Kelly Schilling's feature debut film With or Without You is the powerful and impactful story of a mother, Sharon (Marta Dusseldorp) and a daughter, Chloe (Melina Vidler), who are forced to navigate the complicated reality of alcohol addiction, an affliction that Sharon uses to manage her anxiety alongside Valium and men. For Chloe, the man in her life, an ex-boyfriend, turns violent and aggressive, inflicting abuse on her by burning down her caravan, destroying her life savings and home in the p...
May 08, 2025•32 min•Season 17Ep. 12
One of the more exciting news points in recent weeks has been the announcement of the new First Nations initiative Damulgurra Stories. Founded by Larrakia man Cian Mungatj McCue, of Moogie Down Productions, and award-winning casting director and producer Sarah Price of Castaway NT, Damulgurra Stories aims to transform the way productions work with First Nations cast, crew and creatives both on and off screen— providing resources, protocols and training rooted in cultural integrity, collaboration...
May 05, 2025•22 min•Season 17Ep. 11
Lars and the Real Girl is Craig Gillespie's 2007 indie comedy-drama about a man who has an unconventional relationship with a sex doll. That man is a young Ryan Gosling, who is supported by Emily Mortimer, Paul Schneider, Patricia Clarkson, and Bianca the Doll. Umbrella Entertainment have released an impressive collectors edition of the film which features custom artwork, a poster, artcards, essays, an audio commentary by Thomas Caldwell, and more. Nadine Whitney reviews the film, the disc, and ...
Apr 30, 2025•19 min•Season 17Ep. 10
Before commencing her career as a filmmaker, Jane Larkin was an Australian representative sprinter, pushing her body to the limits on the track. In the moments of preparation, cooldowns, and every minute in between, Jane was building friendships, learning from fellow athletes, and seeing a world of sports that we rarely get to see in cinema. After shifting over to acting in 2018, Jane embraced roles in films like Ron Howard's Thirteen Lives and the Netflix series Boy Swallows Universe , before c...
Apr 28, 2025•40 min•Season 17Ep. 9
Andres Veiel's latest documentary, Riefenstahl , delves into the dark and deep archive of the private estate of Leni Riefenstahl, exposing the deep ties the filmmaker had with the Nazi regime. Andres uses footage and correspondence from Riefenstahl's own personal records, including hidden interviews and documents that present a different side of a director who has been both acclaimed and criticised for her role in the rising Nazi regime. Riefenstahl is a powerful and impactful film that shows ju...
Apr 27, 2025•15 min•Season 17Ep. 8
Saskia Archer is an actor on the rise. From the streets of Sydney, to the turf of Tasmania where she embarked on a path to become a paramedic, to a shift to WA where she built her acting skills at the WA Academy of Performing Arts, and now, to the bustling city of New York, Saskia is seeing the world and forging a path in acting doing so. Genre-fans might know Saskia from the 2022 flick The Reef: Stalked , where she played Annie, while others might know her as her turn as Hanabeth in Bali 2022 ....
Apr 23, 2025•41 min•Season 17Ep. 7
Eli Craig smashed onto the slasher scene with his genre-defying comedy event Tucker & Dale VS Evil , and he's back with another slasher that upends expectations: Clown in a Cornfield . Clown in a Cornfield is based on the first entry in Adam Cesare's Frendo series which chucks a group of teens into the mayhem of a Midwestern American town where they find themselves picked off by a growing group of killer clowns. Eli Craig then takes that terror from the page and supplants it brilliantly with...
Apr 22, 2025•16 min•Season 17Ep. 6
Every so often, you sit down to watch a film, and find that it unexpectedly fills a hole you didn't know you had in your life. You might not know you needed a charming, dose of positivity in that moment, but as the seconds tick over, you find yourself being swept along in a wave of joy that your day shifts and things that would usually bother you suddenly bounce off you, even if it's just for a day. That's what I experienced when I watched Jesse Leaman's delightful short film, Mother of Chooks ,...
Apr 20, 2025•36 min•Season 17Ep. 5
And we're back with another review discussion with myself, Andrew, and my colleague Nadine Whitney. In this episode, we discuss the work that we both did on the Umbrella releases of Eyes Without a Face and Hounds of Love , while also discussing the importance of the supplementary materials that come with physical media releases, alongside the work that goes into writing or creating essays for physical media releases. We also discuss other current releases from Umbrella, including Metal Skin , an...
Apr 18, 2025•1 hr 1 min•Season 17Ep. 4
ion to our humanity. At twelve years of age, Darwin won the award for Best Film by a Child Producer, Best Cinematography, and Best Editing at the KidzFlicks awards for his short film Red Panda Man . He had previously made a claymation short film called My Eco Friendly House . Darwin then also was a Tropfest Jr finalist for his short Milk . Again, he was only twelve years old at the time. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CIZDIpQoomY Flash forward a decade and Darwin's creative streak continues wit...
Apr 18, 2025•35 min•Season 17Ep. 3
In December 2013, Australian journalist Peter Greste, alongside fellow Al Jazeera colleagues Mohamed Fadel Fahmy and Baher Mohamed, were arrested in Cairo, Egypt under charges of holding illegal meetings with the Muslim Brotherhood, an organisation declared as a terrorist group by the Egyptian Interior Ministry. Kriv Stenders is a prolific Australian filmmaker, with his work spanning features, documentaries, and TV series. His latest film, The Correspondent, translates this period of Greste's li...
Apr 16, 2025•29 min•Season 17Ep. 2
Aussie band Kingswood are rock royalty, having played shows with AC/DC and The Hives, tearing down the rooves of Aussie venues in equal measure with their unique brand of raucous rock. In 2024, the band undertook a record-setting road trip across Australia with the Hometowns Tour, the longest ever music tour, encompassing 112 shows over six months, with everywhere from the outer regions of Western Australia to the sticky floors of Sydney getting a taste of their guitar licks and long hair. Knowi...
Apr 03, 2025•27 min•Season 17Ep. 1
In 2024, director Natalie Bailey and writer Lou Sanz unleashed Audrey onto audiences in Australia and America. Here's a film that I called a caustic comedy that rains like refreshing acid rain. Here's the story of a mum, Ronnie (played by Jackie van Beek), who opts to literally take over the life of her daughter Audrey (Josephine Blazier) when she ends up in a coma after an accident. This immaculately layered comedy film arrived in a time where Australian audiences are calling for more Aussie co...
Mar 19, 2025•1 hr 8 min•Season 16Ep. 22
At just twenty years old, transgender wunderkind Alice Maio Mackay has crafted a filmography that would make most seasoned professionals envious. Alice's filmography is built within a defiantly independent space that centres queer stories on screen. From 2021's short film The Serpent's Nest , to the run of genre defying horror and sci-fi feature films that includes 2021's So Vam , 2022's Bad Girl Boogey , 2023's T-Blockers and Satranic Panic , and 2024's Carnage for Christmas , Alice has showed ...
Mar 19, 2025•51 min•Season 16Ep. 21
For decades, David Stratton and Margaret Pomeranz were Australian film reviewing royalty, having built up a loyal following with their weekly show on SBS, The Movie Show . The 90s and early 00s was the peak of David & Margaret’s influence over Australian audiences. What they recommended, people would head out and go and see. Both David and Margaret are staunch supporters of cinema, becoming advocates for all kinds of cinema and decrying the impacts of censorship. While both have played roles...
Mar 13, 2025•38 min•Season 16Ep. 20
This podcast is also recorded in Naarm, Victoria, with fellow critic Nadine Whitney reviewing two of the films screening at the 2025 Alliance Française French Film Festival. In the following reviews, Nadine discusses Anne Fontaine's Bolero and Éric Besnard's Miss Violet . For all the festival details and to purchase tickets, visit AFFrenchFilmFestival.org . If you want to find out more about the work we do on The Curb, then head over to TheCurb.com.au. We are a completely independent and ad free...
Mar 12, 2025•16 min•Season 16Ep. 19
Carmen & Bolude marks something of a first for Australian films. Here is a comedy about two close friends, Carmen (Michela Carattini) and Bolude (Bolude Watson), who both call Australia home. Carmen proudly embraces her Latin heritage, while Bolude navigates the line between Western values and her Nigerian roots. Together, they take on the world and the rampant Americanised identity politics that have caused much society to turn against itself. We meet Carmen on the subways of New York where...
Mar 09, 2025•39 min•Season 16Ep. 18
My Melbourne is a powerful and uplifting new collaborative feature made with an array of established Indian directors and emerging Australian filmmakers, alongside a diverse group of writers behind the scenes, who each bring one of four stories of Naarm-Melbourne to life on screen. My Melbourne opens with the narrative called Nadini, it's directed by Onir with co-direction from William Duan. This story followed Indraneel, played brilliantly by Arka Das, and his partner Chris (Jackson Gallagher),...
Mar 06, 2025•33 min•Season 16Ep. 17
Matt Mirams is a indie creative who has over two decades of experience as a musician, actor, director, theatresports enthusiast, and independent filmmaker. His latest film, Residence , is a bloody zombie comedy that sees Australia inflicted by a brain eating parasite that turns its hosts into mindless zombies that wander the countryside looking for their next victim. It's also a biting satire about the consumerist world we live in, asking whether it's the mind-sapping parasites that have turned ...
Mar 02, 2025•44 min•Season 16Ep. 16
With her debut feature documentary film Queens of Concrete , Eliza Cox takes audiences on a seven year journey with three skateboarders: Ava Godfrey, Charlotte Heath, and Hayley Wilson. They each embrace a different style of skateboarding, with street and park being the two styles that are featured at the Tokyo and Paris Olympics. It's that 2020 Olympics that the girls have their sights set on, with Eliza following their journey from the skateparks of Melbourne to the sponsored events in London ...
Feb 26, 2025•53 min•Season 16Ep. 15
Jesse Vogelaar is a writer and director whose works spans across Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand, flitting between the stage where he masters the art of improvisation, to advertisements, where he transforms the products of Samsung or Specsavers into savvy slices of commercial entertainment, to his growing body of short films, which includes You Lose , a short that Junkee called Australia’s Greatest Work Of Art to Room for One More , a tale of a bloke trapped under his collapsed house, calling...
Feb 23, 2025•44 min•Season 16Ep. 14
Listeners should note that the following interview contains discussions about trauma as it relates to #MeToo. The work of director Ruth Caudeli regularly appears at the Queer Screen Mardi Gras Film Festival , with her previous films Eva and Candela and Leading Ladies both screening at the festival. Her latest film, Same, Again , makes its world premiere at the festival on 25 February 2025. This improvised drama follows a Colombian theatre troupe who join together to bring the play La Casa de Ber...
Feb 23, 2025•20 min•Season 16Ep. 13
I'm calling it right now. Lesbian Space Princess is the film of the year. I saw it in a sold out auditorium at the beautiful art deco Piccadilly cinema in Adelaide with an Adelaide Film Festival audience that lapped up every laugh, every tear, and every splash of neon bright queer celebration on screen. Lesbian Space Princess is the animated feature debut of filmmakers Leela Varghese and Emma Hough Hobbs, a collaborative force to be reckoned with, set to change the Australian film industry one b...
Feb 20, 2025•36 min•Season 16Ep. 12
Cinematographer James Hoare is a recent graduate from Curtin University, where he worked alongside director Christopher Paik-Swan and writer Max Joyce to bring to life their final year short film Don't Talk About the Monster on the Roof , a micro-budget horror short flick inspired by the look of Ozploitation films. It's an impressively taut thriller that is drenched in sweaty tension as a group of mates head off on a road trip up to the Pinnacles, only to find that while on the trip, they each s...
Feb 17, 2025•45 min•Season 16Ep. 11
The joyous and jubilant documentary Sally! - the exclamation mark is deliberate - is a delightful and educational journey through the life and history of Sally Miller Gearhart: a professor of Speech, Theatre, and Women Studies; a fantasy writer; and most known as a lesbian feminist activist who helped transform the world for women and queer people alike. If, like me, you haven't truly heard the name Sally Gearhart before, then you might know of her activist work alongside Harvey Milk, notably fr...
Feb 14, 2025•39 min•Season 16Ep. 10
We Forgot to Break Up tells the story of fictional Canadian band The New Normals; an indie rock group that transcends labels and definition, and changes the scene of indie rock music. The New Normals is led by Evan (excellently portrayed by Lane Webber), a trans man singer-songwriter who has the big stage in mind all the while trying to navigate his relationship with his girlfriend Isis (June Laporte). Evan finds his relationships tested as the arrival of the new guitarist Lugh (Daniel Gravelle)...
Feb 14, 2025•48 min•Season 16Ep. 9
Gianluca Matarrese's gentle documentary Gen_ opens with overwhelming images of planets and stars. Or are they cells and aspects of human biology? As we lean in to the screen, curious about what we're seeing, the title, Gen, that's gen with an underscore, flits on screen, with a rotation appendage of possible word creations: genesis, genitals, genetics, generation, genealogy, gender, genes. Overlaying this is a chaos of noise and radio chatter from around the globe. European figures discuss trans...
Jan 30, 2025•28 min•Season 16Ep. 8
If there's a minor blessing that has emerged from the pandemic, it's in the way that film festivals have shifted and persisted with online options. As one of the leading film festivals in the world, the Sundance Film Festival continues to bring selections of their festival to global audiences via their online and in person screening events. The 2025 festival is underway, with online screenings taking place from January 30 - February 3. I mention this as one of the values of being able to attend ...
Jan 26, 2025•27 min•Season 16Ep. 7
Jason Raftopoulous is a filmmaker who I owe my continued writing career to. In 2018, Jason released West of Sunshine , a drama about an average bloke, Jim, played by the excellent Damian Hill, scrounging through the back streets of Melbourne for money to pay back a loan shark. With a synopsis like that, West of Sunshine suggests that it'll another one of those crime-drama films with a bit of retribution and violence along the way. Instead, under the guidance and careful hand of Jason, there's a ...
Jan 22, 2025•1 hr 42 min•Season 16Ep. 6
Let's take a moment to look ahead in 2025 to a few of the Australian films that will get people talking. Two particular films had their world premiere at the Adelaide Film Festival in 2024, where their lead actor and performer, Albert Mwangi, was in attendance. Kate Blackmore's Make it Look Real is a hybrid-documentary experience that explores the role of intimacy coordination on film sets. Albert features in the documentary as himself, and in the film-within-a-film as a character in Kieran Darc...
Jan 19, 2025•59 min•Season 16Ep. 5
