Tagged Australian cinema

“Don’t run after poetry. It penetrates unaided through the joins.” - Robert Bresson (1) Throughout human history from Euripides to J. K. Rowling the discomfort experienced from the fear of the unknown, an ina...

Producers’ Note: Photography of the hunting scenes in this film took place during an actual kangaroo hunt conducted by licensed professional hunters. No kangaroos were expressly killed for this motion picture. ...

In Rachel Perkins’ musical One Night the Moon the convention of the duet typical of the classical Hollywood musical is reconfigured. In the film, there is a particular moment whereby Perkins employs a harmony w...

Silence. Punctuated by the insistent ringing of a public phone. Ringing. Ringing. Ringing.  Unanswered. This leitmotif in Warwick Thornton’s Samson and Delilah embodies some of the biggest issues raised i...

For those of us with an interest in Australian film, the idea of Asian Australian cinema might evoke a short list of names and titles, all from the very recent past. Examples might include Clara Law’s SBSi-prod...

Way back in 2003, Nigel Buesst did a solitary excavation of Melbourne filmmaking during the 1950s and ’60s. Those years were characterised by what seemed like a rather large amount of naively optimistic filmmak...

The history of Australian cinema is littered with small-scale, unobtrusive and even intimate portraits of working and middle class life that are largely forgotten in many accounts of what is troubling called Au...

“Friday night too tired; Saturday night too drunk; Sunday, too far away.” – “The Shearer’s Wife’s Lament” Sunday Too Far Away is a film that never quite settles on its identity or purpose. It begins with a ba...

“If you like outrageous cinema, you live and breathe to wait for those weird moments that happen every once in a while in genre cinema, where it’s like, you can’t believe you’re seeing what you’re seeing.” - Q...

In a rundown school, a science-teacher, Mr Clarke (Ivar Kants), is at least able to keep trouble at bay in his class of bored, disengaged teenaged boys. His pupils are largely the sons of migrants from the post...

Almost as extraordinary as Justin Kurzel’s feature film debut, Snowtown, about the 1999 “Bodies in Barrels” murders, is the often-baulking reception with which it is met. Peter Bradshaw writing for The Guardian...

Where does one begin a piece on Russell Crowe, Oceania’s most precocious and visible film export after Nicole Kidman? Which scene or what image first “made” him and encapsulated his particular qualities? The ma...