This is a celebration of the richness and diversity of Australian screen talent, highlighting ten exceptional series and ten memorable movies that showcase the country's unique stories and perspectives.
One excellent use for the Australia Day long weekend is to appreciate how rich and diverse this country’s creative screen talents have been. Even with classics such as unavailable on streaming platforms, a scripted sampling of 10 exceptional series and 10 memorable movies provides more than enough outstanding viewing options. How a country depicts itself on screen allows for entertainment and a deeper sense of understanding – this is who we were, this is who we are, this is who might be.
From romantic comedies to crime thrillers, let’s start watching. 'The Unusual Suspects' captures its eclectic mix of familial longing, larrikin dedication, thongs-and-all magic realism, and 1980s Brisbane suburban crims. The seven episodes have a vivid energy, suiting the quests that fall upon the slender shoulders of 13-year-old Eli Bell.Now that it’s concluded after five entertaining seasons, this cycle-of-life Australian comedy-drama stands up as a genuinely diverse body of work. Beginning with a surprise high school pregnancy that intertwined two students and their distinctly different families, 'The Heights'' series was a paean to how we can adapt to – and grow from – life’s unexpected curves. Set in a multicultural inner-city Sydney, 'Janet King' has it always been a distinct part of the Australian vernacular but has it ever had a practitioner as fluent as Eddie Redcliffe (Madeleine Sami), the rattled Darwin homicide detective sent to a small Tasmanian town to help local police chief Dulcie Collins (Kate Box) with a macabre murder? A foul-mouthed and feminist screwball take on the classic procedural. 'The Newsreader' about a journalist (Keddie) who matches with a wealthy grazier and investor (Wenham) and slowly starts to lose her bearings. Told with scrupulous attention to the needs the characters steadily reveal, it’s a study of deception and cruelty where the accumulated cost is harrowing and enthralling. 'The Hunter' puts an Indigenous spin on blood-sucking horror as an outback Aboriginal community is protected by a wayward father and his teenage daughter (Rob Collins and Shantae Barnes-Cowan) from the vampires who’ve been proliferating since they arrived with the First Fleet. Creators Warwick Thornton and Brendan Fletcher go for pulpy fight scenes, derisive humour, and boomerang kills.'The Job' the comedy that single-handedly created a demand for brown suits, the idiosyncratic daily mishaps, and the small but satisfying victories of starting-life-over-in-Melbourne solicitor(co-creator Kitty Flanagan) make for a straight-faced but genuinely funny slice of office life. One way to measure how enjoyable this show is? The stacked list of Australian comic talent queueing up for a guest slot. This drama about a family whose individual members, whatever the generation, have to come to grips with what they really want from life, remains underappreciated. In outline, it’s tidy and sometimes even overly rewarding – when done-with-dating doctor Clare () meets the right man he’s a charming former model – but its depiction of the fractious family’s shared dynamic is sharply authentic. If you’ve ever been at a family get-together that went off the rails, this show knows your pain.A criminal enforcer and occasional hitman who is trying to lovingly co-parent his young daughter sounds like an incongruous mix, but over three seasons, this black comedy from creator and starhit all kinds of nerves. Ryan’s former soldier Ray Shoesmith is a laconic lens to examine violence’s corrosive hold, the struggle to escape past trauma, and the healing powers of the humble “dimmie”. When a woman is found murdered, and tensions run violently high, it falls upon two outsiders to seek answers. Leung Wei Shing (Yoson An) is the “head man” of the segregated Chinese miners, while Belle Roberts (Alyssa Sutherland) is a widow left with a failing newspaper. Neither knows what they’re in for.'The Honourable Woman' “Charming” can be apologetic praise at times, but it’s an essential element in this comic drama about a harried city lawyer () who relocates to a country town with her children to serve as the local magistrate and gets her sensibilities casually shocked back into shape. Given it ran from 1998 to 2000 (we will ignore the 2019 revival), 'The Wog Boy' it follows a misguided young Muslim man (Sami) who, to please his cleric father (Don Hany) and expectant community, fakes his acceptance into a medical degree. Jeffrey Walker’s film is a comic broadside against racial division, a tender love story, an exchange between cultures, and a comedy of poor judgment grown to alarming proportions. 'Animal Kingdom' that serves as a bloody coming-of-age tale, David Michod’s astonishing debut follows a teenage boy (James Frecheville) who goes to live with his crime matriarch grandmother (Jacki Weaver) just as his uncle (Ben Mendelsohn, never more intense) becomes violently unhinged. Suffused with dread and told with cruel economy – an entire court case is encapsulated by a single brief shot – the film feels inevitable. There’s no escaping i
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