Andrew F Peirce and Nadine Whitney head to prison with Colman Domingo and Clarence Macklin for the powerful drama Sing Sing , before taking a sojourn to the beach for Robert Connolly's adaptation of Alison Lester's children's book Magic Beach . The waters of Australia linger in Nadine's mind as she embarks on a trip through the history of Naples with Paolo Sorrentino's Parthenope . Film recommendations this week include What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? and Superman . Listen to Andrew's interview...
Jan 15, 2025•58 min•Season 16Ep. 4
Andrew F Peirce and Nadine Whitney delve into the darkness of Robert Eggers latest horror Nosferatu , before diving onto the dance floor with Michael Gracey's Better Man . Time gets out of order with John Crowley's latest weepy, We Live in Time , followed by a soapbox chat about the AACTA award nominated adaptation of Paul Kelly's iconic song, How to Make Gravy . Listen to Andrew's interview with John Crowley here . Film recommendations this week include the superb documentary I Used to Be Norma...
Jan 10, 2025•1 hr 9 min•Season 16Ep. 3
Die Bully Die is a short film built on the notion of retribution and exorcising the pain inflicted by a high-school bully. Actors and writers Matthew Backer & Drew Weston are directed by Nathan Lacey & Nick Lacey, and collectively they bring forth a horror comedy that shows in bloody fantasy sequences how a victim might just want to throw that pain back at their inflictor. Die Bully Die was the winner of the Sydney Film Festival Dendy Award for Best Short Fiction, and is nominated for Be...
Jan 02, 2025•51 min•Season 16Ep. 2
Welcome to the first episode of The Curb review podcast, where Andrew F Peirce and Nadine Whitney catch up to talk through recent cinema, while also recommending a feature film from the past to catch up on. In this first episode, we delve into the relationships in William S. Burrough’s Queer , directed by Luca Guadagnino and adapted for the screen by Justin Kuritzkes, with Daniel Craig, Drew Starkey, Lesley Manville, and Jason Schwartzman. This discussion flows into talking about Halina Reijn’s ...
Dec 31, 2024•45 min•Season 16Ep. 1
For this final chat in the series, Andrew catches up with prolific Australian director Robert Connolly and celebrated children's author Alison Lester to talk about their new collaboration, Magic Beach . Magic Beach takes the Alison Lester's much-loved illustrated kids book and brings it to live with a series of vivid, vibrant, and invigorating animated shorts, made by some of Australia's finest visual talents: Lee Whitmore, Anthony Lucas, Marieka Walsh, Eddie White, Susan Danta, Jake Duczynski, ...
Dec 30, 2024•27 min•Season 15Ep. 5
For this chat, Andrew catches up with Irish director John Crowley to discuss his latest drama, We Live in Time. We Live in Time is an utterly brilliant drama the follows the lives of Andrew Garfield's Tobias and Florence Pugh's Almut in an out of sequence format. We flit from the past, to the present, to the future, with each moment acting as a new memory laid upon the next. This burgeoning relationship emerges into a family which emerges into a drama that will have you reaching for the tissues ...
Dec 29, 2024•20 min•Season 15Ep. 4
On this episode, Andrew catches up with Academy Award winning master of stop motion animation, Adam Elliot, and Emmy award and AACTA award winning screen legend, Sarah Snook, to talk about their mollusk-motion flick, Memoir of a Snail . Memoir of a Snail is driven by the delightfully dark sense of comedy and a relatable pathos, both of which bring the off-kilter world of Grace Pudel (Sarah Snook) and her equally orphaned twin brother Gilbert (Kodi Smit-McPhee) to life. It's a film that's resonat...
Dec 28, 2024•48 min•Season 15Ep. 3
Our second discussion is with Academy Award winning actress Kate Winslet who was recently nominated for a Golden Globe for her turn as photographer Elizabeth 'Lee' Miller in Ellen Kuras' Lee . We first meet Lee in the months before WW2 commences, where Lee worked as a fashion model before forging a path for women journalists in wartime as she became a war correspondent for Vogue magazine. Lee's photography from that era is some of the finest work you will see focused on WW2, yet after the war, s...
Dec 27, 2024•22 min•Season 15Ep. 2
Welcome to the first episode of our summer series of chats where Andrew catches up with filmmakers and creatives who are behind some of the years best films. From Saturday Night, to Lee, to We Live in Time, and Australia's own Memoir of a Snail, we've got some great film discussions to keep you going over this festive break. First off the rank is a chat with two of the creatives behind Saturday Night, the comedy retelling of the first night of Saturday Night Live. In it, we follow a young Lorne ...
Dec 26, 2024•34 min•Season 15Ep. 1
Join Andrew as he gives his candid thoughts on the 2025 AACTA Award nominations. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Dec 06, 2024•29 min
With his feature documentary debut In the Trenches: The Making of Before Dawn , Benjamin Scotford has made a rare achievement within the Australian film industry: a behind the scenes documentary which follows the muddy and tough production of Before Dawn , Jordan Prince Wright's equally rare achievement, an indie war flick shot in the remote West Aussie landscape. Benjamin dives into the ditches of this WW1 epic, taking audiences behind the scenes for the highs, the lows, and the difficulties th...
Dec 04, 2024•54 min•Season 14Ep. 14
Director Imogen McCluskey continues her exploration of suburban Australia with the comedy-drama film Nugget is Dead: A Christmas Story . This delightfully relatable Aussie Xmas tale was written by Jenna Owen and Vic Zerbst, who both act in the film alongside Aussie screen legends like Gia Carides, Damien Garvey, Ed Oxenbould, Steve Rodgers, Mandy McElhinney, Kerry Armstrong, and Tiriel Mora, and more. Steph Stool is a dermatologist in training who has her feet in two worlds. The shiny sheen of S...
Nov 20, 2024•37 min•Season 14Ep. 13
Welcome to a special Adelaide Film Festival round up discussion featuring myself, Virat Nehru, and Nadine Whitney. While we have known each other for years, the 2024 Adelaide Film Festival was our first opportunity to meet up in person, watch some films, and do what film critics do best: talk about them afterwards. The following discussion sees us traipse along a path of the highs and the lows of the Adelaide Film Festival, with each critic highlighting some of their favourite films for the fest...
Nov 03, 2024•1 hr 10 min•Season 14Ep. 12
In the heart of Adelaide, a movement is changing the conversations about film and film culture. That movement is called moviejuice, a ground up driven collective of artists, filmmakers, film theorists and enthusiasts, who commune to watch, experience, and talk about film and art culture together. Created by Shea Gallagher, Daniel Tune, and Louis Campbell, moviejuice was born in the backyards of Adelaide, spotlighting the sonic landscape of the city with live music and films like Tim Carlier's en...
Oct 27, 2024•29 min•Season 14Ep. 11
Director Samuel Van Grinsven returns to our screens with his sophomore feature film, Went Up the Hill, a powerful drama about an abandoned child, Jack (Dacre Montgomery), attending the wake of a mother he never knew, and encountering her grieving widow, Jill (Vicky Krieps). As Jack and Jill navigate the fractured existence they find themselves in, Elizabeth's spirit emerges in curious and strange ways by possessing each character, resulting in a narrative that flows into the realm of being a pos...
Oct 24, 2024•22 min•Season 14Ep. 10
Kate Blackmore's feature length film debut, Make It Look Real , navigates the intricacies of utilising an intimacy coordinator on the set of a film. Kate follows intimacy coordinator Claire Warden as she embarks on the collaborative process of presenting sex on screen for Kieran Darcy-Smith's film Tightrope , which features three Australian actors who each are asked to simulate sex on screen in different ways. Throughout Make It Look Real , we see frank and open conversations between Claire, act...
Oct 24, 2024•50 min•Season 14Ep. 9
Regular readers of The Curb will know that I have a particular soft spot for the work of Sally Aitken. Through her expansive filmography that tells stories that span the globe, from David Stratton, to Valerie Taylor, to The Wiggles, and now to Every Little Thing , a film about Terry, a wildlife carer in California who runs a rehab facility for hummingbirds, Sally has managed to provide a generous, kind, and considerate perspective of the world and how we interact with it. Every Little Thing is a...
Oct 24, 2024•24 min•Season 14Ep. 8
Director Silje Evensmo Jacobsen's documentary A New Kind of Wilderness won the 2024 Sundance Grand Jury Prize for World Cinema – Documentary and will be screening at the Adelaide Film Festival on Saturday 26 October and Tuesday 29 October. This serene and moving film follows a young family in the midst of transition. Parents Maria and Nik are raising their four children on a remote farm in Norway, teaching them a self-sustainable way of life and learning how to live alongside the land they call ...
Oct 23, 2024•31 min•Season 14Ep. 7
Documentarian Ian Darling's filmography includes a myriad of films that explore the fabric of Australian society. With Paul Kelly - Stories of Me , Darling immersed viewers into the poetry of one of Australia's greatest lyricists. In The Final Quarter , the excoriating and cruel racism inflicted upon footy legend Adam Goodes is explored through the media's coverage of the event. Then, working as a producer on a film like The Department , Darling shines a light on the people who keep the child pr...
Oct 22, 2024•26 min•Season 14Ep. 6
The AFLW was established in 2016, expanding from an initial eight teams to eighteen in 2022. In the years since it launched, the league has grown to showcase the different styles of football that each corner of Australia has to offer. In Sal Balharrie and Danielle MacLean's essential documentary Like My Brother, we follow four AFLW hopefuls from the Tiwi Islands, Rina, Freda, Juliana and Jess, as they follow their dream to become league players. But, dreams aren't always meant to happen overnigh...
Oct 16, 2024•25 min•Season 14Ep. 5
Over the span of eleven minutes, the impressive short film Yeah the Boys sways and swerves through a boozy night with the lads in nondescript backyard Australia. Drinking culture, Aussie larrikinism, and the masculinity that finds fertile ground in these areas is brought to life with a pulsing score by The Avalanches. Oh, and all of this is presented with an the organic dance movements choreographed by Vanessa Marin. Yeah the Boys is written by Vanessa, with her partner Stefan Hunt taking direct...
Oct 14, 2024•31 min•Season 14Ep. 4
To call Parish Malfitano's sophomore feature, Salt Along the Tongue , a straight up horror film feels like a disservice to the experience of watching this magnificent melodrama-adjacent film. Yes, there are most certainly horrific elements - blood features heavily throughout the film, upsetting tales about the symbiotic relationship between wasps and figs are told, bodies float in the air in unsettling ways, boils and scars emerge in haunting ways on the legs of characters, and of course, the th...
Oct 13, 2024•1 hr 1 min•Season 14Ep. 3
Finnish-Australian filmmaker Saara Lamberg has crafted a filmography which features genre-defying, boundary pushing films like 2017's Innuendo , 2022's Westermarck Effect , and the docu-fiction film The Lies We Tell Ourselves , which received screenings at Perth's Revelation International Film Festival and the Sydney Underground Film Festival . Screenings of The Lies We Tell Ourselves at these festivals became an event that spilled out of the cinema and into the foyer, with Saara dramatically co...
Oct 09, 2024•46 min•Season 14Ep. 2
The Koalas is a documentary that follows in the footsteps of the McIntyre's Kangaroo: A Love-Hate Story and Jane Hammonds's Black Cockatoo Crisis, in that it essays the plight of an Australian icon - the koala - alongside the stories of the activists, ecologists, politicians, and wildlife carers who are putting themselves on the line to save the iconic creature. Directed and produced by Gregory Miller and Georgia Wallace-Crabbe, The Koalas is a powerful, if at times devastating, documentary that...
Sep 25, 2024•55 min•Season 14Ep. 1
The upcoming 18th Annual Sydney Underground Film Festival kicks off in Newtown, NSW, on Thursday 12 September with a Smell-O-Rama screening of John Waters cult classic Female Trouble , celebrating its 50th anniversary. The festival runs until Sunday 15 September with a huge array of films and features ranging from the truly bonkers Vulcanizadora to the superbly surreal Can't Stop the Music extravaganza, alongside frightfully great features like the Aussie dark comedy The Organist to the latest w...
Sep 08, 2024•43 min•Season 13Ep. 13
Law Chen's familial documentary Starring Jerry as Himself follows retired Florida man Jerry C. Hsu as he's recruited by Chinese police to become an undercover agent. The documentary follows Jerry as he retells his story about how he was recruited, what actions he needed to take to help inform the agents, and, most importantly, the lengths he goes to to hide his recruitment from his family. Starring Jerry as Himself features Jerry and his family re-enacting Jerry's story, which is frequently tens...
Aug 27, 2024•46 min•Season 13Ep. 12
One of the smash hit films of the year on the festival circuit has been Mike Cheslik's wonderfully inventive Hundreds of Beavers . Ahead of the films launch in Australia earlier this year, Nadine Whitney caught up with the creative team behind the film to discuss all of its eccentricities. Nadine wrote about the film in her review saying: Describing Hundreds of Beavers is almost reductive. It is quite simply a film that must be experienced to appreciate its genius. It is symphonic physical comed...
Aug 20, 2024•27 min•Season 13Ep. 11
With 2021s phenomenal documentary River under his belt, filmmaker and musician Joseph Nizeti is no stranger to bringing the world of nature to life on the big screen in a way that transforms how we see the environment with live alongside. With his latest film, Fungi: Web of Life , which he co-directs alongside Gisela Kaufmann, Joseph turns from the worlds rivers to the unexplored world of mycology. Fungi: Web of Life is a 3D IMAX presentation which makes its Australian premiere at the 2024 Melbo...
Aug 14, 2024•47 min•Season 13Ep. 10
When tickets went on sale for Andy Burkitt and Jack Braddy's independent Australian feature film, The Organist , at the 2024 Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF), the filmmakers managed a rare feat: they sold out their first two screenings, with a third screening quickly being scheduled. Receiving wide audience support for their world premiere is a phenomenal achievement for these emerging filmmakers. The Organist is a darkly comedic film that speaks to the current global cost of living ...
Aug 06, 2024•56 min•Season 13Ep. 9
Akmal Saleh is one of Australia's finest stand up comedians having spent decades keeping Australians entertained through his observant and enjoyable brand of comedy. When not on the stage, Akmal can be heard on screen in an array of kids animated shows like The Wild Adventures of Blinky Bill, Tracey McBean , and the superb animated series 100% Wolf. The sequel to the 2020 werewolf hit, 200% Wolf , hits cinemas on 8 August, and as I continue my championing of the film with interviews with directo...
Aug 05, 2024•19 min•Season 13Ep. 8
