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Noora Niasari's Shayda is a measured, quietly powerful debut that marks her as one of the most promising new filmmakers on the Australian scene. Based on her own childhood experiences, the film tells the story of an Iranian mother and daughter seeking safety and stability in a women's shelter in 1990s Australia. It's a deeply personal story, but one that speaks to wider issues of displacement, domestic violence, and female resilience.

At the centre of the film is Zar Amir Ebrahimi, who gives a performance of remarkable control and emotional precision. As Shayda, she radiates both vulnerability and strength. You can feel the weight of her decisions without the film ever having to overstate them. It's the kind of performance that's all the more effective for what it holds back.

Niasari directs with restraint, prioritising character over exposition and intimacy over spectacle. There's a clear confidence in how she paces the story: scenes breathe, silence is used intentionally, and emotional tension builds slowly but purposefully. She trusts the audience to stay with her-and it pays off.

The cinematography by Sherwin Akbarzadeh complements this tone perfectly. The boxed-in aspect ratio draws us closer to Shayda's inner world, while close-ups linger just long enough to make us sit with her emotions. It's the kind of subtle visual storytelling that doesn't try to impress but ends up doing just that.

One of the film's most gut-punching scenes comes in the form of a phone call-Shayda's own mother, from afar, urging her to give her abusive husband another chance. It's handled without melodrama, but the implication is brutal. It speaks to a cycle that many women are caught in, culturally and generationally. That's where the film's strength lies: in capturing specific moments that feel tragically familiar and widely resonant.

If anything, the film's final act drags slightly, but it's a minor issue in what is otherwise a tightly constructed, emotionally rich experience.

Shayda doesn't aim for fireworks. It's not trying to be a crowd-pleaser. It's an honest, grounded film that speaks to the real lives of women trying to escape violence-and rebuild from the rubble. It deserves to be seen and talked about, not just as a work of cinema, but as a window into lives often overlooked.

Rippy should have been Australia's answer to Cocaine Bear-a wild, blood-soaked, tongue-in-cheek marsupial massacre. Instead, it hops straight into the realm of the forgettable, weighed down by cringe-inducing earnestness, limp storytelling, and a complete lack of self-awareness.

Ryan Coonan's kangaroo slasher arrives with a killer concept: a jacked-up joey goes rogue in the Outback. Sounds like campy gold, right? Wrong. Instead of leaning into the absurdity, Rippy insists on dragging viewers through a desert of maudlin backstory, family trauma, and dead-serious exposition. You'll spend 85% of the runtime wondering if someone accidentally swapped the script with an abandoned Outback soap opera.

Tess Haubrich plays Maddie, a haunted sheriff with daddy issues so cliché they should've come with a warning label. The film opens with her narrating her dead father's legacy like a eulogy from a bad Hallmark movie. It doesn't get better. The emotional weight is forced, unearned, and entirely unnecessary in a film about a murderous kangaroo.

Michael Biehn, bless him, is the only one who understands the assignment. Playing Schmitty, a deranged, bathrobe-wearing bush prophet, he twitches, rants, and throws himself into the ridiculousness with abandon. Unfortunately, the script abandons him, leaving him stranded in a movie that's too embarrassed to be what it should've been: fun.

The kills? Meh. The gore? Minimal. The jokes? Non-existent. Not even a single half-decent pun-no "roo the day," no "marsupial mayhem," not even a cheeky nod to Skippy. When your monster is a murderous kangaroo, you owe the audience at least some wink-wink carnage. But Rippy squanders every opportunity to lean into Ozploitation chaos.

By the time the film finally delivers a campy one-liner in the closing minutes, it's too little, too late. You don't make a killer kangaroo movie and spend 90 minutes pretending you're making Mystic River.

My Eyes is the kind of film that thinks it's saying something profound - but ends up delivering little more than a polished PSA with a $3.5 million price tag.

Written, produced by, and starring Tsu Chambers, the story follows Alana, an optometrist whose daughter is diagnosed with a hereditary eye condition. To save her daughter's vision, Alana must reconnect with a former lover - a vision-impaired judo athlete. It's the kind of setup that might work in a short film or a grant proposal, but stretched into a feature, it feels contrived, flat, and emotionally thin.

Chambers throws herself into the role, but the opening with back-to-back crying scenes are more draining than moving. Adam Garcia gives a professional turn, but there's zero chemistry between him and Chambers. Kieu Chinh - a legendary actor - is given almost nothing to work with and spends most of the film looking bewildered and under-directed.

The biggest problem? The writing. It's juvenile, clunky, and painfully literal. The characters are paper-thin - all overly earnest, squeaky-clean do-gooders with no real flaws, no edge, no grit. Everyone seems to exist to deliver a message, not to live in a world with real stakes.

The central plot - that the only way to help the daughter is to reconnect with a vision-impaired ex - is so on-the-nose it borders on parody. It feels engineered for funding checkboxes rather than storytelling integrity.

And here's the part that stings the most: this film was made on a $3.5 million budget. I've seen better storytelling - tighter, riskier, more emotionally resonant - from indie filmmakers working with a fraction of that. For all its resources, My Eyes never justifies its price tag, either narratively or technically.

The only real praise I can give is that Chambers got a feature made. That's no small feat. But filmmaking isn't just about getting it done - it's about crafting something that actually lands.