Yesterday Island

(MA15+) ★★★★

Director: Sam Voutas.

Cast: Ivan Aristeguieta, Florence Noble, Francis Greenslade, Genevieve Neve, Luke Saliba.

"Last time I order a bucket of KFC on Uber Eats."

It's one thing to have a great high concept, it's another thing to turn it into a great 90-minute film.

The elevator pitch for Yesterday Island is basically "Groundhog Day: The Island", but it's more than that. This tightly contained Australian comedy also happens to be a cunning morality play thanks to its neat plot mechanic - the only way off this time-loop isle is to find someone to replace you. So who would you doom to a single eternal day on a sub-Antarctic island in exchange for your own freedom?

Yesterday Island doesn't labour its ethical quandary but makes it work. There are a few leaps of faith for the audience, but by and large it's successful in making you laugh and think.

Amos (Aristeguieta) is the poor sucker lured onto the island and forced to figure out its riddle, then find someone to take his place on the ever-repeating isle. But how do you con someone you don't like to visit you on an island south of Tasmania? And how do you just leave them there?

Yesterday Island's very dry, straight-faced sense of humour helps sell its fantastical plot, while also making the most out of it. Running gags are the order of the day, and they make the film's deliberate repetition work in its favour.

The entire movie is compact - one set, few locations, small cast, tight story-telling - which adds to the claustrophobic nature of it all. The feeling of being trapped shines through, bringing a neat sense of tension to this absurd comedy.

Its solid cast of little-known actors (Mad As Hell's Francis Greenslade is potentially the biggest name here) does a great job, particularly Aristeguieta, Noble, and Neve. Aristeguieta has the difficult task of carrying the toughest part of the film and manages it pretty well, Noble bounces nicely off Aristeguieta when the story turns into a two-hander, while Neve's role as a sort-of-villain adds spice to the final act.

There are a few lines that clunk here and there, the ending is wild, and the film's internal logic strains at times, which may leave you scratching your head after the credits have rolled. But this indie comedy-sci-fi poses fascinating questions, has a few laughs along the way, and shows that you don't need big bucks to tell stories with big ideas.

The End Of Oak Street

This is a version of a review airing on ABC Victoria's Statewide Mornings program on August 20, 2026.

(M) ★★★

Director: David Robert Mitchell.

Cast: Anne Hathaway, Ewan McGregor, Maisy Stella, Christian Convery.

No pants, just sacks.

I've often wondered why there aren't more movies about dinosaurs outside of the Jurassic Park series. Dinosaurs are cool, yet they don't seem to turn up in a lot of films. Or not enough for my preference.

Part of the problem no doubt is how to wedge them into a plot in a new way - we've done de-extinction (the Jurassic Park series), dino planets (65), and lost worlds/islands/jungles (going all the way back to The Lost World in 1925).

So full points to The End Of Oak Street, which takes a novel approach to injecting dinosaurs into a film - by transplanting an entire neighbourhood from 1982 into the Mesozoic Era via a loosely explained phenomena.

This temporal displacement puts regular 1982 dysfunctional family the Platts on the menu for a huge number of dinosaurs, as their once-quiet suburban home becomes an apocalyptic nightmare.

If you watched this trailer and expected this to be some kind of slightly dark but slightly funny family adventure, you'd be dead wrong about the second bit. The End Of Oak Street is a daylight horror with next-to-no sense of humour. It's more of a survival film than anything else - once the "event" happens and the dinos appear, this is a balls-to-wall nailbiter.

It's a shame because a sense of humour or at least a sense of self-awareness might have elevated this to something truly special. Instead this is a serviceable actioner with a surprising brutality to it, yet is oddly po-faced in the face of its plot's absurdity.

McGregor and Hathaway are totally comfortable playing this straight, especially the latter, who channels the great scream queens with a touch of Sigourney Weaver's Ripley - she effortlessly switches from terrified to gun-toting and back again in the face of the insanity. In between, they're a believable couple going through a very rough patch in their marriage, thrown into a prehistoric nightmare.

With most of the action taking place in sunlit suburban streets, so there's no hiding the CG in the dark or the rain, but there's no fear because the effects look great. It's also in the film's favour that we see things we've never seen before. An allosaurus and a titanoboa star in two of the most nail-biting scenes, which will live long in the memory.

Maybe the rest will prove memorable as time goes on (even its bold-if-questionable ending). But for now this surprisingly grim dino-thriller is a good time-filler, without being as fun as you'd think.

Spider-Man: Brand New Day

This is a version of a review airing on ABC Victoria's Statewide Mornings program on August 6, 2026.

(M) ★★★★

Director: Destin Daniel Cretton.

Cast: Tom Holland, Zendaya, Sadie Sink, Jacob Batalon, Jon Bernthal, Florence Pugh, Tramell Tillman, Mark Ruffalo, Marisa Tomei, Liza Colón-Zayas, Michael Mando.

"Can those who want to stab Spider-Man please form an orderly queue?"

There must be written on a wall at Sony somewhere the maxim "When in doubt, make a Spider-Man movie". It's more than likely that same maxim is now pinned to the walls of Marvel Cinematic Universe HQ.

For Sony, Spider-Man has been its golden goose. Not even its rotten-egg Spidey spin-offs (Kraven, Morbius, Madame Web) have been able to taint the webspinner's appeal, and the studio has continually been able to wallcrawl its way back to Queens, make another Spidey movie, make a shit-ton of money, and feel good about its lone Marvel property all over again.

But over at the MCU, an unexpected malaise has set in. Despite great reviews for Fantastic Four: First Steps and Thunderbolts*, the only film out of the last five MCU outings to make mega-bucks (or break-even) was Deadpool & Wolverine. And so, when in doubt....

Thus we have the fourth stand-alone Sony/MCU Spider-Man outing. Given how good of a send-off No Way Home was, one could cynically presume Brand New Day has been driven more by Sony and the MCU's desire to make serious bank than scratching a creative itch.

But that's too cynical, even for me. Because, wouldn't you know it, Brand New Day is actually really, really good. Some fans and critics are calling it the best Spidey film to date, and while it doesn't top No Way Home for me, it's another great example of a movie that understands its hero and its audience, and delivers in spades.

Picking up some years after a spell wipes Spider-man's true identity from the collective consciousness, Peter Parker (Holland) finds himself alone, and throwing himself into being Spidey more than as being himself. But when his own powers start to evolve, he begins to question who he even is anymore, and whether he really can do everything all by himself. 

The first solo Spidey outing in five years features a more adult Peter Parker than we've seen before, and that plays into the movie's themes of evolution and growth. There are some other spoilerific ideas that this feeds into as well, but the main aim of the film seems to be "what does Spidey do when he was no one around him?".

The answer is a fascinating snapshot of the very problem facing a lot of lonely young men - they get angry, frustrated, and violent, and lash out at the world. While for Spidey, much of this is a manifestation of his powers mutating, it's hard to ignore the underlying "angry young man" subtext permeating the film. Throw in that Punisher is the ghost of Spidey Yet To Come, and that the villain is on a similar course of lashing out, and you get yet another Spidey sequel with good thematic depth to it.

Another new aspect to Spidey is that he's far more "street-level" in Brand New Day than he's been for a while. No more multiverse shenanigans or SHIELD missions - he gets around in his home-made (though admittedly hi-tech) suit, works with cops, and swings around the streets of New York. It's a satisfying throwback to the characters origins, as are the cameos of Punisher, Hulk, and Black Widow, which help to make the film feel part of the MCU, without labouring the point.

Holland is an exceptional actor and we've seen that in and out of the MCU. Brand New Day is no exception. With minimal Aunt May, MJ or Ned to bounce off, Spidey is on his own a lot, or flitting from one encounter to the next, meaning that Holland has to do more heavy lifting here than in any previous Spidey-film. And he's great, carrying the film with ease, as the cameos wander in and out of the movie.

There's a more down-to-Earth approach in Brand New Day than we've seen in a Spidey-film for a while, even compared to Homecoming. And it's great. It really feels like the Spider-Man comics of old, where he would swing through the skyscraper canyons of New York, catch a villain, chat with a cop, bump into the Punisher or Black Widow and swing off on his merry way to his next adventure. There are even plenty of Easter eggs to old-school comic book covers to really drive that point home.

Even with this street-level approach, there are some killer action sequences. A battle with Hulk, another with the Hand, and street-chase involving a tank and the Punisher are among the highlights. It's fun, it's action-packed, and it rarely feels long despite its two-and-a-half-hour run time.

Tom Holland can't be Spider-Man forever, but so long as he keeps starring in films this good, I hope he is.