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The BAFTA-qualified filmmaker on character construction, practical production challenges, and making I Am The Prize on a two-day schedule Sai Karan Talwar’s third short film stars Russell Tovey as Anthony—a charismatic, polarising self-help figure whose appeal is as unsettling as his worldview. Rather than simply condemning him, Talwar examines what sits underneath: the self-mythologising, the insecurity, the performative power.

Growing up is hard enough. Growing up gay in a deeply religious rural community is something else entirely. Life isn’t working out for the Australian teen Naim (Joe Bird) in debut director Adrian Chiarella’s Leviticus (2026). Naim just lost his father, and his mother has moved him to a rural town in Victoria. In addition to being a lonely place for the youth, the community is incredibly religious, making it difficult for Naim to fit in.

There’s a one-sided and disturbing relationship within Obsession, an indie horror from director Curry Barker. What is the difference between love and romance? It’s a distinction that the protagonist Bear, played by Michael Johnston, doesn’t question much. He spends too much time lingering on how to ask out his crush Nikki, played by Inde Navarrette. Too much time is spent practicing his proposal or stalking her social media.

Once more, Pixar digs back into the toy box with Toy Story 5. For a franchise three decades old, it’s astonishing that these toys still have some play left in them. The times are changing for the toys of Bonnie’s room. Playtime seems to be going well under the leadership of Jessie. There might even be a marriage proposal in her future as Buzz Lightyear prepares to pop the question to Jessie. But the many toys once more find their existence threatened. This time, it’s the terror of technology.

Stanley Kubrick died of a heart attack six days after screening Eyes Wide Shut for Tom Cruise, Nicole Kidman, and Warner Bros. executives. That biographical fact hovers over the film and is difficult to entirely separate from the experience of watching it. This film is a product of pure obsession. It resists easy viewing and does not care about being accessible. It is, by any measure, a strange film.

There is a moment early in The Quiet Duel (1949) where Toshiro Mifune, scalpel in hand, realises what has happened. A small cut. A contaminated instrument. A syphilitic patient bleeding on the operating table during the chaos of wartime surgery. The camera doesn’t linger. Kurosawa doesn’t underline it with music or a dramatic close-up. He lets the moment pass. The Quiet Duel explores how a man responds to his circumstances, rather than the events themselves.

From Rebecca (1940) to North By Northwest (1959), these are the best Alfred Hitchcock movies, ranked. He was nicknamed the “Master of Suspense.” And for good reason. One of the most influential filmmakers of all time, and with a prolific directorial career spanning 50+ years (from a dusty Old Hollywood 1925 to a disco ball New Hollywood 1976), Alfred Hitchcock was a veritable force.

It’s 1989. There’s no Zoom, no ChatGPT, no last-minute lifeline available at the touch of a screen. When Jason (Espyn Doughty) leaves a major homework assignment until the night before it is due, his single mother (Charity Schubert) is forced into an overnight scramble to help him through it. ‘Last Minute’ won the Grand Prize at the Louisiana Film Prize before earning its Tribeca Festival premiere on June 6, 2026 and it justifies both. At eight minutes, it’s more than a nostalgic comedy.

For Wild Rose (2018), Jessie Buckley insisted on performing the film’s songs live on set, capturing emotion in real time rather than polishing it in post-production. For Spielberg’s remake of West Side Story (2021), Mike Faist drew on his theatre background, treating movement and choreography as extensions of character psychology rather than performance spectacle. Neither performance was designed to be noticed as a performance.

Akira Kurosawa’s The Idiot (1951) is a ruthless philosophical experiment disguised as a psychological drama. Transposing Dostoevsky’s novel from 19th-century St. Petersburg to post-war Hokkaido, Kurosawa uses his camera to magnify not just a character but a concept: absolute empathy. The film argues an unsettling thesis: that the world cannot, by its very nature, harbour sanctity. Purity of soul, it insists, survives only in the form of madness.