Every December the internet is awash in best-of lists, with critics and cultural commentators embracing the calendar year as if it were the only meaningful way of categorising art. And yet who can resist the allure of the listicle? This December offers even more than usual, because it marks the end of a decade.
Surveying the Australian film landscape as I whittled down my selections, the first thing that leapt out were the number of productions that emerged from first-time film-makers: seven in total. Just as strikingly, all except two of these deeply impressive works were helmed by directors who either wrote or co-wrote the script.
The question of authorship in the collaborative medium of motion pictures has existed since virtually the beginning of the art form. There is no doubt, however, in the films listed below, from whose visions they emanated. These films are bold, unique, dramatic, funny and, at times, shockingly good, presenting thrillingly varied depictions of Australian life.
Terror Nullius director: Soda_Jerk
Spear director: Stephen Page
It isn’t easy to whittle a decade of national cinema down to 10 highlights, so please forgive the tie. Terror Nullius and Spear are very different films, though both have something striking in common: they are powerful challenges to the male-dominated, Judeo-Christian centric view of Australian history and identity, representing more diverse stories and broader cultural significance.
The former – from the two-person art collective Soda_Jerk – is a work of remix and reassembly, plucking bits of pre-existing materials from a wide range of Australian films and TV in order to create new, incendiary political statements. Lord Humungus from Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior, for example, now has Pauline Hanson as one of his gang. The film-makers describe their fiercely contemporary approach as a form of “rogue historiography”; read this more detailed review to get your head around it.
The director Stephen Page’s Spear feels, to me, not just an individual film but a celebration of one of the most exciting movements in the history of Australian cinema: the first mainstream wave of Indigenous films from Indigenous film-makers, which only emerged, in full glory, at the turn of the century. Adapted from work developed by Sydney’s Bangarra Dance Theatre, Spear – the first contemporary Indigenous dance movie – is a unique, atmospheric experience, matching beautiful choreography with striking visuals and an exquisite soundscape.
Read more: Terror Nullius review – dazzling, kinetic, mishmashed beast of an Australian film
Read more: Spear review – a weird, wonderful milestone of a dance movie
Director: David Michôd
The writer/director David Michôd’s Scorsesian gangland drama – inspired by real-life events involving Melbourne’s infamous Pettingill family – won an Academy Award nomination for Jacki Weaver. As the crime family matriarch Smurf, the veteran actor hissed snake-like charm into lines that might have sounded ordinary coming from somebody else – such as: “You’ve done some bad things, haven’t you sweetie?”
And Mendo. Oh, Mendo! Plonk this guy on a couch, in front of a TV playing a music video for Air Supply’s I’m All Out of Love and hey presto: suddenly you get an unforgettably creepy scene. When it arrived in cinemas, Michôd’s film became an instant classic.
Read more: David Michôd on Animal Kingdom: I feared I was making a gigantic mess
Director: Hugh Sullivan
The writer/director Hugh Sullivan’s joyously entertaining and fiendishly clever comedy follows a sad sack scientist (Josh McConville) who deals with a broken heart by inventing a time machine (as you do) in order to attempt to recreate the perfect weekend away with his girlfriend (Hannah Marshall). Things do not go to plan, especially when her ex (Alex Dimitriades) rocks up.
This under-appreciated gem of a film, partly inspired by the nano-budget American indie Primer, is a chamber piece as zany as they come, with fastidiously arranged story architecture. Beneath the plot double-backs and parallel timelines, there is a meaningful message about how we cannot control the emotions of the people we love.
Read more: The Infinite Man review – playful sci-fi with masterful plot manoeuvres
Director: Thomas M Wright
The author, journalist and publisher Erik Jensen’s book about Archibald prize-winning artist Adam Cullen is the sort of highly ambitious read that tends to be described as “unfilmable”. The debut director Thomas M Wright (who co-adapted the script with Jensen) turned it into a biopic for the ages, led by a mesmerisingly gloomy performance from Daniel Henshall, playing Cullen during his final, alcohol-soaked and heroin-filled years.
Conflicted by the task of separating the myth from the man, Wright shirks the “tortured artist” trope and explores – like the great 2000 character study Chopper – big ideas about the nature of Australian culture and celebrity.
Read more: Acute Misfortune review – Adam Cullen biopic is an enthralling, complex triumph
Director: Justin Kurzel
Nobody evokes a sense of festering dread quite like the great auteur Justin Kurzel, who kicked off his cinematic career with this icky drama about South Australia’s infamous “bodies in the barrels” murders. Take a bow, again, Daniel Henshall, who was ghoulishly effective and compulsively watchable as the serial killer John Bunting.
Threaded into a story of violence and abuse in decaying suburbia is an exploration of how the residue of traumatic experiences leaves an imprint on people’s lives. The residue of this film left a hell of an imprint, too: it sits alongside The Boys, Chopper and Animal Kingdom as one of the great modern Australian crime pics.
Read more: Snowtown rewatched – a supremely unsettling portrait of a killer
Director: Warwick Thornton
The director Warwick Thornton’s second masterpiece – after 2009’s brilliant Samson and Delilah – is a neo-western of painterly beauty and biblical scope. Set in central Australia during the 1920s, Thornton’s cross-country morality play follows an Aboriginal man (Hamilton Morris) who kills a bigoted war veteran (Ewen Leslie) and is chased across unforgiving landscape by a doggedly determined, hard-bitten cop (Bryan Brown).
Thornton, who is his own cinematographer, conjures both achingly personal and grandiose compositions, with notes of a John Ford western. On a purely visual level Sweet Country ranks among the all-time greatest depictions of the Australian outback – up there with classics including Walkabout and Wake in Fright.
Read more: Sweet Country review – brutal Australian western soars with Biblical starkness
4. Casting JonBenet (2017)
Director: Kitty Green
The director Kitty Green’s enthralling film – beautifully shot by fellow Aussie Michael Latham, whose recent work includes Strange Colours – may investigate an American crime story – but it received development and production support from Screen Australia, which qualifies it for this list.
How do you make a documentary about a murder case when nobody knows who did it? Green audaciously explores the (still unsolved) 1996 murder of six-year-old beauty pageant star JonBenet Ramsey by filming actors’ audition for various roles, for a movie that was never intended to exist. She then uses those audition tapes – plus short re-enactment scenes and other embellishments – to present a meta, self-reflexive quasi-documentary that explores the relationship between truth, legend and performance. The resulting mind-melting film is twisted, complex and ingenious.
Read more: Casting JonBenét review – magnificent provocation to the very notion of truth
3. Hail (2011)
Director: Amiel Courtin-Wilson
Pretentious. Maddening. Inaccessible. I assume all these words have been hurled at the writer/director Amiel Courtin-Wilson’s fiercely unique character study, which follows an ex-con struggling to adjust to life outside prison. He is played with bulgy-eyed intensity by the magnetic Daniel P Jones, whose life inspired the film.
Hail combines hallucinogenic moments (one of which involves a dead horse being dropped from a helicopter) with bone-rattling verisimilitude, creating an unusual dance between realism and fantasy; perception and delusion. The uncompromising Courtin-Wilson is one of those most interesting Australian film-makers to have emerged since the turn of the century.
Director: George Miller
Returning to his signature franchise to again capture a world gone to hell in a petroleum-doused handbag, director George Miller’s desert-set explode-a-palooza is the most decorated Australian film in history – winning six Oscars, and accruing an Immortan Joe-sized bounty of accolades. The AV Club voted Fury Road the best film of the decade, local critics called it the finest Australian film so far in the 21st century, and this week Miller confirmed there is a follow-up in the works.
The plot is simple: an on-the-road story about the world’s greatest U-turn, which sees Max Rockatansky (Tom Hardy) meet his match with Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron). Not a scene nor a moment is squandered in this intensely visceral beast of a film; you don’t so much watch it as experience it.
Read more: Mad Max: Fury Road in black and white: a fascinating re-evaluation of a groundbreaking film
1. The Babadook (2014)
Director: Jennifer Kent
The writer/director Jennifer Kent’s shockingly brilliant feature debut is another hard-wired genre pic synonymous with dropped jaws and countless accolades. The ‘dook’s many champions include The Exorcist director William Friedkin, who (not inaccurately) described it as one of the scariest films ever made.
Essie Davis delivers a gooseflesh-raising tour-de-force performance as a single mother experiencing a – shall we say – turbulent period in her life, thanks to a creepy character from a children’s book that leaps into existence and terrorises herself and her son (Noah Wiseman). Kent’s film is brilliant work of atmospherics that evokes deep, dark and terrifying emotions; it is ultimately about the fear of being a bad parent.
Read more: The Babadook review – a superbly acted, chilling Freudian thriller
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