In Film Australia - all about Australian films

Bruce Beresford’s memorable 1976 film has a reputation of bawdiness and vulgarity mixed with explicit nudity that well and truly precedes it. However, few of these seedy, politically incorrect associations have any basis in truth - at least not by modern standards.

Australian youths of the 1980s were apparently just as likely to fall prey to the same foolish distractions as those of today if John Clark’s mostly unintentionally hilarious Running on Empty is any indication. This was only ever going to be a cult film, with its undernourished treatment of hotted-up cars, schoolboy vendettas, abnormally high [...]

Stories that reflect Australia’s embrace of multiculturalism are common place on cinema screens these days. Last year saw the release of two such films - The Combination and Cedar Boys. But nearly 20 years ago the same could hardly be said and a piece like Micheal Jenkins’ The Heartbreak Kid emerged as a breath of [...]

The past has a way of catching up with everyone, even Ned Kendall (Ben Mendelsohn), a writer who finds himself drawn back to his childhood home and into a confrontation with a chapter of his life no longer containable to the fabrication he reserves for his work.

From the fringes of Australian suburbia, director David Caesar dredges up a portrait of idle and vanquished lives in his second feature Idiot Box. Two moronic dole bludgers, Kev (Ben Mendelsohn) and Mick (Jeremy Sims), spend their life stuck in a familiar loop. Highlights of their day include a walk to the local bottle shop [...]

Shaping the short stories of Israeli writer Etgar Keret into a series of interlocking lives within an apartment building in a nondescript city, Tatia Rosenthal’s stop-motion feature debut has enough of an idiosyncratic bent to ensure a sizeable, devoted following in the years to come.

You have to wonder if Australia’s own variation on Fatal Attraction is now just a discredited footnote in the career of Naomi Watts. Surely she’s long suppressed all recollection of her demented schoolgirl act in Gross Misconduct, directed unremarkably by George Miller (not to be confused with the George Miller who directed Mad Max).

Martin (Hugo Weaving) has been blind his entire life. He also happens to be an avid photographer. His meticulous snapshots, though seemingly random to a partial observer, actually supply the framework that defines his world. With descriptive summaries typed in Braille stuck to their undersides, the photographs are categorical ‘proof’ that Martin existed in a [...]