheels, and drags him across the country on a quest to start a banana boat business. It sounds unhinged because it is—but within all the chaos, filth, and feral shouting, something unexpectedly tender grows. This isn’t just a road trip from hell; it’s the sort of unlikely collision of souls that somehow, through duct tape and desperation, becomes salvation.

It’s sometimes hard to tell whether Wes Anderson gets more joy from assembling his ensemble casts or meticulously crafting his miniature dreamscapes. But in "The Phoenician Scheme," it’s not just visible — it’s palpable. Every frame hums with intention, with beauty, with a kind of quiet, obsessive passion. This is a deceptively delicate film: a confection dusted in desert sand, perfectly symmetrical and somehow still askew — like a compass caught in an identity crisis. It’s a tale of legacy and deception, of daughters and their shadowy fathers, of monopolies disguised as miracles… and.... bugs. But beneath all the Andersonisms — the ornate props, the ornate prose, the ornate everything — lies something I didn’t quite expect: a bruised and bewildered heart, beating just as loud as his recent works.

For a studio synonymous with spectacle, Thunderbolts* is an anomaly—and, paradoxically, one of its finest achievements. It is neither galaxy-spanning nor multiverse-breaking. There are no portals, no sky lasers, no races to retrieve glowing MacGuffins. Instead, Marvel’s latest swings the pendulum back towards something it seemed to have forgotten: people. Not pawns in a CGI chess game, but messy, wounded, quietly hopeful people trying to make peace with their pasts. And that shift, that defiant act of restraint, is what elevates Thunderbolts* from franchise filler to a genuinely affecting piece of cinema.

I can't remember the last time I finished a film feeling so broken and rage-filled that I wanted to scream at my TV, unplug it from the wall, and bury it. Bring Her Back isn’t just horror. It’s punishment. An unrelenting, claustrophobic descent into domestic trauma, possession, and the psychological rot that festers in the aftermath of unimaginable loss. If Talk to Me was a clever teen horror with emotional undercurrents, then this is its full-grown, emotionally mangled parent—drenched in grief, manic with delusion, and weaponised through the performance of a woman I thought I’d never fear: Sally Hawkins.

There are films that claim to echo with heart, with history, with heritage—and then there is "Sinners," Ryan Coogler’s audacious, transcendent blend of Gothic folklore, musical soulcraft, and cultural reclamation. It doesn’t just echo. It sings. It howls. It bleeds. From its first frame to its devastating final image, Sinners is a full-bodied spiritual experience masquerading as horror—a rare, roaring anomaly that doesn’t fit inside a genre but redefines what cinema can be when it chooses truth over trope.

In a media landscape overflowing with sensationalist ghost hunts and neon-soaked exorcism specials, "A Cursed Man" dares to do something audacious—and far more outlandish. It steps away from spectacle and into something much murkier: the psychological and philosophical weight of belief itself. Liam Le Guillou’s documentary isn't just a flirtation with the occult—it’s a full-on existential gambit, one where the filmmaker becomes both observer and sacrificial subject.

In "Blood Daughter," director Bryan Enk transforms the myth of Dracula into something stranger, more fractured, and more psychologically volatile than we’ve seen before. This is not just a retelling of Bram Stoker’s novel—it’s a self-aware haunting, a fever dream stitched from memory, mythology, and the burdens passed between generations.

Luz Cabrales’ "Shadows of the Past" is a lo-fi, homespun horror anthology that’s as earnest as it is uneven. At just 83 minutes and made on a shoestring budget of $15,000, the film wears its influences proudly—echoes of Tales From the Crypt and The Mortuary Collectionresonate throughout—but its ambitions, while admirable, sometimes outpace its execution.