Author Jake Wilson

“If a viewer understands the story and characters fully, then I have failed.” – Bill Mousoulis on Lovesick Those were the days, when you could have no income to speak of and still live in Collingwood. I m...

Aspiring filmmakers in Australia and elsewhere stand to learn a lot from John Cumming’s The Films of John Hughes, not least about how to deal with funding bodies. An innovator in documentary and adjoining field...

It’s December 2014, and I’m researching a book on the 1976 bushranger film Mad Dog Morgan – one of the best Australian films of the 1970s, a far-out antipodean Western directed by the much underrated pop surrea...

When I think of John Flaus, my mind goes back to an evening ten or 15 years ago, when Fitzroy’s Erwin Rado Theatre hosted a rare revival of Salt of the Earth – an independent, communist-backed drama about a str...

I met Albie Thoms only once, in 2009, when the Australian Centre for the Moving Image revived his 1969 feature Marinetti – an avant-garde extravaganza described in Thoms’ 1978 essay collection Polemics For a Ne...

The time is 1980; the place, a crucial node on the grid of inner Melbourne, where Swanston Street, running north to south, crosses Flinders Street, running east to west. Four corners, four landmarks. Southwest...

Another Opening, Another Show In Joe Dante’s satirical Small Soldiers (1998), a range of high-tech action figures is marketed under the slogan “Everything Else Is Just a Toy.” Perhaps this year’s Melbourne I...

This essay originally appeared on the website of the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, and was written to accompany the retrospective “Grain Of The Voice: 50 Years Of Sound and Image” which I curated. ...

Once, and appropriately, Melbourne based filmmaker Leo Berkeley went under the moniker of “last of the independents”. Having shaped a decades-long body of work on the fringes of the industry, he talks at length about the filmmaking principles that inform his work.

Where’s she from anyway? The outback? The moon? Worse. L. A. - friends of Rhonnie (Thea Gumbert) in Sally Marshall is Not an Alien At the end of the twentieth century, there was more than one reason for Aus...

Over the past two decades, Rolf de Heer has arguably emerged as Australia’s leading active narrative filmmaker: excepting one or two figures working mostly outside this country, none of his contemporaries can m...

The fabulous was Jim Sharman’s birthright. Grandson and son of successive managers of the legendary Jimmy Sharman’s Boxing Troupe, he fills the opening pages of this remarkable memoir with vivid recollections o...

Every film lover in Australia owes David Stratton an enormous debt of gratitude. He was largely responsible for the growth and success of the Sydney Film Festival, which he directed for 17 years; he did alm...

This short essay argues that most recent Australian comedy films have been all too "ordinary" – but nominates one or two new directors as talents to watch.

Reflections on Melbourne’s own ‘new wave’ from a participant and observer.

De Heer continues in his latest, minutely controlled film a 'naïve' sensibility that resonates with contemporary trends in international cinema.

The first in the Australian Screen Classics series by Melbourne novelist, playwright, commentator and filmmaker, Christos Tsiolkas, is here reviewed.

An analysis of this 2002 Australian release, in particular its cinematic exploration of race relations.

Wilson unearths the undercurrents and biases of this recent Australian book.

Wilson's insightful analysis highlights the beauty and complexity of Varda's contemporary masterpiece.

The most obvious lesson from the 2002 St Kilda Film Festival is that the definition of a film is more elastic than ever. Over half the inclusions in the main competition program were made on digital video; ...

A revealing, sensitive response to Lawson's latest work of stories and essays.

A review of the recent book, The Money Shot, and a wider and thought-provoking discussion of art and criticism.

I switched on the TV soon after the planes hit, and there were the twin towers smouldering like giant cigarettes. As I watched this 'live' spectacle unfold from the safe distance of my lounge room in Melbourne,...

Untransformed by brief encounters in a share house: Wilson weighs up Lowenstein's latest instalment in the share household genre.

Intro The following are various ideas and impressions from the ten screenings I attended at the 2001 St. Kilda Film Festival. It is, of course, impossible to provide 'fair' assessments of fifty or so films in ...

Now that he's directed two feature films of his own, as well as contributing to the scripts of two directed by Emma-Kate Croghan (1), it should be possible to infer a few things about Stavros Kazantzidis (f...

An astute discussion of characterisation and mise en scène in Shirley Barrett's latest film.

A sensitive account of this recent Australian film.

What could be 'better than sex'? I'm not sure that Better Than Sex (Jonathan Teplitzky, 2000) really wants to answer this question: the title is a provocation, a tease, a come-on. It's also a sign that the ...

Melbourne becomes unreal in the Cantrills' City Of Chromatic Dissolution.