ALLIANCE OF WOMEN FILM JOURNALISTS

Female Film Critics 24/375

Author: Alexandra Heller-Nicholas

Books Commentaries 

Alexandra Heller-Nicholas’ 1000 WOMEN IN HORROR: 1895-2018 (Exclusive Excerpt)

Alexandra Heller-Nicholas , ,

For myself and so many of my women friends – those when I was a kid, and those today – horror spoke to us on what was often a primal level about living in a world where physical threat is a constantly present reality, where danger quite possibly is hiding just around the corner. In this context, pretending the world is all sunshine and rainbows just doesn’t cut it. Any woman who has walked home alone in the dark at night and even once looked behind her or quickened her step has first-hand experience of the fears and anxieties that horror often speaks to, whether they personally enjoy horror movies or not.

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Festivals Reviews 

THE DEGENERATE: THE LIFE AND FILMS OF ANDY MILLIGAN (Tribeca 2025) – Review by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas

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Andy Milligan might not be a familiar name to all but the most hardened and dedicated of exploitation film fans, but with the Tribeca world premiere of Josh Johnson and Grayson Tyler Johnson’s The Degenerate: The Life and Films of Andy Milligan, all that will soon hopefully change.

While Milligan’s reputation is built on a series of extremely low-budget horror and sexploitation movies made from the mid 1960s through to the late 1980s, The Degenerate provides the biographical backdrop to this work in this lovingly crafted yet fairly unflinching portrait of a challenging yet undeniably important – and far too overlooked – pioneer.

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Festivals Reviews 

RE-CREATION (Tribeca 2025) – Review by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas

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While too predictable to be a satisfactory whodunnit as such, this appears to be one of the least things director Jim Sheridan is interested in. While Sheridan’s immersion in the unsolved murder case is to be commended and the creative approach to the material is refreshing, this speculative twist on the old true crime formula raises more ethical questions than it answers. Is Sheridan trying to play God in a fairly undisguised way in light of the fact that the ‘real’ scales of justice failed Sophie Toscan du Plantier so dramatically? Can a movie right the wrongs that courts in two countries failed to do?

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Festivals Reviews 

BIRTHRIGHT (Tribeca 2025) – Review by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas

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While ostensibly a comedy, Australian writer-director Zoe Pepper’s debut feature Birthright is as pitch black as it comes. The film follows Cory and his heavily pregnant wife Jasmine, a millennial couple whose life has been upended by an unstable rental and employment market. With a baby due any day, out of pure desperation Cory swallows his pride and returns home unannounced to his wealthy but mean-spirited boomer parents, Richard and Lyn. Passive-aggression turns to aggressive-aggression in mere days, as Cory and Jasmine are mortified by his parents’ greed and cruelty.

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Festivals Reviews 

MAN FINDS TAPE (Tribeca 2025) – Review by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas

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Just over 25 years since The Blair Witch Project rendered found footage horror the microbudget subgenre du jour, it is another co-directed banger, Paul Gandersman and Peter Hall’s Man Finds Tape, that reminds us just how effective this formula can be in the right hands. The titular ‘tape’ that the ‘man’ has found brings with it key questions which are at the heart of the movie: Why did the footage go missing? What secrets about the past does it hold, and how will that impact the present? Perfectly straddling the real and the supernatural and built around increasingly hard to answer questions about what is real and what isn’t, Man Finds Tape cleverly employs a mockumentary framework to formally reflect this thematic essence.

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Festivals Reviews 

INSIDE (Tribeca 2025) – Review by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas

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While Inside offers a suffocatingly powerful instance of the Australian prison drama, it is also about something far greater than the country’s oft-demonstrated fascination with its own penal past. It is a film about absent and dysfunctional fathers, both literal and symbolic, a kind of roadmap of the complex and insidious forms intergenerational trauma can take on young men doomed to become older ones. These men will do anything to deny responsibility for their actions, blaming others – even the penal system itself – rather than owning up to their own flaws. But the film identifies the possibility for hope. It’s thin, but it’s there, and it is this which ultimately propels Inside into something almost mythic.

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Festivals Reviews 

IT ENDS (Sydney FF 2025) – Review by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas

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Alexander Ullom’s feature film debut It Ends takes enormous conceptual swings that largely all pay off. After a long day helping one of their number move house, four young friends hit the road to grab some post-moving food, but a detour becomes a bizarre nightmare when they find themselves trapped on a never-ending country road from which they cannot escape. A film elegant in its simplicity that garners much of its oomph from the solid individual performances and the undeniable spark between them, It Ends is the kind of bold, original movie that low budget horror cinema at its best provides a perfect home for.

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Festivals Reviews 

REDUX REDUX (Sydney FF 2025) – Review by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas

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With their 2020 film The Block Island Sound, twin filmmakers Kevin and Matt McManus framed a story about a son’s grief at the mysterious death of his father in what for all intents and purposes was a tone poem. The Block Island Sound was a deep, heavy film, whose sombre vibes felt only indirectly related to the nuts-and-bolts mechanics of the story itself. With Redux Redux, the McManus brothers return and flip the script, all while maintaining a focus on what are clearly their defining fascinations of grief and parent-child relationships. Here the focus is on a mother whose daughter has died, with Kevin and Matt’s sister Michaela starring in the film just as she did The Block Island Sound.

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Festivals Reviews 

THE HOME (Sydney FF 2025) – Review by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas

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The Home is a challenging, tragic film that never surrenders to cliche or easy ethical binaries, and one that grants dementia a serious, considered focus, albeit told through the lens of supernatural fantasy. Set in an aged care facility. it provides a kind of ethically loaded, morally ambivalent space where older characters deemed “too hard” are discreetly housed so as to allow their family’s the space to move on with their lives otherwise undisturbed. Protagonist Joel (Philip Oros) is haunted by trauma intimately connected to his family. When it is time to put his mother Monika (Anki Liden) in the home of the title, Joel’s homecoming almost immediately destabilizes him as he is forced to face ghosts both literal and metaphorical. As Monika’s condition deteriorates, Joel is forced to grapple with the very real horrors both she and he endured in earlier years as he discovers some monsters refuse to remain dormant.

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Reviews 

THE SURRENDER – Review by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas

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Something about the way palliative care is depicted in this film feels almost respectful, even reverent: not merely to the dying, but to those left behind who are pushed to limits that most movies find almost impossible to articulate. The Surrender is a solid horror film, but where it truly excels is in its wholly singular, authentic and deeply empathetic portrait of palliative caregiving, which – as anyone who has ever done it knows – is a nightmare in and of itself.

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