Metro

High Ground is a provocative interrogation into the nation’s bloody history, as Nicholas Godfrey writes. High Ground (Stephen Maxwell Johnson, 2020) is an arresting and immersive film that uses the genre of the western to bring Australia’s past to l

Back in 2015, the new film from Australian director Jeremy Sims, Last Cab to Darwin, did the rounds of the international festival circuit alongside an Icelandic film called Rams, directed by Grímur Hákonarson.1 The latter is an understated triumph of

‘Why don’t we just turn around and go back the way we came up?’ the eighty-year-old Paul Hogan, playing himself, asks at the outset of The Very Excellent Mr. Dundee (2020). In one of writer-director Dean Murphy’s wittier touches, the image that accom

Communication is commodified in A Family (Jayden Stevens, 2019). Its lonely central figure, Emerson (Pavlo Lehenkyi), holds auditions to find himself a set of parents and siblings whose paid interactions will be scripted and rehearsed before being pe

Bloodshot Heart is one hell of a title. It’s evocative in a visceral way – in every sense of the word. For me, it calls to mind the image of a swollen heart, its crimson flesh straining against the polluted arterial liquid within: a manifestation of

Just as stories of gay men have tended to overshadow or even obscure lesbian history, until very recently the same has been true of cinematic depictions: the boys in the band hog the limelight. Ellie & Abbie (& Ellie’s Dead Aunt) (Monica Zanetti, 202

Baby Done, a dryly hilarious 2020 comedy from Kiwi husband-and-wife director Curtis Vowell and writer Sophie Henderson, opens by showing us its protagonist, Zoe (Rose Matafeo), as she sees herself. ‘I’m a leader; I’m a soldier; I’m an animal with sup

In 2016, seventy-six female leaders in STEMM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics and medicine) fields set foot on a boat to Antarctica: this is the bare-bones premise of Ili Baré’s fly-on-the-wall documentary The Leadership (2020), which q

The opening scenes of Wild Things (Sally Ingleton, 2020) show the lush environment of the Tarkine in the Tasmanian summer. The area is, the documentary tells us, the second-largest tract of cool temperate rainforest in the world – and yet only 6 per

In the opening moments of the new Australian documentary Brazen Hussies (Catherine Dwyer, 2020), an on-screen intertitle notes that the women’s movement was ‘reignited’ between 1965 and 1975. That word stuck with me because, while it was most definit

When German Cabrera narrates his life in The Meddler (Alex Roberts & Daniel Leclair, 2020), he posits himself as a man on a mission. He may be a dumpy middle-aged mechanic in a polo shirt, fishing vest and dad cap – a father of five from a rundown ne

Three gunshots ring out and a woman repeatedly wails, ‘Oh my God,’ piercing a heartbeat-like drum loop. From the outset, filmmaker, photojournalist and artist George Gittoes’ gripping documentary White Light (2019) unsettles. Sixteen-year-old Englewo

Major Leo Carmichael (Ewen Leslie) sits in a cafe in Adelaide, over 800 kilometres from the Maralinga nuclear-test site in a remote region of South Australia. At Maralinga, he is the boss, but he’s losing control: problems are spreading beyond the co

There’s a scene in the documentary Hong Kong Moments (Zhou Bing, 2020) in which Benny Yeung, a district councillor who’s been in office for twelve years, takes a taxi ride through the city. It’s 2019, so the conversation with the driver inevitably tu

In 2016, it came to light that a number of boys across various Australian schools had been involved in a series of cybercrimes against their female peers. Police were called in to investigate the sharing of nude images, including social-media pages s

The Matrix (Lana & Lilly Wachowski, 1999) remains a rare 1990s blockbuster to have aged well. In an era of franchise films and intimidating special-effects budgets, the spark of originality that ignited the cyberpunk classic has endured where its con

In My Blood It Runs (Maya Newell, 2019) is a beautifully constructed documentary that tells the story of ten-year-old Arrernte/Garrwa boy Dujuan Hoosan. Filmed over a three-year period, it taps into the enduring strength and dignity of Aboriginal peo

Citizen journalism has reached its apotheosis in the digital age. Although eyewitness reportage predates the information revolution, its rise coincides with the evolution of accessible recording devices and the democratisation of media outlets. Moder

Bliss (Ray Lawrence, 1985) is a film no-one quite knows what to do with. Despite winning several of the major categories at the 1985 Australian Film Institute (AFI) Awards, it’s a movie that doesn’t fit neatly within accounts of Australian cinema his

Australia’s cultural sector is on life support – but admirable attempts to take events online have proliferated, to varying degrees of success. Sadly, a combination of readily available machinery and the misguided promise that the digital space offer

To say Australian cinemas have been on life support during COVID-19 would be to imply that someone was looking after them. While that may have been the case for the local production industry, cinema operators have been left to bleed – and bleed they