Much has been written about the performance of Australian films at the box office in 2015, their collective gross totalling one of the biggest hauls in Australian history. But long after the numbers have been forgotten the films themselves will be remembered.

This list is generally comprised of titles that got a run outside the festival circuit (so The Daughter, which played at Sydney film festival but is opening in cinemas in March, will be on next year’s), with a couple of exceptions: Spear, which premiered in Adelaide in October, will start to be rolled out shortly after you read this and we want you to be excited; and The Suicide Theory, despite being shown in US cinemas and now US Netflix – may never receive distribution in Australia and it’s too good not to include.

Vincent Cassel isn’t just menacing as a father figure raising a compound of child assassins in the feature debut of acclaimed short film director Ariel Kleiman. He’s a force of nature, volatile and charismatic, ready to leap at you like a frog from a dynamite pond. Kleiman’s drama about a dangerous cult in an unnamed city sustains a moodily realistic tone with painstaking consistency, the director bringing an assured style typically reflective of film-makers many years his senior.

Read the full review.

Director Jocelyn Moorhouse’s self-professed “Unforgiven with a sewing machine” revenge/romance/return-to-small-town drama sure is a strange beast: an off-kilter, off-key, off-the-wall period piece that literally explodes with energy. Kate Winslet is the stabilising central force as Myrtle “Tilly” Dunnage in a film that oscillates madly between tones. Glorious treats emerge from the raucous including a scenery-chewing crazy cat lady-esque performance from Judy Davis.

Read the full review.

Australian film-making royalty Gillian Armstrong recounts the story of Kiama-born three-time Oscar-winning costume designer Orry-Kelly, who worked on classics Casablanca and Some Like it Hot and dressed the likes of Bette Davis and Marilyn Monroe – but somehow was never really appreciated back home. Reminiscent of her 2006 investigation into the life of Florence Broadhurst, Armstrong decorates her sleuthing to the hilt, with party-like visual panache and a cocktail of different documentary techniques.



Read the full review.

Writer/director Brendan Cowell, adapting his own acclaimed Belvoir St play, found a novel way to explore an unstable alcoholic’s tumultuous relationship with Mr Booze. His film, a polished piece of work bristling with acerbic dialogue at times reminiscent of the cut-throat comedy of American enfant terrible Todd Solondz, is less about the protagonist’s struggle for sobriety than why his friends and family want him to remain on the sauce.

Read the full review.

Visions of people from one of the world’s last tribal societies meeting around an active volcano in remote Vanuatu, as if regarding it as a kind of all-knowing spiritual force, ranked among the year’s most memorable films. Performed by non-professional actors from a tiny tribe known as the Yakel, Tanna is the narrative debut of Australian documentarians Bentley Dean and Martin Butler and the first feature to be shot entirely on the South Pacific island. Tanna’s doomed-lovers-from-warring-tribes framework is a familiar one, but exotic settings and the film-makers’ attention to detail give it a lush, lavish, shimmering sense of beauty and vitality.



Read the full review.

Despite opening in America in July to a slate of incredible reviews, director Dru Brown’s low-budget Queensland-shot thriller is yet to receive distribution in Australia. Percival (Leon Cain) hires an assassin (Steve Mouzakis) to kill him because he is cosmically incapable of doing the job himself, like the scenes in Groundhog Day where Bill Murray attempts suicide only to wake up in bed again and again. A batty, twist-filled screenplay – with a gay romance backstory and a splash of cross-dressing – binges on intertwining fate plotlines. It’s Sliding Doors with a bullet, smoked through a crack pipe.



Director Molly Reynolds’s documentary explores David Gulpilil’s home community of Ramingining in the Northern Territory, and its uneasy relationship with “whitefella” culture. Or as Gulpilil puts it, “what happened to my culture when it was interrupted by your culture”. Essentially a long audio essay paired with observational footage, Ramingining is used as a case study to springboard wider discussion around compatibility between Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities. The insights, articulated by Gulpilil with simple but profound eloquence, are fascinating.

Read the full review.

Despite a massive following in rural Australia, director Richard Todd’s jaw-dropping documentary about one man’s tireless crusade against coal seam gas companies went largely under the radar. Self-professed “accidental activist” Dayne Pratzky makes great never-say-never talent and his David and Goliath-esque battle, filmed over a handful of years and packaged with the pace of an action-thriller, is an outstanding local companion piece to 2010’s Oscar-nominated American-made exposé Gasland. Case studies exploring the effects of fracking will make your blood run cold.

Read the full review.

A contemporary Aboriginal dance movie from artists at Sydney’s Bangarra Dance Theatre? Yes, please. Choreographer Stephen Page’s feature-length directorial debut is a dazzling affair: a soul-stirring visual and audio feast that reflects in joyfully abstract ways on the troubled history of Indigenous Australians. Spear will evoke many responses and feelings, not least the sense that some kind of weird and wonderful milestone has been reached.



Read the full review.

Spear by Stephen Page. Photograph: Bangarra Dance Theatre

Australian-made blockbusters get by with a little help from their Hollywood friends. Warner Bros took a big risk stumping up nine digits for half-mad Aussie visionaries to make a batshit-crazy movie in the Namib desert, replete with petroleum-dowsed BDSM outfits and monstrous vehicles that actually worked. The result is the best action flick since the turn of the century and a masterclass in turbocharged cinema from director George Miller.

Read the full review.