Nitram (2021 movie)

Category: Biographical drama.

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Nitram is produced by the same person that brought you Snowtown, Justin Kurzel. So you know it's not going to be a rom-com.

Even if you're not overly familiar with large swathes of Australian history, you probably already know about the Port Arthur Massacre, Australia's worst instance of firearm deaths and the catalyst for our world-famous gun laws. And just like with Snowtown, this movie is a 90% retelling - it tells the overall story, but changes some details.

Nitram (played by Caleb Landry Jones, and based off of the real-life perpetrator Martin Bryant) lives with his mother (Judy Davis) and father (Anthony LaPaglia) who clearly love and dote on their son, but his intellectual disability affects how he interacts with people and the world around him. And given this is the 1970s and 1980s, not much in the way of social support is given - you were expected to tough it out and hope for the best.

We see various interactions between Nitram and his parents that clearly show the struggle they go through to keep him out of trouble and them onto their sanity, as well as Nitram's father's attempt to secure a bank loan to buy a bed and breakfast on the Tasmanian coast that he plans to retire to.

Immaculate (2024 movie)

Category: Nun horror

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If you asked me even last week if I'd be eager to see Sydney Sweeney in a film, any film - let alone a horror - I'd have laughed you out the building. I mean, after her performance (if I could call it that) in Madame Web, who would have thought a nun-horror film would be the thing to sway my opinion?

But sway my opinion it did, and while I'm nowhere near becoming a Sydney Sweeney fan-boi, I can see her becoming an top-level actress if she can make some minor improvements to how she goes about her craft (something I will expand on later).

So the plot of this movie isn't TOO deep and meaningful, but interesting nun-theless (see what I did there?):

Like all good nun-horror films, we start with a flashback to a scene however many decades prior where a young nun in her convent/abbey/cloister sneaks into the bedroom of her Mother Superior and steals a set of keys. Said nun then runs towards the front gate and fumbles the keys as four hooded figures bear down on her. The nun is able to unlock the gate, but that gate is also chained and the chain has just enough slack to squeeze her body through. But right as she gets out, she slips and a hooded figure grabs her leg, pulls it back through the gate and gives it a twist to (painfully) ensure the nun isn't able to run anywhere in a hurry.