Kiwi and Aussie screen legends Sam Neill and Michael Caton have teamed up in this heartfelt and humorous remake of Grímur Hákonarson’s 2015 Icelandic original. The template of Hákonarson’s story has been transplanted but all the details and fillings have changed. Director Jeremy Sims pitches us in Australian sheep country, a sunny and laconic world where life flows at a pretty breezy pace. Until disaster sweeps in.Brothers Colin (Neill) and Les (Caton) live on adjacent farms but haven’t spoken for years. Colin is kind and earnest, while Les could have dropped off the set of the 1970s psycho- Read more ...

Two genuinely lovely performances elevate an often-simplistic tale in Penguin Bloom, based on a 2016 memoir of the same name. Telling of the rehabilitation of an Australian athlete, Sam Bloom, who – true to her surname – learns to blossom anew following a terrible injury, this Netflix film is carried aloft by the integrity of leading players Naomi Watts and Andrew Lincoln. That same quality, alas, isn't always so apparent elsewhere.Screenwriters Harry Cripps and Shaun Grant have gifted the narrative chores to Griffin Murray-Johnston, who plays Noah, the eldest of the Blooms' three Read more ...

Relic's deliberate drabness hits home first; set in Victoria, Natalie Erika James’s modern horror shows us a grey contemporary Australia, a place bleached of all colour. We first see Kay and her daughter Sam (Emily Mortimer and Bella Heathcote, pictured below) driving through a wooded landscape in search of Kay’s octogenarian mother Edna (Robyn Nevin), reported as missing from the family home. James's debut highlights how fraught intergenerational relationships can be, and Kay’s indifference to Edna is made clear when she’s quizzed by the local police about when she last checked in with her Read more ...

After a 16-year wait for the second album from Australian sample-stitchers The Avalanches, their third, a mere four years later, feels like a rush release by comparison. We Will Always Love You has been preceded by no fewer than four singles which, while welcome, are in danger of distorting the overall picture slightly.While it could still be broadly catagorised as hip-hop and psychedelic pop, We Will… is a more thoughtful collection, peppered throughout with considered call-backs to connecting themes of distance, loss and transcendence. And while the quality isn’t always consistent, the Read more ...

We’re eight months into a global pandemic, and Kylie Minogue is serenading us from her kitchen. “We’re a million miles apart in a thousand ways,” she sings, feather-light vocals floating over a driving disco beat. “Can we all be as one again?”At least on first listen, Kylie’s 15th studio release - 12 tracks of giddy, gleaming, disco-pop escapism, appropriately titled DISCO - doesn’t fit the now-established mould of the lockdown album. The clue is in the sleeve notes where, for the first time, you’ll see an engineering credit on every track in the name of Minogue: the singer taught herself Read more ...

The bleak power of the Australian horror movie Relic, Natalie Erika James’s feature debut, derives from its masterful use of a simple metaphor. The creepy house wherein Kay (Emily Mortimer) and her daughter Sam (Bella Heathcote) first seek and are then stalked by Kay’s enraged elderly mother Edna (Robyn Nevin) is an externalization of Edna’s waning cognitive skills. Many haunted houses in movies can be considered the manifestations of damaged psyches; few have literalized so terrifyingly the division between mental acuity and the void many people fall into before they die.Having learned Read more ...

It’s always a timeslip moment, revisiting films first seen in your teens, but never more so than when watching this beautifully restored print of Walkabout. Nicolas Roeg filmed and directed this fever dream of a movie in 1970, after co-directing Performance with Donald Cammell. Very loosely inspired by an Australian novel, Roeg enlisted playwright Edward Bond to write a script that diverged fundamentally from the original plot and barely amounted to 65 pages but it won Roeg the necessary funding. He set off with his wife, young sons, a teenage Jenny Agutter and a small crew to film this near Read more ...

Babyteeth gets off to a terrific start. A semi-naked, manic Moses (Toby Wallace, full of scabby charisma) almost pushes 15-year-old Milla (Eliza Scanlen; Sharp Objects, Little Women) on to the Sydney train tracks as she waits on the platform in her school uniform, carrying her violin. It’s a thunderclap: she’s smitten. The next scene is just as intriguing, with Ben Mendelsohn (The Outsider, Bloodline, Animal Kingdom) on fantastic form as Henry, a psychiatrist, eating a sandwich and having sex with Anna (Essie Davis; The Babadook, True History of the Kelly Gang) in his consulting room.The fact Read more ...

As an opening line to BBC Two's new three-part series, “Rupert Murdoch is an enigma” failed to set pulses racing. It rather implied that after three hours of documentary TV, we may end up none the wiser about what makes the scary Australian media tycoon tick.Still, director Jamie Roberts and his team had done their due diligence in the research department, turning up a trove of nuggets from the archives interspersed with pithy interviews from assorted players in Murdoch’s extraordinary journey, including Alan Sugar, Hugh Grant, Piers Morgan and Andrew Neil. There were some chilling Read more ...

The battle of Long Tan in Vietnam isn’t well known to the casual observer, but it has entered the military folklore of Australia and New Zealand. On 18 August 1966, 108 men of Delta company, 6th Battalion of the Royal Australian Regiment found themselves under ferocious attack from 2,000 Vietnamese troops, and only some stubborn leadership, dogged resistance and the New Zealand artillery saved them from complete annihilation.Kriv Stenders’s film tells the story with an unpretentious straightforwardness you wouldn’t get in a bigger-budget Hollywood production, even though the story isn’t Read more ...

It was in March 2018 that Australia’s cricketers were caught ball-tampering during a Test match in Cape Town. The resulting public outcry and sanctions against the guilty players and assorted backroom staff shook the Australian game to the core. There was a sense that the team had developed a bullying, arrogant attitude, and this was their well-deserved come-uppance.Australia’s process of rehabilitation, with a rebuilt team under new coach Justin Langer, is the theme of Amazon’s meaty eight-part documentary series, directed by Adrian Brown. If you’re a cricket fan you won’t be able to resist Read more ...

"All true spiritual art has always been RADICAL art": thus spake the oracular Georges Lentz, composer of the pitch-black odyssey for electric guitar that took everyone by surprise last night. In that vein, why not add that all the greatest performers always push the boundaries, and that 28-year-old Sean Shibe, though included by the sponsors of this concert among "emerging talent", is already in their select company. This amazing Wigmore concert took us from a first half of fragrant miniatures by David Fennessy and minimal magic from Sofia Gubaidulina elided into radical Bach to the " Read more ...