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

At a brisk 95 minutes, Drop is the kind of taut, grown-up genre film that feels increasingly rare.

It’s a post-Bluey world and children deserve better from animated dog properties, let alone adults who might be drawn in by Dog Man’s appealing art.

Looney Tunes: The Day the Earth Blew Up is a delightful, high-energy adventure that stays true to the heart of what makes the franchise so beloved.

Oh, Canada tries to be profound and contemplative, but disappointingly, is not as deep or compelling as it thinks it is. 

For all of the hysteria that has surrounded this adaptation, when I watched this in a preview screening surrounded by cheering girls in Snow White costumes, it was hard to remember why people were convinced of the insidiousness of this film in the first place. 

If you’re looking for a bit of lighthearted fun, One of Them Days is one release you won’t want to miss!

Steven Soderbergh continues his prolific ‘post-retirement’ run with Black Bag, a tightly-wound spy thriller that is as cleverly composed as it is devilishly paranoid.

While it most likely won’t be regarded as a mobster classic when compared to some of Scorsese’s other masterpieces it is trying to channel, The Alto Knights is still a well-enough-made film that fans of the mobster genre will be able to glean some enjoyment from the feature.

From a young age, the film stuck in my mind as undyingly sympathetic, and upon my revisiting it recently, I love it more than ever as not only the purest demonstration of Lynch’s ability to thrive within the studio system, but also the directorial attention to his own idiosyncratic way of loving the people of the world around him.

The Monkey is a weird and fundamentally unserious, yet somehow still kind of moving experience. The end result is an absolutely fantastic time at the movies, a testament to taking wild career swings and giving the audience the maximum bang for their buck in terms of entertainment value.

Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy is a tale bound to resonate with every woman’s experiences.

The Last Showgirl is a reflection on how the end is just the beginning, and the whimsy of girlhood can persevere into womanhood.

Heart Eyes is certainly a commendable addition to the horror-comedy genre, offering a refreshing take on the slasher formula without reinventing the wheel.

Stephen Soderbergh […], makes a return to experimental filmmaking with Presence: a modernised ghost story serving as a deliberate subversion of the genre itself.

Though Queer has all the ingredients of a great drama, its delivery misses the mark. 

Reijn suggests that pleasure has an interstitial quality, making it neither good nor evil, only a key part of life.

Dating and relationships, especially in the modern world, can be a real horror.

As far as January horror movies go, you could do worse, but howling about Wolf Man, you will not be.

Nothing in the film really ‘fails’, per se, and if there were a universal, objective checklist of things that make a Good Movie–there isn’t, by the way–The Brutalist meets them all.