Cirrus@Austlit

'He Ain't Heavy, the first feature film from West Australian director David Vincent Smith, begins with an attempted home invasion. On a suburban street, a man in a hoodie is shouting bloody murder, trying to kick the front door down, but the house's middle-aged occupant (Greta Scacchi) seems oddly unperturbed, drinking a cuppa at the kitchen table.'  (Introduction)

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'After a decade in Hollywood, Ben Mendelsohn has found himself, writes Harry Windsor.'

'Twenty years after The Matrix gave him a career in America, Hugo Weaving is back at the Sydney studio where the film was shot, only this time Weaving’s rehearsing a play instead of swinging on wires. The other day he took a phone call from one of the Wachowski sisters, who  directed The Matrix, marvelling at the serendipity, and Weaving keeps bumping into crew he’s worked with over the course of a screen career that’s now almost four decades old. Weaving is at Fox Studios because the Sydney Theatre Company (STC) has temporarily decamped to a row of shopfront offices here while the company’s home at The Wharf is under renovation. Tucking into a salad beneath one of the lot’s outdoor pavilions, he admits to experiencing a kind of cognitive dissonance, as if two mistresses – local theatre and Hollywood blockbusters – have accidentally been introduced.' (Introduction)

'Kate Mulvany’s adaptation of Mary Stuartshares with the recent film starring Saoirse Ronan and Margot Robbie a desire to portray rival monarchs Mary and Elizabeth I as sisters pitted against each other by the patriarchy.' (Introduction)

'Sweet Country, the first conventional feature that Warwick Thornton has made since Samson and Delilah (2009), his début, puts the lie to its title. It opens with a shot of boiling tar and only gets angrier from there. The film was christened a western after its première at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2017, though it is set a decade after World War I, far removed from the period we associate with the traditional oater. This doesn’t stop Thornton from invoking the genre and the medium explicitly, with 1906 film The Story of the Kelly Gang at one point projected onto a sheet outside an outback pub. The same pub is presided over by a madam whose bustier looks decades out of fashion, and the film is littered with well-worn lines like ‘I am the law’ – courtesy of an unsmiling Bryan Brown – that would seem to locate it squarely within the genre.'  (Introduction)

'Following the success of her Glass Menagerie with Eamon Flack, Pamela Rabe reunites with the director to explore the knottiness of Ibsen’s Ghosts. “I’m never one to sit around and wait for the phones to ring,” she says. “I love working in the theatre, and I work a lot in the theatre.”'

'With ‘Hacksaw Ridge’, Mel Gibson returns to the mythmaking game.'