Apex (2026)

As if Dangerous Animals weren't abominable enough, Netflix essentially repeats the exercise here: a big Hollywood name - in this case, Charlize Theron - gets thrown in amongst the Aussies in a horror thriller that squanders its most interesting idea, namely that a strong independent woman is pitted against  toxic masculinity in a remote Aussie environment, and instead serves up unedifying nonsense about an impossibly bizarre killer - Taron Egerton's psycho would sit more comfortably in Pan's Labyrinth - and, suggesting how little anyone cares about this throwaway exercise, the film has been given a name that is destined to bury it amongst Google search results for a computer game and an old Bruce Willis bomb.

★★☆☆☆

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Storm boy (1976)

I understand Colin Thiele makes it clear in his book that Mister Percival, the pelican raised by Storm Boy, is trained and responds to voice commands, but the movie springs this idea on its audience right when Mister Percival is needed to save a boatful of fishermen, resulting in a laughable Skippy moment that slightly strains the otherwise faithful adaptation, an emotional, likeable, and touching Australian classic, with the ten-year-old Storm Boy living a lonely but - to me - dream existence, quietly at the beach with the Coorong - its beaches, birdlife, and Ngarrindjeri culture (as taught to Storm Boy by David Gulpilil's Fingerbone Bill) - resplendent around him.

★★★★☆

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Within The Pines (2024)

There are movies that make good use of sound (The Conversation, Berberian Sound Studio, A Quiet Place...) but this uneven Australian horror makes no use at all of the fact its main character is a sound engineer in a forest where he stumbles upon something nasty: every time he dons his headphones and points his dead cat, we hear nothing at all and it is not until he takes his headphones off that what he hears with his ears, finally, is rendered moot by what he sees (the light of a torch or the light of a helicopter, for example), and at other times, when our terrified-before-anything-actually-happens hero trips, cries, chases a helicopter screaming, rolls down a hill, kills a dog, and generally stomps around with gay abandon, noone in the pine forest seems to hear anything, not even the hillbilly standing just over there who seems to forget in a scene a moment later that someone is trampling around his caravan of horror.

★☆☆☆☆

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The Royal Hotel (2023)

This refreshing Australian suspense avoids tired outback horror tropes and instead presents a horror of the sort you read about in the news, of international tourists on an adventure ending up working under terrible circumstances in remote parts of Australia, on farms, say, or in this movie's FIFO mining town and specifically  at a pub that everyone - the drunk local men, the two new female staff, the audience - knows needs to be burned to the ground long before an alcohol-fuelled Mick Taylor is let to wreak his inevitable bloody havoc.  

★★★☆☆

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Road Games (1981)

Patrick Quid (Stacy Keach), a truck driver transporting pig carcasses across the Nullabor Plain, repeatedly encounters on that long straight stretch of road through the Australian desert a green van, the driver of which he suspects is a serial killer, and Patrick supposes out loud to a hitchhiker he's picked up (Jamie Lee Curtis) that the killer thinks "women are pigs", a hint that there's an intellectual game happening in this horror thriller, but when all is said and done, the road games are just that: puns, wordplay and shallow tongue-in-cheek to while away time along the way.

★★★★☆

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Bloodmoon (1990)

For the first three-quarters of this ugly, lamentably plotted slasher, no one in the movie even knows for sure that anything is wrong: two or three high schoolers disappear but their absences are shrugged off as runaways, which means a long plod for audiences who must endure woefully scripted school dances, waterhole picnics, and the like waiting for the characters to catch up with what the opening scene established - that someone is killing students with a barbed wire garotte in the nearby woods - and when the killer is finally revealed, the plot, the town's collective obliviousness, and the ignorance of one townsperson in particular (given the celestial and historical circumstances of the crimes) ceases to make any sense at all.

★☆☆☆☆ 

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2:22 (2017)

Most of the energy put into this Australian film, a sci-fi romantic thriller about a man experiencing odd things at 2:22pm each day, is spent trying to make Melbourne and Sydney look like New York City (or at least trying to make them look not unlike New York City, with the camera sticking close to the actors and street scenes cutting short just before a tram rumbles past), and there's not much energy to be found anywhere else because the tone is supposed to be ethereal, mystical, and mesmeric, and the two leads - playing the world's worst air traffic controller, and a victim of the near-aviation incident he causes - are brought together by Fate with their destinies written in the stars, so they are essentially automatons going through the motions whether they understand why they keep ending up at Grand Central Station or not.

★★☆☆☆

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Kidnapped (2021)

Nothing to do with Robert Louis Stevenson, he'd be in a hurry to tell you, this mindless mystery fare, like an especially poorly plotted episode of Murder, She Wrote, has an American couple running around a small Australian island resort called Koala Sanctuary looking for their daughter missing from hotel childcare, but who among the wooden Australian extras would want to kidnap the girl and for what possible motive you will know immediately as the story, like a Days Of Our Lives subplot given more credence than it is due plays out in soapy, bleedingly obvious fashion.

★★☆☆☆

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The Dry (2021)

The leads in this mystery - Eric Bana, Genevieve O'Reilly, and Matthew Nable - are terrific, as is the evocation of drought-stricken rural AustralIa (with scenes making me audibly gasp as they transported me back to the local pub, shop, dry creekbed, the local copper, and the locals of my Australian country-town upbringing) but I've read Jane Harper's The Lost Man and now I've seen The Dry and what doesn't rise up to the level of the actors and the photography is Harper's mystery, because like the plot of The Lost Man, this movie's mystery ends with a shrug, like you didn't realise you were just watching an episode of Cop Shop because it was dressed up like Picnic At Hanging Rock.

★★★☆☆

Under the Cover of Cloud (2018)

Of very limited appeal, probably even to Tasmanians and cricket fans, this deeply personal film, like a motion picture family album, is about a writer, Ted Wilson (the writer-director-lead actor and financer, playing himself) who returns to Tasmania after he loses his job and engages in not-very-interesting conversations with his family while he embarks upon the task of writing a cricket book.

★★★☆☆

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My Brilliant Career (1979)

Fierce and intelligent and packaged off to live with relatives like an Australian Anne of Green Gables, Sybylla (Judy Davis, in her first lead role) waves off anatopic turn-of-the-century British sensibilities and as much as possible determines her own irreverent way through her Australian bush life, juggling family responsibilities and personal endeavours with a blossoming romance with dashing landowner Harry Beecham (Sam Neill in his first lead role).

★★★★☆

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The Australian Dream (2019)

I grew up feeling like my disinterest in AFL was a personality defect, but watching this documentary about two-time Brownlow Medal winner and 2014 Australian of the Year Adam Goodes, I had the epiphany that what I hated about football as a kid was the vitriol and terrible behaviour on show at matches, both on the field and off, and the power of this documentary is that it shows what AFL could be and in turn what the country could be, and hopefully the Australians who most need to see this see it when they are ready to listen because it is a message powerfully presented and in a format that isn't able to be interrupted and obfuscated by the obnoxious input of the likes of Sam Newman, Andrew Bolt, and similar turds.

★★★★★

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Rabbit (2017)

Thanks to a series of terrifying waking visions, a woman, quite unnecessarily a medical student in Germany, becomes convinced she knows the whereabouts of her missing twin sister and so embarks on a journey into a gothic Australian bush nightmare of catatonic parents and colonial weirdos doing song and dance routines a la Britt Eckland in The Wicker Man, and before you can say, "All these creepy elements aren't going to add up to much," things become really incoherent.

★★☆☆☆

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Blame (2010)

A home invasion that leaves a piano teacher gagged and bound while a group of youths in balaclavas arrange his fake suicide appears to be a crime motivated by the death of one of the culprits' friends, but background information about this death is scarce - the focus remains on the criminals as they immediately, irreparably bungle their crime, and you'll have to sit through their mess and the group's long series of shouty, sweary bouts to see the revelation at the end that is treated like a bombshell but doesn't exactly change or mean anything.

★★☆☆☆

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Bad Girl (2016)

When Chloe (Hugo Weaving's niece, Samsara Weaving) is first introduced, she is good - save-a-life angelic good - but the contrast between her and bad girl Amy (Sara West, not Hugo Weaving's niece), a juvenile delinquent causing her foster parents major headaches, is barely established when Chloe turns bad - Glenn-Close-in-Fatal-Attraction bad - and from the moment Amy discovers Chloe to be this rank nutter, the movie manages to protract to seventy more minutes (scream, scream, scream) a situation which Amy (scream scream scream) really should have been able to sort out in the first five. 

★★☆☆☆

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Beyond the Known World (2017)

An annoying couple embark on an unlikely wild goose chase through India in an effort to find their missing19-year-old daughter, and even though they are "beyond the known world", they succeed in encountering only people as abrasive and unlikeable as themselves as their investigations gradually reveal their daughter has wandered into the Indian mountains in thrall to ideas about the impermanence of river waters.

★☆☆☆☆

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Gurrumul (2018)

Firstly, this is a celebration of a remarkable life - interesting, funny, but also tinged with sadness given such a remarkable vocal talent was discovered so late and lost so soon - but it also serves as a reminder that "the tiles are falling off a national treasure," and it is well-constructed documentaries like this one that might help spread such an important message.

★★★★★

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Wish You Were Here (2012)

This well-acted 2015 movie about an Australian foursome's trouble-filled holiday to Cambodia and its aftermath is rather dishonestly marketed as a mystery and while there is an investigation (an inert and highly unlikely one) launched in Sydney, Australia after only three of the bogans return from the trip, viewers who persist through the protracted misery, I mean mystery, will be disappointed by a revelation at the end that is impossible to predict and that makes the movie's whole fall apart, unless some tenuous thing is being suggested that links marital and familial dischord, bad behaviour overseas, and trauma.

★★☆☆☆

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Infini (2015)

A mercenary team teleports to and investigates a ravaged space station where they discover a crew decimated by a contagion of some sort, is the well-established sci-fi set-up that this Australian movie tries its hardest to keep interesting, but unfortunately what intrigue the film manages to squeeze out of the premise too often gives way to low budget things like just more biffo or just another character whose eyes have turned red and the ending similarly is a low budget, underwhelming one.

★★☆☆☆

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Frog Dreaming (aka The Go-Kids/The Quest/Fighting Spirits/The Mystery of the Dark Lake) (1986)

Struth, this 1986 family adventure with a zillion different titles must be 'Stralya's answer to 1985s The Goonies cos it has a gang of loopy ankle-biters (one is Henry Thomas, the kid from E.T., fair dinkum) going bush, braving scary stuff like skeletons and crabby adults to cop a gander at what they reckon is Donkegin, a frog monster from Aboriginal mythology that lurks in a billabong up the back paddock, and the bloody flick is such an oddity and pretty good mystery, it is definitely worth a Butcher's Hook.

★★★☆☆

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