Australian Top Twenty

It's been a while, but here's another Top Twenty. This time, my favourite Australian films. There are quite a few recent Aussie films I haven't seen, so I'd be happy to hear recommendations, but this is the list I've come up with. Once again, aside from the number one, the ordering was difficult, not to mention the beauties that missed out (Mad Max 2 & 3, Lantana, The Dressmaker, Muriel's Wedding, The Tracker, Don's Party, Look Both Ways, Newsfront, The Sum of Us and Bad Boy Bubby, just to name a few). So, in ascending order, have away at it.

20. The Boys (Rowan Woods - 1998)

An uncomfortable watch but really well-acted with David Wenham in fine form. Based on the real life case of Anita Cobby, this film creeps to its ugly finale. I foolishly took a girl to see this at the cinema back in 1998. A great movie but not a date movie.

19. Mad Max: Fury Road (George Miller - 2015)

Simply structured (I can only think of Withnail & I that has such an equally obvious framework) but inventively bonkers with breathless chase sequences. Hardy and Theron could crack marble with their faces.

18. Sunday Too Far Away (Ken Hannam - 1975)

Jack Thompson stars as a unionised shearer in the 1950s who likes a drink and a brawl. This is a biting political drama dressed up as a knockabout blokey romp, but don't be fooled.

17. The Nightingale (Jennifer Kent - 2018)

Hard to watch but kind of beautiful in its horror. A stark look back at Australia's shameful history. Aisling Francioisi and Baykali Ganambarr work brilliantly together as Clare and Billy. Don't be put off by the chat around this, it's required viewing.

16. The Rover (David Michod - 2014)

A fairly dystopian view of Australia's future with no sugar and loads of dust. Guy Pearce could be the guy you see walking along Scarborough Beach Road with no shoes but plenty of intent.

15. Mad Max (George Miller - 1979)

And speaking of dystopian...say hello to Mr. Rockatansky. The original is still (just) the best for me, though I really like parts of 2 and 3 as well. This is a pure, animalistic revenge drama in an inhospitable landscape. The post-apocalypse never looked so bronzed Aussie.

14. Chopper (Andrew Dominik - 2000)

Eric Bana with a bravura performance here as Mark 'Chopper' Read, notorious Melbourne gangland figure. This film skirts glorification very close but the ridiculousness of Read and Bana's take on him give the film some nicely odd balance.

13. The Year of Living Dangerously (Peter Weir - 1982)

Gibson's star on the rise here, and regardless of the twat he's since shown himself to be, he had bags of charisma back then. He plays an Aussie reporter in Indonesia during an attempted coup against Sukarno in 1965. Pretty gripping stuff, well maneuvered by Weir.

12. Breaker Morant (Bruce Beresford - 1980)

A fine dissection of crimes in wartime and the consequences of them. Edward Woodward, Bryan Brown and Jack Thompson put in some sterling work in a film often distilled to its climactic lines.

11. Picnic at Hanging Rock (Peter Weir - 1975)

Creeeeepy shit, this. The shooting style, the pace, the ethereal performances, the music - all make this one of the scariest Aussie films made. Weir again pushes all the right buttons.

10. Idiot Box (David Caeser - 1996)

I'll be honest here. This may be a bit high on the list as I can't remember too much about it. What I do remember is that I thought it was a bag of stupid fun and Ben Mendelsohn was one of our best actors. And still is.

9. Walkabout (Nicolas Roeg - 1971)

I really hope we can accept this Nic Roeg gem as an Aussie co-prod, because it's a great little piece of cinema. David Gulpilil stars with Jenny Agutter and the director's son, Luc in this oddly affecting film of privilege and pathos.

8. Travelling North (Carl Schultz - 1987)

Probably the quietest film here but one of the best. Old Rumpole of the Bailey (Leo McKern) stars with Julia Blake as a couple who head north from Melbs to Queensland to retire. Graham Kennedy pops up and is brilliant as usual.

7. Gallipoli (Peter Weir - 1981)

Simply, one of the most iconic films Australia has produced. No surprise that Peter Weir helmed it, nor that playwright David Williamson co-wrote it (he's responsible for two more on this list - 8 & 12). Gibson and Mark Lee star as champion runners who sign up for WW1 and end up at the infamous Turkish battleground. A film rightly famous for its finale.

6. Death in Brunswick (John Ruane - 1990)

Sam Neill and the late, great John Clarke star in this weird black comedy set in the Melbourne suburbs. I reckon this was an influence on many lesser 90s Aussie urban comedy dramas. Hard to bottle this stuff.

5. Animal Kingdom (David Michod -2010)

Bloody Nora. What a brilliantly misanthropic film this is. And 10 years old now! Mendo and Joel Edgerton ooze grungy menace and Guy Pearce adds integrity but Jackie Weaver is the standout for me. Hell mother in spades.

4. Little Fish (Rowan Woods - 2005)

Yeah, you may like Blanchett doing English Queens or classy Yanks but she's never better than on her home turf and this is her best performance for my money. With Sam Neill and Hugo Weaving to bounce off, she's supreme as a recovering addict. The choir doing Flame Trees is a spine-tingler.

3. Romper Stomper (Geoffrey Wright - 1992)

This was Russell Crowe's breakout film (though he was still a few years away from being a Hollywood big hitter). Nobody does brooding intensity like Crowe, and his Neo-Nazi thug, Hando, is the perfect outlet. Far from sensationalising this pathetic sub-culture, Romper highlights the dead-ends expertly. Jacqueline McKenzie is incredible, too. Sadly, Daniel Pollock (centre) killed himself just after filming wrapped.

2. The Proposition (John Hillcoat - 2005)

An amazing Aussie western from a script by Nick Cave, this has a basically perfect pace. Guy Pearce stars alongside Danny Huston, Ray Winstone and David Gulpilil. It's all very bleak, very outback, very harsh and illustrates what extreme circumstances can do to people. The cinematographer, Benoit Delhomme, certainly lent a majestic external eye to the landscape.

1. Proof (Jocelyn Moorhouse - 1991)

A peerless three-hander with Hugo Weaving, as a blind guy who likes photography, Genevieve Picot, as his housekeeper and Russell Crowe, as his new friend, who agrees to describe his photos to him. The performances are excellent and the bubbling emotions and anxieties are perfectly teased out by Moorhouse. It's a crime she hasn't made more films.

Comments

Two Prosecutors

This Stalinist 'thriller' sets out its stall early, with a snowy prison yard holding our attention (or not) for a good few minutes. Prisoners are herded in, most very old and on the verge of pegging it. One such geezer is tasked with burning hundreds of letters to Josef himself, pleading with him to hear their case. The old guy saves a letter written in blood and so begins the story. The note is from an ex-academic, party member and proud Bolshevik, asking to see someone from the prosecutors office. Enter Kornev (Alexander Kuznetsov), newly appointed and eager. His meeting with the ancient political prisoner, Stepniak (Alexsandr Filippenko) opens his eyes to the creeping dread of the times. Kornev makes the trek to Moscow to see the Procurator General (Anatoliy Beliy) to make his case against NKVD corruption brough to his attention by Stepniak. It's not an easy mission. The bureaucracy and interminable fucking waiting throughout the first two acts of the film would make Kaf...

The Quiet Girl

This is a great film, especially in the way that it manages to create something interesting out of a reasonably mundane synopsis. A young girl is sent away to a relative's house for the summer where she is treated better than at home. Sounds like it could have a bit of Rohmer-style youthful awakenings? Or maybe some gritty Loach-ian societal comment? Even perhaps a revenge tinged 'fear the youth' theme? Well, it's none of the above, and more power to its style. The Quiet Girl herself (Cáit) is a newcomer, Catherine Clinch, and she was apparently found via an Irish language school call out. She's incredible - meek, direct, no airs nor graces whatsoever, with a clear-eyed awkwardness. She's almost like a little female Bowie in The Quiet Girl Who Fell to Earth (no, not a film but I thought I'd italicise anyway). There are orbiting performances that complement her perfectly. Carrie Crowley and Andrew Bennet play Eibhlín and Seán Cinnsealach, the couple who tak...

Ainbo: Amazon Princess

A young Amazonian girl bounding around on a tree like Mowgli in The Jungle Book opens this Peruvian/Dutch/German co-production. We soon discover that this is the Ainbo of the title, and that her best friend, Zumi, is about to be crowned leader of their tribe. A relatively quick whip- round of characters introduces us to the two leads; a smarmy village thug called Atok; Zumi’s father and current tribal chief, Huarinka; Ainbo’s foster mother, Chuni; as well as two ‘loopy’ spirit guides, Dillo and Vaca (a bespectacled armadillo and a clumsy tapir). The environmental theme is also introduced early on, in the form of dying fish and disease in the village, attributed to a curse but, as we find out later, the result of something more real, and more troubling. Ainbo is convinced by her spirit guides to embark on a trek to find a magical root that will save the village. On her journey she must deal with various perils, ranging from a pursuing Atok, and a gigantic sloth in his volcano home, t...

Arco (Me) (Kid)

This is the first feature length film from French writer/director Ugo Bienvenu. It tells the story of futuristic kid, Arco, voiced by Juliano Crue Valdi in the English dub, and Oscar Tresanini in the French original - here I'll explain that I saw the preview of this with the English voice cast, so I'll mention them from now, unless I spy a notable Frenchy. Anyway, Arco is too young to fly to the past like his family do, but like any young ding-a-ling, he decides to chance his arm, and ends up in 2075. This is a more recognisable future for us than Arco's time, as we see climate change writ large on society. In this time-zone, Arco meets Iris (Margot Ringard Oldra) and her domestic robot, Mikki (voiced by a strange combination of Iris's parents, Natalie Portman and Mark Ruffalo). Iris wants to help Arco return to his time, but they're thwarted by a missing jewel that he needs in order to travel, as well as a trio of bumbling goons (Will Ferrell, Andy Samberg and Flea...

The Voice of Hind Rajab

The Voice of Hind Rajab is a very confronting film that uses real emergency recordings to tell the story of Hind Rajab, a 6 year old Palestinian girl trapped under siege in northern Gaza in early 2024. Tunisian writer/director Kaouther Ben Hania apparently paused work on another film when she heard the audio of the calls between Hind and the Palestine Red Crescent Society in order to get this film made. And it's a timely reminder of the crimes of this current Israeli government. The film starts in the offices of the Red Crescent, a West Bank based rescue agency, when Omar (Motaz Malhees) gets a call from a man in Germany explaining that his family are stuck in a car that's been attacked. Omar contacts a young woman in the car but is cut off by the sounds of gunfire. When the call is reconnected, it's soon discovered that the only person still alive in the car is a 6 year old girl, Hind. The sole way to save her is to coordinate with the Israeli army, via the Red Cross to a...

28 Years Later: The Bone Temple

I'm really getting into the 28UoTLCU (28 'Unit of Time' Later Cinematic Universe). This edition is directed by Nia DaCosta, and she picks up the reins from Danny Boyle and slots right into the landscape. The biggest takeaway from The Bone Temple is that Father Figure transference is rife, throughout both of these '28 Years' films, actually. If we choose the obvious link, Spike (Alfie Williams) is passed from parents, Isla (Jodie Comer) and Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) in the first film, onto two polar opposites, Kelson (Ralph Fiennes) and Jimmy Crystal (Jack O'Connell) in this one, and presumably to a certain returnee in the third installment. But there are also other relationships in the film(s) that explore the nature of dependency, and we have to assume writer Alex Garland, DaCosta, and godfather Boyle, have other, real-world settings in mind, not purely in the zombie genre. This manifests in the rapprochement of Dr. Kelson towards the 'infected', s...

We Bury the Dead

I went along to Luna Outdoor last Friday to see a preview of local lad, Zac Hilditch's Albany shot, Tassie set zombie drama, We Bury the Dead . The premise goes that the US government has accidentally detonated an experimental pulse weapon close to the east coast of Tasmania, killing more than 500,000 people. A side note to this disaster is that some of the dead are rebooting. Daisy Ridley plays Ava, an American physical therapist looking for her husband, who was in Tassie on a work retreat. She volunteers to be part of a body retrieval unit but is told she must not leave Hobart. She meets Clay (Brenton Thwaites) and they manage to cadge a motorbike and hit the road south. On the way, among the rebooted, they run into soldier Riley (Mark Coles Smith), who has his own reasons for being out of the capital. In a Q&A after the film with The Curb's Andrew F. Peirce, Hilditch mentioned that the film started out as a pure grief drama, and zombies were added to the script later. Th...

The Goya Murders

The machinations of the serial killer have long been fertile ground for filmmakers but the quality of the final product can vary greatly. For every Zodiac or Se7en there’s one like this. The Goya Murders (or El Asesino de los Caprichos ) starts with a reasonably sound premise – a killer is poisoning his (usually well off) victims and recreating scenes from Goya prints as deathly exhibits. Imagine the murders scenes in Se7en but with less gore and more artistry. Investigating these are Madrid detectives, Carmen Cobos and Eva González, played by Maribal Verdú and Aura Garrido, and though the actors are fine, they have the writing to overcome. Their characters are broadly painted, there’s not a lot of light and shade here. Carmen immediately takes against her younger partner for no apparent reason. Eva is a fun-loving, karaoke singing, happy mother-of-two, while Carmen drinks from a hip flask and drives erratically. At one point a fellow officer tells Carmen that her ‘bad cop’ routine ...

Best Films of 2011 to 2020 - End of Decade Report

I realised a few weeks ago that I've been doing the Film Shapes blog since 2011. This got me thinking that it might be a doddle to put together an aggregation of the top tens of each year, a kind of 'best of the decade' list. Not such an easy task. I've had to stretch a mooted ten out to twenty and the order has been troubling me for some days. As it turns out, all these films were actually made between 2011 and 2020, otherwise titles like Inception may have snuck in. Anyway, I'll leave you with this for now and bugger the consequences. 20. Slow West (2015) An odd, melodic Western, directed by John Maclean (of The Beta Band), this has young Scot, Kodi Smitt-McPhee crossing the perilous US west, helped or hindered along the way by their excellencies Michael Fassbender and Ben Mendelsohn. As the title suggests, it's slow-paced but that's what sets it apart from other films of its ilk. Come to think of it, this is a pretty lonely ilk. 19. Bohemian Rhap sody ...

Mandibles

Mandibles is the latest film from French musician turned filmmaker, Quentin Dupieux (aka Mr. Oizo). It’s an odd film, veering between lovably surreal farce and nihilistic idiocy. The premise has our protagonists, Manu (Grégoire Ludig) and Jean-Gab (David Marsais), stumbling upon a grotesquely large fly in the boot of a car they’ve stolen. This scuppers the completion of a possibly dodgy job they’re on but these two will not be disheartened. Jean-Gab suggests training the huge fly, which he names Dominique, and putting it to work for them as a kind of thief drone – one that “doesn’t need batteries”. The action takes place in a less than idyllic South of France where Manu and Jean-Gab lurch almost involuntarily from one ludicrous situation to another, all the while giving each other a nerdy hand-shake called ‘The Toro’. After some initial criminal tomfoolery, Manu is mistaken for someone else and invited to a country villa by some young women. Offer accepted, they take advantage of th...

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