In Film Australia - all about Australian films

When you remember it, and it certainly lingers large in the memory, the stretchy shit-eating smile of local actor/comedian Angus Sampson (pictured above, left) seems unrealistically large, as if it extends further than the borders of his face and leaves the rest of his body lingering limply below like the legs of [...]

Few films that deal with the pain and suffering from the loss of a loved one are as bold and innovative as Burning Man, a scorching new Australian drama from writer/director/producer Jonathan Teplitzky (now available on DVD). His third and by far best feature film (Teplitzky also directed Better Than Sex and Gettin’ Square), Burning [...]

Three months after major up and coming talent Tanja Liedtke was appointed artistic director of the Sydney Dance Comedy – a holy grail of arts gigs – fate dealt a cruel hand and she died after being hit by a garbage truck in August 2007.
Life in Movement, directed by debut documentarians Sophie Hyde [...]

It’s obvious from the opening scenes of Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead that wet around the ears documentarian Joe Cross never went to film school, never debated the merits of gonzo, expository or observational approaches to documentary. Cross is the antithesis of a filmmaking expert, an inexperience he spins into a virtue as the audience [...]

Writer/director Jonathan Teplitzky (Gettin’ Square, Better Than Sex) offsets the grimness of making a film about overcoming grief by modelling what could have been a morbidly despairing downer into a pot of revved-up and risqué drama with a soulful core simmering beneath the bombast.
Sex, swearing, car crashes, flames and fast-paced kitchen scenes that make episodes [...]

What if Clark Kent was not actually Superman but a highly delusional nut case who could never fly and struggled to lift a coffee table? What if the movies we saw him in, the comic books and TV shows, were simply visual representations of his delirium?

The Tree is a maudlin art house drama in which one of its lead characters is exactly that – a tree. But this ain’t just any tree: it’s a gigantic angry fig tree that’s been infused with the spirit of a grieving family’s dead father.

Writer/director Samuel Genocchio’s dark and abstruse thriller Bad Bush is set in a remote farmhouse, where a young woman and her newborn baby spend a night alone with a drug-crazed dope grower. The film is a creepy cat-and-mouse story intelligently handled and resourcefully shot, squeezing every penny out of a total budget of $220,000 (including [...]