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The one thing everyone knows about The Nightingale is its depiction of sexual violence. I understand that for some people this can be triggering and, if that’s the case, fine, don’t watch this movie. But this is a depiction portrayed from the female character’s perspective, by a female director, to shine a light on the treatment of real women whose stories have been buried in history. That’s the best reason I can think of to expose such events on screen.

The violence generally in this film is pretty constant, but to be honest, I didn’t find it as shocking as some have purported. To be shocked by this film, you’d have to know nothing about the history of Australia or the conduct of the British Empire abroad generally.

Around 200 indigenous languages were lost during the colonisation of Australia. Do you know how many people you have to kill to wipe out 200 languages?

The main character Clare starts the film with a husband and child, and spends the bulk of the film seeking revenge against the British soldiers who come to her house one night. She is accompanied in this by an Aboriginal tracker Billy. Over the course of the film, they go from a place of mutual distrust to a shared sense of common grief.

This is a raw, bare nerve of a film, in which the horror is at how everyday extraordinary cruelty is. The director is the lassie who did the Babadook, and this is another film about the screaming howl of unstoppable grief, expertly told with abundant humanity. And the performances are amazing. Every one award-worthy.

Aisling Franciosi gives a gut-wrenching performance as Clare. Baykali Ganambarr just conveys a wealth of unspeakable injustice as Billy. Even the baddies are amazing in their turn. Sam Claflin is basically in the running for all time greatest bastard in Australian cinema history. And Damon Herriman, a massively underrated dramatic actor, also brings a brilliant depiction of the worst of humanity.

Yet I think what I like most about the film is the unwillingness to simply be the straight revenge tale it should. Instead it struggles with the inability for revenge to heal, for anything to heal what cannot heal, and where to go to from there, for there to be any after. I like it for not letting itself off the hook with that. It makes the last quarter of the film more muted than some might want, given that we’re used to seeing vengeance narratives all ending in resolved catharsis. But this is a movie about the characters, and its important that the conclusion of the film is on them, not the perpetrators.

A good film, if you are willing to come to it knowing you won’t be spared from the parts of history we don’t speak about.

Q: What do you get if you cross a mentally ill person with a society that abandons them?

A: You get exactly what you fucking deserve.

This is the mission statement of Joker.

Gotta say, when this movie first started, I didn’t think I was gonna like it. The writing is obvious and heavy-handed, to a cringe-worthy degree at times. The directing is likewise, with scenes full of posters or signs with giant letters literally spelling out words relevant to the scene. You can almost hear the director sucking his teeth, and saying, “But do you think the audience’ll get it unless I put in a giant sign saying what the scene’s about?” This film is not subtle or clever.

What it is is bowled over by the shear force of Joaquin Phoenix’s performance. The success of this film is entirely down to him – period. Frances Conroy gives a great performance. Glenn Fleshler also gives a strong contribution in a relatively small role. But the centrepiece of this film is the character Phoenix channels with every ounce of his being. Even fighting over the clunkiness of the script to deliver what the lines should have been, what it really means despite the words.

And it just pulls you along. Despite the script, despite the direction, despite how much the movie seems to be talking at you rather than showing you, Phoenix’s Joker just wins you over. And the sheer rage that radiates out of him like liberation is dazzling.

The ending is an obliterating wave of exultation, conquering all reservations I had about the film. It basks in the ecstatics of the freedom that comes with letting go and losing your mind.

So many scenes were identifiable to anyone who’s dealt with mental health services. Sitting in appointments thinking, now I understand why folk stab nurses. The cure’ll make you crazy.

Joker is a juggernaut of one actor’s embodiment of a character over every obstacle.

The opening shot of this movie stands for the whole. It begins with the director filming her baby daughter in the hospital, playing with her as the baby tries to chew her own feet, when suddenly BANG! and she’s up and carrying the baby out the room, a friend takes her and yells, “Get downstairs!” as the hallway fills with smoke and soot, she grabs at others, helping them, as their feet go downstairs, across rumble, into the wards, where children lie on the floor, wounded and dying, and she loses sight of her friend and cries out, “Where’s Sama?!”, and the light goes out and the machines beep and the doctors have to manually ventilate patients, and in the darkness she cries, “Where’s Sama?!”, and down into the basement, through the crowd of frightened and disoriented people looking for shelter, pushing through them, she cries, “Where’s Sama?!” and then suddenly she sees her, being bounced on her friend’s lap, gurgling, smiling up when she sees her mother, like nothing is wrong.

This film is incredible and everyone should see it as soon as you can. Heartbreaking, inspiring, enraging and hopeful, I gret until it felt like my eyes were burning. Everyone in the audience was crying. It is a film of cracked open raw humanity.

The film takes the form of a letter from the director to her newborn daughter, Sama. She tells Sama, this is the story of you, and why your life is the way it is, and the decisions me and your father made that led to things being this way. The film primarily takes place across the first year of Sama’s life as her father, a doctor, struggles to keep going what becomes the last remaining hospital in east Aleppo, and her mother, a journalist, tries to document the struggle for freedom from the Assad regime.

It does flash back at points to before her birth to tell how her parents met at university, an ordinary story, and took part in the peaceful protests of the Arab Spring. They were so convinced that, like Tunisia and Egypt, with only some pushback from security forces, the huge numbers of their movement would prevail, and the regime would crumble.

In 2016, the view is not so bright, as Aleppo comes under seige. Realisation starts to dawn that they are no longer an uprising against a regime, but just civilians being slaughtered in a pen. They aren’t going to win. And into this Sama is born. And the story becomes one of hope in the darkest of times. Of what we live for. Of what’s worth dying to give our children.

This is a profoundly moving film, that you will never forget. Please go see it when it’s out on general release next week at the GFT.

Really liked it. It has more of an arthouse feel than Hereditary, and its pacing is slower and more soporific. I can understand why some audiences wouldn’t be expecting that, and wanted more action, but I really dug it.

It’s been most frequently compared to the Wicker Man, but I think that’s mostly because it’s the most well known folk horror. I actually found it closer to Get Out, with an outsider coming into a seemingly welcoming community, done with a lot of humour as well as horror. The main character Dani, is twice an outsider, as she arrives with a group who don’t even want her.

This is kind of more a character journey, as Dani eventually lets go of her extremely shitty boyfriend, while the cult horror plays out the traumas of needing to belong, the need to feel wanted, and the lengths people will go to, and sacrifice, to have that.

FYI, this movie is trauma right out the gate, so be prepared early.

I love going to see shit horror movies with my sister. So imagine my disappointment when our plans were thwarted as we discovered that Ma is actually good. And not, good for a shit horror movie good. But actually good. Good for a horror, good for a drama.

Rather than being about teens versus the villain, it is a character study of a woman whose trauma has lived inside her so long, growing, that containing it has warped her. This is very much the last chapter of a long story, in which poison has boiled unseen, until the slightest discomfit sends it spewing in all directions.

And of course, the person you have to thank for that is Octavia Spencer, who is excellent in this. She is able to really hold your sympathy, even as she spins ever deeper into violence. She just plays this with such pain and yearning, you’re rooting for her to pull out of this for her own sake, save herself from being utterly consumed by her demons.

This is not the binary heroes/villains teen horror movie you might think it is. The teens are nice people. Ma was a nice person once. But bad things happen to good people for no reason.