Half-Time: Best of 2025 so far

An immediate cult hit that’s about to take over and revive local storytelling as global conversation -- gorey, funky and satisfying from start to finish.

Marina’s new album is an invigorating blend of past, present and future, where vulnerability meets camp to birth pop perfection

One of the most expensive films ever made, “The Final Reckoning” is a masterpiece of blockbuster filmmaking that is as earnest as it is big. This is storytelling at its most complicated, and most difficult -- and most heartfelt.

Fun Kesha is back. With her first album that she owns. Getting rid of the phantom of Dr Luke once and for all.

Instead of leaning into what you’d expect, Armstrong veers leftward (pun intended) to truly deconstruct how aggrandised masculinity self-immolates under the weight of itself.

It is always so nice to descend on the Prince Charles Cinema and realise you’re surrounded by passionate people. I feel that venues like the PCC are some of the only places left in the modern world where people aren’t pretending to be too cool, or nonchalant - it’s a venue that inspires passion. Y

Growing up and feeling trapped in a life you don’t identify with is a key theme in this inventive, exciting new adaptation of Paris Lees Memoir

Good cinematography can obscure bad writing, and I’m not really sold on what Materialists is selling about us. The film has charm and disarms in funny little interludes, yet it’s disinterested in anything besides the aesthetic.

Our new contributor Anika gives us her tempered thoughts on the highly anticipated rom-dram.

A screed against cynicism, Celine Song set herself the mission of rationalising irrationality - and mounting a 360 degree critique of rationality itself.

“I came from my people, they need to adore me, so Christian Dior me, from my head to my toes.”

I mean...Earnest!

With effortless charm, a pitch-perfect cast, and a liberating disregard for strict spatial continuity (all the better to disorient you), Nadia Conners has conjured magic here.

The outstanding singer and songwriter gives pop a proper shot.

“Jake Schreier’s Thunderbolts* manages to present a simple and clear to understand story that even first timers [of the MCU] can enjoy”

In an unprecedented run of films, James Gunn once again proves that the only way to win at making a comic book movie, is to actually make one.

In a gripping and emotional finale, we realise the true protagonist has been Luthen all along.

Marvel’s First Family have been invisible in the MCU thus far -- whether the goodwill toward Marvel would stretch to this adaptation was hotly debated, but here’s the thing…

A genre-blending feast for the senses that challenges its audience to confront horrors, both human and supernatural

Written, Directed, Performed and Edited by Nor García

At the heart of female fantasy lies the painful, drastic, desperate core.

Michael Shanks’s first feature is one wicked spitfire of a horror film, and if its metaphors seem heavy-handed, it has the decency at least to deliver them in the nastiest package possible.

A masterful dialogue-less story on par with the most devastating Pixar fare you can imagine.

A Sundance 2024 Official Selection and a Peccadillo Pictures release—I am absolutely, unadulteratedly in love with this film.

The best film I watched at Cannes, and, I believe, the one with the brightest year ahead of it.

Once we really know what’s going on, that’s when things get bloody, and Kleber Mendonça Filho will have you on the edge of your seat.

With a grounded plot and beautifully integrated experimental elements, Carmen Emmi spins gold.

A magical Rom-Com, and (thanks to technical difficulties) an interview you will simply have to take my word for…

Take a trip to 1980’s Brazil, where the kids of São Paolo get it in. and by ‘it’, I mean the ball into the net, of course. What else could I possibly be referring to?

In what can only be described as the most colourful, explosive and beautifully kitchy Short I have had the pleasure to see this year, Klimovski rampages.

A riveting and well-made character study that goes deeper on the tenuous mind-space boxers manage in the lead up to the world’s most beloved bloodsport.

Inheritances Writ in Mud and Chlorine - Birthright is a Thrilling Battle of the Generations.

Twinless is slightly sorta like Vertigo, on poppers, running on the energy of an off the walls 2000s movie laced with the spirit of a Hitchcockian thriller.

Fiore Di Latte punctures wacky with doses of real, and Charlotte Ercoli uses the madness like an easel to paint a woefully accurate portrait of addiction.

A gripping portrait of the depths you can sink to when you’re grief stricken and your husband truly hates you.