In Film Australia - all about Australian films

Ringan Ledwidge’s Gone has the auspicious distinction of being that other annoying-backpackers-getting-themselves-in-too-deep-murder-and-mayhem-amongst-the-shitbergs-and-outback-of-Australia-flick; released in the unexpectedly looming shadow of Greg Mclean’s chart topping and blood lettingly sadistic torture-porn downunder  flick Wolf Creek, and relegated to short run theatrical and easy-to-ignore dvd release, Gone came second in 2007’s two film outback psycho thriller race.

From 2008 remaining in memory as one of the more creatively bankrupt years in recent Australian cinema (and, let’s face it, just plain bankrupt – without the hyperbolic Australiana strainings of Baz Luhrmann’s patriotically titular Kidman-fest, 2008 was a 30 year low for box office takings around these here parts), 2009, thankfully, seems to be [...]

Francisco Alberoni, high falutin’ critical theorist that he is, wrote in the 1960s that celebrities make an unknowable world knowable – that if you can whittle the whole big scary planet down to a motley collection of whining money grubbers who cry at the Oscars and find ever more unlikely ways to congeal their names [...]

The suburban dysfunction genre is a funny old thing – all the trappings of aspirational lifestyle mixed with a hearty dose of angst and some plain old hysterical dish-throwing doesn’t seem like obvious popcorn fodder to me.

The day after Christmas. huh? Mine historically tends towards a pretty extreme turkey hangover, comprised of publicly rueing the day I gorged on whatever fateful bird it happened to be, and privately crossing the mental calendar days off till the next one

The Nothing Men describes a room full of undirected and misdirected men, a ticking timebomb of testosterone that starts off describing the uncomfortable limbo of industrial decline and ends up somewhere a lot lazier.

Elissa Down’s The Black Balloon, a semi-autobiographical piece that layers the experience of autism within a suburban family over a more traditional coming of age story, is officially the first Australian cinema success story of the new year.

As a memoir of unstable family and difficult times in cross-cultural 60/70s Australia, The Home Song Stories is a personal and affecting account of a Chinese boy growing up both because of, and despite the strains of family.