Mad Max: Fury Road, The Dressmaker and Blinky Bill – family-friendly films, adult-oriented dramas and A-list stars replace 2014’s slew of sleeper hits. Could 2015 be the year of the homegrown box office?

Genre film-making in Australia hit its stride in 2014, serving up a mean slate of edgy releases that were often under-watched at home but found audiences overseas. Those edges have rounded out a little in 2015, with more family-friendly films, adult-oriented dramas and appearances from A-list celebrities in the pipeline. Here are a selection of Australian films to look forward to this year.

The Dressmaker

Kate Winslet stars in The Dressmaker. Photograph: NIXCo

Director Jocelyn Moorhouse described her adaptation of Rosalie Ham’s bestselling gothic revenge novel as “Unforgiven with a sewing machine”. To that we say: sold. Kate Winslet will ride into the fictional town of Dungatar circa the 1950s to reconcile with her sick mother (played by Judy Davis), impress the populace with crazy-good dressmaking skills and exact payback on the nasty pasties who drove her away as a child.

Moorhouse’s first film in almost two decades – her credits include 1991 Aussie classic Proof – comes chocked to the gills with talent including veteran cinematographer Don McAlpine (My Brilliant Career, Breaker Morant), composer David Hirschfelder (Strictly Ballroom, Shine), production designer Roger Ford (Babe, Rabbit-Proof Fence) and producer Sue Maslin (Japanese Story, Hunt Angels).

The Blinky Bill Movie

Australia’s iconic anthropomorphic koala climbs to the big screen, clad in trademark red dungarees, for the first time since 1992 when the mischievous marsupial stuffed into his bingle some $2m from the local box office. If a CGI-animated movie about a talking koala whose best friends include a kangaroo, a platypus and a mouse doesn’t have “exportable” written all over it, a bumper voiceover cast will give it a push along -- including True Blood’s Ryan Kwanten (as Blinky), Toni Collette, David Wenham, Barry Humphries and Rufus Sewell.



Mad Max: Fury Road



The angriest Max in show-business (he might not have a lot of competition, sure, but he’s still very angry) is back after three decades baking in the sun and wandering across post-apocalyptic deserts, which we can only imagine has made him even angrier. The last time we saw the eponymous leather-clad antihero (in 1985’s Beyond Thunderdome) he was attempting to escape the clutches of Tina Turner.

Since then he’s had a costume and, um, body change: Max is now played by Tom Hardy, who promises to bring more literal muscle to the role than the comparatively puny Mel Gibson. Mad Max: Fury Road’s hell-for-the-leather teaser trailer made the entire internet do a double-take when it launched in December, with an explosion-per-shot ratio quite possibly second to none. George Miller, who directed all of the original movies, returns to crank the dial to eleven.

Paper Planes

Paper Planes line-up. Photograph: Arenamedia

Could this be the first movie in history about competitive paper plane throwing? Writer-director Robert Connolly moves from literary fiction (2013’s The Turning) to child-orientated feel good drama with Paper Planes, which follows a 12-year-old boy (Ed Oxenbould) with a gift for building and flying aerodynamic stationary. This skill leads him all the way to the top: a world championship in Tokyo where careful folds and precise wrist movements presumably lead to stardom.



The movie played at CinéfestOz 2014 and the Melbourne international film festival, where a Q&A session with Connolly took on a 4D component when it was bombarded by hundreds of paper planes.

Sam Klemke’s Time Machine

Documentary director Matthew Bate’s feature length debut Shut Up Little Man! (2011) told a cracker stranger than fiction story about two violently noisy alcoholic flatmates in the 1980s whose daily routine included yelling insults at each other at ear-splitting volumes – and who were secretly recorded by their neighbours onto wildly popular audio cassette tapes.



Bate has found a worthy curio for his follow-up feature: the tale of Sam Klemke, a professional caricature artist who has been obsessively filming himself and chronicling his life (complete with narration and stream-of-conscious neurosis) since 1977. In other words, well before the dawn of the selfie stick.

Strangerland

Joseph Fiennes and Nicole Kidman in Strangerland. Photograph: Supplied

Nicole Kidman and Joseph Fiennes play parents on the hunt to find their teenage children after they go missing in the the desert in director Kim Farrant’s mystery-drama, which was shot in Sydney, Canowindra and Broken Hill. The Strangerland publicity still depicts a topless Fiennes clutching a grubby-looking Kidman, suggesting their journey across rugged and unforgiving Australian landscapes won’t be (who would have thought?) a walk in the park.

Kill Me Three Times

British actor Simon Pegg makes his Australian cinematic debut sporting an attention-devouring handlebar moustache in black comedy Kill Me Three Times, the first film from genre-hopping director Kriv Stenders since his 2011 smash-hit Red Dog.

Divided into three time-shifting chapters, details concerning the death of assassin-for-hire Charlie Wolfe (Pegg) are gradually divulged. Revelations reportedly arrive in a Tarantino-esque blend of pulpy movie throwbacks, crisscrossing narratives and overlapping points of view.



Oddball

Buoyed perhaps by the knowledge that the last Australian movie about an inspiring real-life pooch went rather well, Shane Jacobson stars in a feel-good family film about a chicken farmer who saves a colony of penguins by recruiting dogs to watch over them. Co-stars Sarah Snook, Deborah Mailman and Frank Woodley join Jacobson and filmmaker Stuart McDonald, who makes his transition from small to big screen after directing TV shows The Secret Life of Us, Summer Heights High and Ja’mie: Private School Girl. If you thought Red Dog was a cuteness overload, wait until you catch a glimpse of Oddball’s maremma sheepdog. Consider yourself warned.

Theatre turned film director Simon Stone. Photograph: Guardian

The Daughter

After directing a segment of the aforementioned literary anthology The Turning , hotshot Australian theatre director and “enfant terrible” Simon Stone continues his transition from stage to screen with The Daughter, bringing with him an A-list cast including Geoffrey Rush, Miranda Otto, Sam Neill and Nicholas “Bad Boy Bubby” Hope.

Stone is a big name around the Belvoir theatre in Sydney, which isn’t exactly known for fluffy feel-good productions. And The Daughter sounds appropriately dramatic: a radical reimagining of Henrik Ibsen’s The Wild Duck (which Stone directed at Belvoir, the Barbican in London, and everywhere in between) billed as “a contemporary portrait of family dysfunction, deception and denial”.