The Curb

For regular readers of the Curb..., you'll no doubt be familiar with the admiration and respect that I have for Laneikka Denne and the cohort of filmmakers and storytellers they've worked with over their career. The pinnacle of that admiration came in 2024 with the short film Oi, directed by the equally great Sophie Serisier. That film sat comfortably at the top of my Best Australian Films of the year list, a statement that's been further cemented over time.

Brandon Daley's acidic comedy $Positions has been compared to the Safdie brothers Uncut Gems with the two sharing a level of anxiety-inducing symbiosis as they follow characters who embark on a voyage of self-sabotage and destruction thanks to the allure of gambling and cryptocurrency. But for my sensibility, $Positions has more of an affinity with the work of comedian Tom Green.

Alana Hunt is a multidisciplinary artist whose work explores history through a forensic approach to research. Her work mines the history of Australia, often utilising archival material to navigate the violent, colonial past. In her 2023 work, Surveilling a Crime Scene, Hunt navigates the materialisation of non-Indigenous life on Miriwoong Country in the town of Kununurra.

Vonne Patiag has been forging a path in film and TV as a writer, director, and actor on shows like Halal Gurls and The Unusual Suspects, and films like Here Out West, Too Many Ethnics, and his new short film Homo, which has its world premiere at the Revelation Perth International Film Festival on 10 July 2026. Vonne's character driven work is grounded in the exploration of identities, with Homo exploring aspects of queer identities on screen.

Most Evil Dead movies rely on a basic attribute: somehow someone either reads from the Necronomicon or a recording does. The words incite the Deadite demons to attack and infect leading to a bloody battle where friends and family slaughter each other in a gore-fest for the ages. There are exceptions such as Army of Darkness, but the basic premise holds for the franchise.

Filmmaker Jess Londono's short film e-Mum is a slightly satirical, completely engaging exploration on motherhood in the age of AI. Emma lives a solitary life with no partner or kids, a point of contention between her estranged mum and her. As an intrusion on Emma's life, her mum delivers an android daughter for her to look after. In Emma's eyes, this AI creation is a mere tool, something that exists to do the tasks that she has no interest in undertaking herself.

Mia’Kate Russell’s brilliant slasher and homage to mid-1980s teen films and Ozploitation needs an antagonist to spark the chaos and that’s precisely what Sophia Wright-Mendelsohn does as Penny’s malicious and mixed-up cousin, Kat. Where Penny is light, Kat is darkness in her goth clothing and fire engine red hair. She thinks she is in control, but she has no idea just how out of hand things will get when she brings her drug dealing boyfriend and his crew into the beach house.

Kristen Stewart’s directorial debut The Chronology of Water is a non-linear interpretation of the award-winning author Lidia Yuknavitch’s memoir.

On a winter’s day, February 8, 1977, in downtown Indianapolis Tony Kiritsis took mortgage broker Richard Hall of Meridian Mortgage hostage via a wire-rigged trigger rifle that would go off if Tony wasn’t keeping it steady. What followed was a tense standoff in which Tony kept Richard in his apartment and waited for a public apology from Meridian Mortgage’s owner M.L. Hall for deliberately gouging Tony of his investments.

We’ve just hit the halfway point of 2026, so it’s a good time to check in on the 2026 Australian Film Challenge. For those keeping track, this is a challenge thrown out to the world to encourage folks like you and me to watch more Aussie films. There were 26 prompts for participants to watch different Aussie films, ranging from watching an Australian film in cinema to digging into a short film or exploring the many great comedies out there.