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Kahn Duncan Mallett

Writer, Creative and Critic

About Me

A multimedia professional spanning various forms of media communication.                                        
                                   

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How I Work

A passionate writer, producer and organiser on both the film and television landscape - one who is able to write in a critical capacity. 

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My Ethos

A commitment to respecting the industry standard, writing with integrity, equality for all, and listening with care.

Get in Touch

Always just an email away, am very eager to develop strong communication skills with all walks of life.                                                                

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Recent Articles and Podcast Appearances

As a member for the Australian Film Critic Association (AFCA), I enjoy writing critical reviews on the film, theatre, and television landscape. At the heart of my writing I am looking for what theme or message each piece of media is trying to tell its audience - can they learn something, can they laugh at something, or can they be moved by something? 

This Is Film - Conversations in Film and Pop Cultu •

Grief, hedonism, and self-discovery collide in Sam Haynes’ chaotic coming-of-age debut 'Pools' | This Is Film

Figuring out what to do in life is rarely a journey ventured in a straight line. In Sam Haynes’ tender coming-of-age debut feature Pools, that uncertainty is captured through a group of pleasure-seeking summer school students. Leading them is Odessa A’zion’s impulsive college slacker Kennedy, distracted by the recent death of her father and the estrangement of her friend Delaney (Ariel Winter). Kennedy would rather keep her head submerged underwater rather than buried in a textbook. 


Drawing...
This Is Film - Conversations in Film and Pop Cultu •

2026’s 'Moana' proves Disney’s originality has sunk to the bottom of the ocean | This Is Film

Disney’s so-called live-action remakes of their beloved animated films have always felt mis-marketed. For the most part, they are still heavily animated – instead of cartoon animation, they rely on photorealistic CGI. There are usually some real humans acting in these digital spaces, but the overall exercise has been a nostalgia mining cash grab. They lobotomise these animated classics in the name of making them modern, “real” movies. The latest surgically engineered offering, Moana, feels despe...
The Curb | Film and Culture •

Milly Alcock tries her best to salvage the super generic Supergirl

When James Gunn took over the DC universe, many fans delighted in his decision to do away with the murky and dour sensibilities of Zack Synder’s ‘DCEU’. The ‘Snyderverse’ fans may have been grumbling, but last year’s Superman provided a much needed sense of hope and comic book flair to the superhero film. While Superman wasn’t perfect by any means either, it provided a bright tone and introduced audiences to David Corenswet’s puppy-dog-personified Superman.In Craig Gillespie’s disappointing foll...
This Is Film - Conversations in Film and Pop Cultu •

Adrian Chiarella’s confident debut feature 'Leviticus' makes it hard for love to resist hate | This Is Film

There is a particular heartbreak in seeing those you love to turn seemingly against you. Someone you thought was a pillar of love and safety becomes a wall of hate and rejection. For a young queer person in regional Australia finding a romantic equal already feels rare enough; so, to have that connection denied, demonised, and reverse-engineered is an all-too-real horror. In Adrian Chiarella’s unnerving debut feature Leviticus, that fear is realised as two teenage boys are forced to confront the...
The Curb | Film and Culture •

Pixar’s Toy Story 5 embraces familiar warmth to tackle childhood in the digital age | The Curb

By the time a franchise reaches its fifth entry, it’s rare for it to maintain the quality and innovation needed to sustain and satisfy its audience. Flop blockbusters such as Ice Age: Collision Course, Terminator Genisys, and Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, prove certain stories reached their natural conclusions multiple entries earlier, ending up presenting tired ideas and rehashed methods into new realms of diminishing returns. For the rare exceptions that rise above this, th...
The Curb | Film and Culture •

Jaume Claret Muxart journeys along the Danube in the beautiful, beguiling and bewildering Strange River | The Curb

Strange River (Estrany riu) is a sensual coming-of-age drama that depicts queer awakening through picturesque lyricism, often favouring porous imagery over dialogue or conventional narrative. Following a family of five on an idyllic holiday along the Danube River, Jaume Claret Muxart’s debut feature is as alluring as it is elusive, blending reality and fantasy into a ponderous journey of desire, frustration, and familial reshaping.The film follows 16-year-old Didac (Jan Monter), a moody, sensiti...
This Is Film - Conversations in Film and Pop Cultu •

'Backrooms' is a unique but frustating sci-fi horror debut | This Is Film

Backrooms began as a creepypasta posted to a 4chan thread in 2019: a simple, slightly tilted image depicting a yellow-soaked, carpeted room that felt both uncanny and detached from reality. After years of forum discussion and lore-building came Kane Parsons, a YouTuber who, in early 2022, began a semi-anthological web series expanding on the extradimensional mythology of the Backrooms. 


Set in the 1990s, the series followed members of the research institute Async as they attempted to document...
The Curb | Film and Culture •

Star Wars returns to the big-screen with The Mandalorian and Grogu, an exercise in galactic-scale entropy | The Curb

Since Disney acquired Lucasfilm, the Star Wars brand has rapidly become more of a corporate product and less an imaginative space opera. After countless TV series, both animated and live action, five feature films, and enough action figures and merchandise to fill a continent’s worth of landfill, the once-magical “galaxy far, far away” is now a tool of consumerist expansion. Despite a few diamonds in the rough, namely Andor and the final season of The Clone Wars, it feels like an age ago that St...
This Is Film - Conversations in Film and Pop Cultu •

David Lowery’s Mother Mary is a unique yet imperfect spiral of devotion, resentment, and artistic possession | This Is Film

Death is not the only way to grieve someone you love. Sometimes the deepest sorrow comes from living alongside the absence of someone still alive; through broken relationships, betrayals, or simply the quiet drift of wayward souls growing apart. There is a particular ache in caring for someone you feel deeply wounded by: once inseparable in each other’s lives, now distant and unreachable. Mother Mary, David Lowery’s beguiling, seductive, and obvious meditation on fame and friendship is determine...
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'Sensory Animation' missing 90 seconds of footage due to copyright. For education purposes of Monash University only.

Sensory Animation: an Audio-Visual Essay

As part of a university project, I was tasked with exploring the idea of conveying film theory and analysis in the form of an audio-visual essay. This involves taking audio, film clips and sometimes narration that adds a new lens or context to a specific scene, code or idea in a film and/or films. A collection of animated features were put together here to form what became known as 'Sensory Animation'.