Monkey’s Magic Merry Go Round is an audacious leap into analogue horror that skilfully marries the nostalgic charm of children’s television with a creeping, unsettling dread and forebodingly surreal stylistic turns.

Sword of Silence believes in the strength of [its] ‘unique’ visual style to carry the film’s shortcomings, which unfortunately still manage to detract from the feature’s overall potential.

Mr. K is ambitious, imaginative and impressive, but the setup is unfortunately better than the payoff.

Aside from the fact that you may struggle to eat tomatoes for a short period of time, Parish Malfitano’s sophomore film is nothing short of spectacular. 

Fantastic Film Festival Australia (FFFA) is back for its 2025 programming, and cinephiles with a taste for the experimental, esoteric, and independent, brace yourselves!

The Deep Dark just doesn’t quite dig deep enough, uncovering a hole that's barely big enough to bury itself in.

If decapitated heads, Tumblr-edit-worthy quotations about the human condition, traditional Slavic folklore, and harrowing cinematography are your thing, then look no further than Le Vourdoulak.

While Metal Skin may be uncomfortable or even unenjoyable viewing, it is a compelling, edge of your seat story of Australia’s male-dominated, rev-head culture, where burnt rubber and women who love fast cars are drivers of the male fantasy.

In Divinity, writer-director Eddie Alcazar seems to have crafted a readymade cult object. A film completely furnished with textual references, grotesque violence, hyper-stylised visuals, and mixed media experimentation, seemingly destined to attract a small coterie of like-minded fans and repeat viewers. The only issue is that I can’t imagine anyone sitting through this twice.

Mami Wata truly has the ability to spellbind, yet keeps its feet rooted in a deeply nuanced point of interest: an ever-changing reckoning with modernity.

Galluppi’s mindfulness in crafting The Last Stop in Yuma County truly shows what outstanding stories can come from taking a leap in the dark.

Behind the flashing neon lights, Mars Express’ messy and complicated core is a delight to unpack and crucially, is without the comfort of easy answers. While it’s not exactly reinventing the wheel, its entangled approach to familiar concepts positions it uniquely, and is well worth the price of admission.

Hood Witch is redolent of self-importance, so deeply invested in its own world that it barely pauses to consider the viewer’s ability not to care about its mediocre characters and plot delivery.

Fans of bizarre, esoteric and extreme films, who live around Melbourne and Sydney can rejoice, because it's that time of year - Fantastic Film Festival Australia is back once again.

With gut-wrenching violence and disruptive themes, and its critique of gender roles and cultural norms in Japan, cinephiles and fans of the more gruesome side of life ought to catch this slow-burning, thought-provoking thriller.

Where weirdness can often lose out in action films, the chaos, vibrancy, and fast-pace of Polite Society breathes new life into the genre, and serves as an excellent tone setter for what the rest of FFFA 2023 has to offer.

Beaten to Death is an uncompromising and particularly nasty slice of Ozploitation that mostly delivers on the bluntness of its title, with a few neat cinematic tricks up its sleeve.

The Outwaters is a found-footage horror film that takes the genre to new extremes of experimentation.

Zillion tells the story of the exhilarating rise and fall of visionary entrepreneur Frank Verstraeten, the man responsible for creating and owning – for a time – Belgium’s most chaotically electric nightclub.

Quantum Cowboys is a bold expedition into the Wild West, the mind-boggling multiverse, and the very capacity and parameters of the cinematic form itself.