A ghostly presence haunts a family's new home in Steven Soderbergh's Presence - but this is in no way a typical haunted house movie. Soderbergh puts the audience directly in the spirit's point of view, drifting in and out of rooms and observing the new family's unfolding conflicts.

It's been over a decade since Cameron Diaz starred in a major motion picture. Once a big screen staple from the late 90s through the mid-2010s, Diaz retired from acting to focus on her family and her new wine label venture, officially launched in 2020. Now she's back in Netflix's new action comedy, Back in Action.

As a child of the 90s, I have a certain soft spot for 90s-style action thrillers. These things were a dime-a-dozen back then, and while many haven't aged well, something about them often feels more tangible than the flat-looking high-gloss sludge we so often get today. They were heightened, sometimes silly, and less concerned with what passes for realism in a way that makes them feel more authentic. Mel Gibson's latest film, Flight Risk, feels like a throwback to a certain kind of 90s thriller - unfortunately, it's not the good kind.

I'm always a bit wary of the idea that the most virulent homophobes are actually self-loathing closet cases - it's always felt like a justification for hurled at bigots, as if homophobia is a weapon that's acceptable to use as long as it's someone you don't like. Of course, there's precedent for this - Kirby Dick's Outrage outed closeted anti-gay politicians nearly 20 years ago. The concept of hiding one's true self behind a sheen of hatred is nothing new, but it remains a tricky and often uncomfortable subject.

While much of the media's coverage of Israel's war on Palestine has focused on Israel's perspective, framing the apartheid state as a perpetual victim and justifying or outright ignoring its crimes against humanity, it has fallen to Palestinians to tell their own stories.

The Universal Monster series was essentially the first cinematic Universe. Beginning with Dracula in 1931, the overlapping series ran until 1948 with the Abbott and Costello parody, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. Of course, Creature from the Black Lagoon would come along in 1954, but it never shared the same space as the core five - Frankenstein's Monster, Dracula, the Mummy, the Invisible Man, and the Wolf Man.

For many years, Jean Eustache's The Mother and the Whore was seen as a kind of white whale, a sort of right-of-passage for cinephiles both for its lack of availability and its gargantuan length. Nearly four hours long and long difficult to see, Eustache's seminal work of youthful malaise has been fully restored and is now widely available for the first time on 4K UHD from the Criterion Collection.

Following their acclaimed Laurel & Hardy: Year One set, specialty label Flicker Alley has released a second look at the early days of their iconic partnership, compiling the ten silent shorts the pair made together in 1928 before transitioning to sound in 1929. While their sound films are arguably more well-known, the duo cut their teeth on silent comedy and were some of the few silent comedians to successfully transition from silents to the sound era.

If we don't tell our own stories - who will? For a film like Satranic Panic, an indie Australian horror film directed by a 19-year-old trans woman, its very existence feels like an act of rebellion. It's certainly messy, its edges ragged and unrefined, but that DIY aesthetic is part of what makes it feel so authentic. What director Alice Maio Mackay (who has now made five feature films before the age of 20) is doing here is reclaiming trans stories from cis framework.

One thing I love about Walter Salles as a filmmaker is his ability to find an eternity in a single moment. That may sound like a backhanded compliment for a filmmaker, but think about those moments in life when you suddenly become keenly aware of your surroundings, of the people around you and your connection to them, those snippets you choose to savor when you know something is coming to an end, when your life seems to stretch out into infinity and everything for a few fleeting seconds appears to be right with the world.

There is something almost unspeakably beguiling about Ryūsuke Hamaguchi's Evil Does Not Exist. The filmmaker behind Drive My Car (a 3-hour meditation on loneliness and Chekov that was so stunning even the Academy couldn't help but nominate it for Best Picture) and Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy is no stranger to thoughtful and introspective dramas.

2024 was a year of contradictions; of an ascendant right-wing that swept Donald Trump to victory in the American presidential election, coupled with a banner year for queer and trans filmmaking. There are not one, but two trans filmmakers in my top 10 list. There’s even a transgender actress making serious Oscar season waves (although in talking about the best films of the year, the less said about Emila Perez the better.).