In Film Australia - all about Australian films

There are really only two things that exist in Australia that are truly terrifying: natural environment and colonial history. In an effort to explore our harsh national topography and its even darker psychogeographical counterpart, writer/director Bill Bennett turns to the traditional tropes of genre filmmaking, resulting in the visually stunning, thematically poignant - though narratively [...]

According to Jean-Luc Godard, “All you need for a movie is a gun and a girl”, a mantra that well served the cinematic output which gave rise to psychoanalytic spectatorship theory in the 1960s and 1970s. But in 1997 it seems anomalous coming from Bill Bennett’s ‘couple on the run’ feature, Kiss or Kill. An [...]

There is a certain type of crassness that is inherently two things: endearing and Australian. But of course there is another kind of crassness that forgoes endearing and situates itself as merely Australian. Welcome to Woop Woop (1997) is a film most commonly condemned as the latter. But just because it’s not endearing doesn’t definitively [...]