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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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, [...]

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 [...]