From Gillian Armstrong to Warwick Thornton, Australian cinema is rife with debuts that made the directors’ names. Here are some highlights

Guardian Gala screening: The Daughter Read more

This month marks the theatrical release of the feature film debut of acclaimed writer/director Simon Stone, the widely-touted “enfant terrible” of Australian theatre.

The Daughter is a scintillating secrets-and-lies family drama with one almighty, Geoffrey Rush-infused sting in its tail – and it’s among the most assured big screen inaugurations of the last few years.



Australian cinema is littered with examples of directors who launched their feature film careers with a hell of a bang. It pains me not to include many others, among them John Heyer’s pioneering 1954 documentary The Back of Beyond, Craig Monahan’s The Interview, Rob Sitch’s The Castle, John Hillcoat’s Ghosts … of the Civil Dead and Justin Kurzel’s Snowtown.

But 10 is 10, and you have to draw the line somewhere. Here are the ones that made the cut.

Based in a fictitious town where residents run passers-by off the road then live off their remains, dismantling their vehicles and experimenting with their bodies, Peter Weir’s wicked, stuck-in-nowhere classic plays like Mad Max crossed with Welcome to Woop Woop.

This batshit-crazy curio is much more than a drive-in-style schlockfest; there’s a great deal under the bonnet. The Cars That Ate Paris is a sharp commentary on small town versus big town ideologies and societal progress versus repression; it also offers a darkly comic take on intergenerational tension. A year later Weir’s next film arrived in cinemas: Picnic at Hanging Rock.



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Seven years after we were first introduced to the troubled souls at the heart of Warwick Thornton’s unforgettable drama, have we ever really recovered?

Samson and Delilah (which Thornton wrote, directed and shot, winning the Caméra d’Or at the 2009 Cannes film festival) hit hard, encapsulating the divide between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australian communities in more powerful and personal ways than any film made before or after. Thornton is yet is direct a follow-up feature drama; his next will be greatly anticipated.

Ray Lawrence’s adaptation of Peter Carey’s Miles Franklin award-winning novel is as if the work of Franz Kafka, Peter Greenaway, Jane Campion and Terry Gilliam was poured into a blender, then thrown on to a warts-and-all character portrait of a man slowly falling apart at the seams.

Advertising executive Harry Joy (Barry Otto) dies from a heart attack but finds a way back to his body, only to discover his existence is now riddled with countless horrors – from an unfaithful wife (and best friend) to incest-committing children. Is the film based in the afterlife? Lawrence mounts a case that Belinda Carlisle got it wrong: hell, not heaven, is a place on earth.

When it comes those in the director’s chair, the Australian film renaissance of the 1970s was almost exclusively a men-only affair. Gillian Armstrong smashed the glass ceiling with 1979’s My Brilliant Career, becoming the first female Australian feature film director in almost 50 years.

Judy Davis is terrific as Armstrong’s bull-headed protagonist, who dreams of something greater than a provincial life. There’s a touching romantic subplot featuring a dashing Sam Neil, but the film is equally as headstrong and unconventional as its subject – light years from happy-go-lucky romantic drama.

The Square (2008), director Nash Edgerton

Neo-noir films are rare in Australian cinema. Rarer still are thrillers half as gripping as Nash Edgerton’s airtight, in-over-their-heads crime story about two adulterating lovers who indulge in a wee spot of arson and blackmail after discovering a duffel bag stuffed full of cash.

Co-written by his brother Joel (who recently made his own directorial debut, with the excellent The Gift), The Square grips audiences in a stranglehold and doesn’t let go. The lives of the characters spiral out of control while the film remains consummately measured and drawn.

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The original Mad Max provides an origin story for Australia’s most iconic hot-under-the-collar antihero, depicting the tragic events that made him such a killjoy. It was also a baptism by fire for the director, George Miller, who shot the film in and around Melbourne on a shoestring budget.

The producers famously violated a number of road laws and paid some of the crew in slabs of beer.

Writer and director David Michôd may have been a nervous wreck in the editing room of Animal Kingdom, but he emerged with one of the finest Australian films: a Scorsesian crime drama inspired by the Melbourne gangland crimes of the 80s and 90s.

In his tale of a close-knit criminal family pursued by dodgy rule-breaking cops (recently remade into an American TV show, Ben Mendelsohn has never been creepier – and that’s saying something. But it’s Jacki Weaver who stole the show, in an unforgettable Oscar-nominated performance as the family matriarch.

Who would have thought a film about a grey lead-drawn storybook character that comes to life would frighten the bejesus out of everybody? The Exorcist director William Friedkin summed up the mood, describing Jennifer Kent’s bone-chilling debut as nothing shy of the scariest film ever made.

Kent conjures a midnight horror ambience that comes on like black magic. There are creaking floorboards and ominous shadows aplenty; the film is a masterclass in give-and-take horror suspense. But niggling at the heart of The Babadook is a very adult deep-seated anxiety: the fear of being a bad parent.

Eric Bana’s international career was formed off the back of his creepily charismatic imitation of Mark “Chopper” Read in Andrew Dominik’s playful self-reflexive character portrait, one of Australian cinema’s most colourful and memorable biopics.

Dominik also caught a plane to Tinseltown, emerging as a major Australian-in-LA talent to watch after making two top-shelf American films: The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and Killing Them Softly.

Love Serenade (1996), director Shirley Barrett

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Titles such as Muriel’s Wedding and The Adventures of Priscilla: Queen of the Desert tend to dominate discussions of quirky Australian comedies made in the 90s, but Love Serenade – winner of the Caméra d’Or at the 1996 Cannes film festival – is right up there with the best.

A silver-tongued, thrice-divorced, droopy-faced celebrity radio DJ (George Shevtsov) moves to a crumby small town where his two new next-door neighbours (sisters, played by Rebecca Frith and Miranda Otto) throw themselves at him. What begins as a sort-of love triangle dovetails into a delightfully dry exploration of sexual politics, ripe with striking idiosyncratic characters and wry situational comedy.