AustLit

'TWO of the best films made in Australia, in this and most other years, are now finishing short runs at marginal sites in our cities. Many who care for cinema per se, and others who see these stories as central in the landscape, are likely to miss them altogether. They can be sought on DVD, but they repay the big-screen impact and should be allowed more of it, with more talk around them, more energetic promotion.' (Introduction)          

'In Charlie’s Country, there’s a key moment that’s both gross and grotesque. David Gulpilil’s Charlie, confronting the admonitions of a police officer, ejects a set of false teeth and says, “I can’t eat with them, I can’t eat without them, I’m starving.” And indeed he looks it; lithe and active, but a fair bag of bones. Sometime, there’ll be a dentist visiting the community. With his mate Black Pete (Peter Djigirr, remembered from Ten Canoes) Charlie goes off shooting buffalo; they’re in search of real sustenance, relief from the junk food in the local store. The rifle, the carcass, and even the carefully crafted wooden spear are confiscated. Charlie’s funds in the ATM, casually disbursed around the place, run out. Relations with local police seem, at the outset, to be made of amiable ritual banter; but things will turn ugly.' (Introduction)          

'The Back of Beyond celebrates the life and times of Australia’s best known outback mail man Tom Kruse MBE. Every fortnight he battled isolation, heat, sand dunes and floods to deliver mail and supplies to the families along the 517 kilometre Birdsville Track in central Australia.

'Representing the complex interrelations of the multicultural community and their environs, the film is considered by many to be one of Australia’s premier films, and is an exemplary representation of 1950s Australian transformational culture.' (Publication blurb)

'Ivan Sen’s Mystery Road is a Western which observes the conventions of its genre: conflict of law and lawlessness in a remote setting; visible wide landscapes; a central character, the man who rides into town with a mission, a man who holds experience and emotion in reserve; a climactic shoot-out; laconic dialogue all round. Seen from behind, Aaron Pedersen’s Jay Swan has a John Wayne kind of walk; and this film, like many Westerns, looks outward across a realm of historical loss.' (Introduction)            

Gravity, Blue Jasmine, Stories We Tell and The Act of Killing

'Sylvia Lawson reviews Sue Milliken’s account of a career in Australian film-making'