In Film Australia - all about Australian films

Though the execution lacks polish and a sense of creating a daringly original perspective, the central themes of director Belinda Chayko’s Lou resolutely come to the fore. This is the story of an 11 year old entangled in trying domestic circumstances in rural New South Wales. Lou (Lily Bell-Tindley), stuck with two younger siblings and [...]

Tom Jeffrey’s film, based on the memoirs of William Nagle, to some extent comes across as an Australian flavoured, poor man’s version of Catch 22 or Robert Altman’s M.A.S.H (1970). Although primarily concerned with depicting the seriousness of young soldiers being tossed into a warzone, scenes of bawdy irreverence provide a welcome counterbalance, with the [...]

Superficially, Dean Craig’s screenplay for A Few Best Men seems like a lazy re-tread of the formula he used for his best known work, the inexplicably successful British comedy Death at a Funeral (2007). Firstly a thin scenario is established using minimal justification for another extravagant family gathering. This time there’s no deceased at the [...]

In 2009, despite serious misgivings, filmmaker Tony Krawitz decided to venture onto Palm Island, off the Queensland coast, with a mission – to reverse a coin of common perception; to tell the lesser known side of a tragic story that began on November 19, 2004. On an ordinary day, a drunken Aboriginal man, Cameron Doomadgee, [...]

Director Ivan Sen’s follow-up to the head-scratching, frustratingly abstract Dreamland (2009) sees him back on home soil to tell a personal tale of how the endemic indifference of our country has created a void into which countless lives empty out like broken vessels. In the Aboriginal township of Toomelah, a dusty outpost and former mission [...]

It’s long been a ploy of screenwriters to concoct a story in which an ordinary man – and obvious outsider - is deposited into a place insulated against the world at large. The locals, we usually discover, are very protective of their own kind, but even more protective of their [...]

Beyond every shifting guise appropriated by the late Heath Ledger there exists the bittersweet temptation to look back with poignancy, to ponder the creative heights all too briefly scaled. In Ned Kelly, Australia’s most notorious outlaw and anti-hero of legendary proportions, Ledger communed with a kindred spirit, a man who [...]

Though it begins with the globe-trekking dreams of its protagonist, director Chris Kennedy’s third feature turns out to be a fairly insular film, trying on a couple of hats before settling on comedy. Doing Time for Patsy Cline is the story of Ralph (Matt Day), a wannabe country singer whose grandiose dreams of discovery in [...]