Down Under Flix

  The Fall Guy (2024) caps a trio of recent American productions with Antipodean elements. Like Anyone But You , it’s set in Australia, milks Sydney’s considerable production value, is headlined by two attractive actors, and prompted think pieces about the tenuous state of movie stardom. Like Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F , its direction—there Mark Molloy, here David Leitch—feels rather anonymous, despite The Fall Guy throwing an awful lot at the screen and wearing its designer eccentricities on its sleeve. I don’t doubt Leitch’s talent and ability to stage action, and admire his work on the original John Wick (uncredited) and Atomic Blonde , but of his subsequent films— Deadpool 2 , Hobbs & Shaw , Bullet Train —I struggle to remember any of the action beats delivered by one of our purported leading action directors. The Fall Guy features Ryan Gosling as a retired stuntman who returns to the fold when the movie star he previously doubled (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) goes AWOL. He’...

  A couple of months after watching Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F , I learned the film’s director was Australian. My earlier lack of inquisitiveness about the film’s director reflects a) the anonymity of its direction and b) Eddie Murphy’s default status as overriding auteur of the production. While Murphy has directed only one feature ( Harlem Nights ) and did not care for the experience, he's written numerous vehicles for himself and been the dominant authorial voice on many of his own projects. Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F is clearly a personal reclamation project, making up for the disappointment of Beverly Hills Cop III —largely of his own making—and of a piece with his other recent streaming-only releases (including fellow sequel Coming 2 America ), a stratagem—much like Adam Sandler—for maintaining the veneer of superstardom without testing box office pull in the marketplace. Lest I sound cynical, there’s a degree of thoughtfulness and pathos to the character etching in  Be...

  Going into Anyone but You (2024) , I expected to either be delighted by or despise the film. Thankfully, I was delighted. However, this apprehension reflects the baggage this film has accumulated, baggage well in excess of its dainty frame. For a movie as lightweight as Anyone but You , it’s become heavily and conspicuously entangled in ‘da discourse’ about 21st century movie stardom and romantic comedies, both routinely pronounced dead. The title of its Shakespearean source material, Much Ado About Nothing , proves apt to describe said discourse. Directed by Will Gluck ( Easy A , Annie , AACTA Award winner Peter Rabbit ) and scripted by Gluck and Ilana Wolpert, the film pits Ben (Glen Powell) and Bea (Sydney Sweeney) against each other as modern-day spins on Much Ado About Nothing ’s Benedick and Beatrice. Following mixed signals and miscommunications after a one-night stand, Ben and Bea are awkwardly reunited when Ben’s childhood friend (Alexandra Shipp) and Bea’s siste...

  Most major starlets — or actresses groomed for stardom — of the 1990s and early 2000s headlined a period film or two during their career ascent, whether suited to the milieu or not (see Julia Roberts, Meg Ryan, Michelle Pfeiffer, Jodie Foster, Nicole Kidman, Demi Moore, Winona Ryder, Reese Witherspoon, Kate Winslet, Gwyneth Paltrow, and so on). Frances O’Connor was no exception, and did nice work in films like Mansfield Park and The Importance of Being Earnest , though for this reviewer O’Connor impressed most indelibly in Emma-Kate Croghan’s Love and Other Catastrophes and Bill Bennett’s Kiss or Kill , both very spiky, spunky contemporary works. That mix of the classical and contemporary is at the core of O’Connor’s directorial debut, Emily (2022) , a dramatization of the life of the Brontë sister of the same name. I use the term dramatization rather than biopic, as O’Connor herself rejects the latter descriptor in a Guardian interview promoting the film ; one could venture ev...

  Operation Dumbo Drop (1994) , which celebrates – albeit with muted fanfare – its 30 th anniversary this year, is based on the true story of American soldiers who helped transport an elephant across enemy territory to a small village during the Vietnam War. Because the film is a live-action Disney product of the 1990s, it brushes only very faintly against the darker realities of the Vietnam War – as might be expected from the writers of Police Academy 3 and 4 and Snow Dogs , among other credits – and stars Danny Glover, Ray Liotta and Dennis Leary, all headliners in more corrosive entertainments, are amiable but sedated, all rough edges sanded down.  Of films from recent memory, George Clooney’s The Monuments Men  – about military personnel in World War Two retrieving stolen art back from the Nazis – is Operation Dumbo Drop ’s closest companion. But  Operation Dumbo Drop is the better film and Australian director Simon Wincer a less heralded but far...

  Whilst I have not crunched the numbers in any conclusive way, I would wager the ratio of major modern Australian directors to tackle period films is quite high. This predilection is not unique among national cinemas, but it is noteworthy, and explicable for a few reasons: the adaptation of canonical (on a curve) literature in the 1970s to legitimate the burgeoning film industry, the extension of this into television miniseries (e.g. For the Term of His Natural Life , Robbery Under Arms ) in the 1980s, the cultural brand recognition carried by the ANZACs and Ned Kelly, and the 21st century turn towards murkier revisionist histories, among other things. Off the top of my head, Bruce Beresford, Peter Weir, Gillian Armstrong, Jocelyn Moorhouse, Fred Schepisi, Phillip Noyce, John Duigan, Simon Wincer, Richard Franklin, Rolf De Heer, Scott Hicks, Andrew Dominik, Gregor Jordan, Justin Kurzel, Warwick Thornton, Rachel Perkins, Kiev Stenders, and Jennifer Kent have all tackled period assi...

  Tom Selleck, as an affable mid-tier movie star, was an affordable muse for Australian filmmakers in the late 1980s and early 1990s, working under Bruce Beresford on Her Alibi , Simon Wincer on Quigley , and Fred Schepisi on Mr Baseball (1992) . The last of these titles was one of the umpteen American baseball comedies that pervaded multiplexes in the 1990s — see also the Major League films, A League of Their Own , Angels in the Outfield , The Sandlot Kids , Cobb , Rookie of the Year , The Scout , Ed , and so on — with Kevin Costner’s great trio of baseball films ( Bull Durham , Field of Dreams , For Love of the Game ) bookending the era. Despite my admiration for Schepisi, I'd never seen Mr Baseball before now, and my dominant point of reference for the film   was a line in Bruce Beresford’s book There’s a Fax from Bruce , where the director laments local media jabs at his newest release: “Very nice of the SMH to note the bad reviews for my film. Did they do the same for ...

  As someone on a perpetual two-to-three-year pop culture delay, it’s very rare I see a new film in theatrical release, let alone its first day of theatrical release, let alone a new Australian film on its first day of theatrical release. However, I had this opportunity for Bill Bennett's  The Way, My Way (2024) . Bennett's film is also, by coincidence, the second film I’ve seen in as many months about someone making a pilgrimage along the famed Camino trail, the other being Emilio Estevez’s The Way . Both films, intriguingly, foreground their filmmakers in the screen story and provide onscreen surrogates for them: in The Way , Estevez appears briefly as a deceased doctor whose father—the film’s protagonist, played by Estevez’s real-life father Martin Sheen—embarks on the Camino trail to scatter his son’s ashes; in The Way, My Way , adapted from director Bennett’s autobiographical travel writing, Chris Haywood is cast as the filmmaker and follows in his director’s footsteps. ...

  Ned Lander’s Molly (1983) was a journey. I went from begrudgingly liking Molly ,   to wanting to begrudgingly like Molly,  to begrudgingly watching Molly and actively wanting it to end over the course of its short but at times ceaseless 90-minute runtime. Not to be confused with the Samuel Johnson-starring miniseries of the same name about Australian pop commentator Molly Meldrum, Lander’s Molly instead focuses on the titular singing dog who befriends  Maxine (Claudia Karvan, age circa 10-11, in her film debut), a young girl who recently lost her mother. Molly’s particular set of skills attract the nefarious, Svengalian intentions of Jones (Garry McDonald), a disgruntled former-entertainer-turned-cook who dognaps Molly with aspirations of reviving his own thwarted career. The above description paints Molly as an amiable goofy family film, and at times it is. Going into Molly , there are multiple component parts I like: I like dogs, singing or otherwise; I li...

  Heatwave (1982) is the fifth film I’ve spotlighted since August from the resourceful, intermittently underrated and overrated Phillip Noyce. While this exercise has not engendered any major reevaluation or revelation about his work—due in part to highlighting three fairly mainstream American works ( The Bone Collector , Salt , The Giver ) and one raw early work ( Backroads )—revisiting his collaborations with Angelina Jolie on The Bone Collector and Salt has reinforced Noyce’s adept handling of actresses. This trait—not one necessarily shared by other thinking man’s action film directors like John McTiernan, Tony Scott, Michael Mann, or Christopher Nolan—is also evident in Noyce’s work with Nicole Kidman on Dead Calm , Everlyn Sampi on Rabbit-Proof Fence , and Judy Davis on Heatwave . Heatwave is based in part on the story of missing journalist Juanita Nielsen, also dramatized in Donald Crombie’s The Killing of Angel Street one year earlier; here, it is Mary Ford, a reporter ...

  These Final Hours (2013) was released the same year as end-of-the-world comedies This is the End and The World’s End . It was preceded a year earlier by Seeking a Friend for the End of the World , and succeeded the following year by a second screen adaptation of Left Behind . The 2010s, generally speaking, was a lucrative decade for apocalyptic cinema: the world was overtaken by zombies ( World War Z ) and apes (the Planet of the Apes revival), collided with another planet ( Melancholia ), and was subject to other myriad calamities, with a fourth Mad Max film thrown in for good measure. Mad Max: Fury Road extended a tradition of apocalyptic Australian cinema dating back to On the Beach and encompassing Dead End Drive-In , Salute of the Jugger , Spirits of the Air, Gremlins of the Clouds , Wim Wenders’ Until the End of the World , Undead ,  The Rover , Wyrmwood , three prior outings for Max Rockatansky, and indeed These Final Hours . Despite this well-worn terrain, Thes...

  Both Leah Purcell’s The Drover’s Wife (2021) and Fred Schepisi’s Roxanne (1987) are drawn from theatrical progenitors: the former a play penned by director-writer-star Purcell herself, the latter Edmond Rostand’s French play Cyrano de Bergerac . Moreover, both features are somewhat shrewd updates of late 1800s source material: Rostand’s play was first performed in 1897, whilst Purcell’s 21st century play was adapted from Henry Lawson’s 1892 short story of the same name. Roxanne is a contemporary retelling and American transplant of Rostand’s play. The larger-than-life soldier poet Cyrano of the play-text is now silver-haired, silver-tongues fireman C.D., played by writer-star Steve Martin: more grounded than Rostand’s heroic character, but still afflicted with a gigantic nose. As per the beats of the play, C.D. falls in love with the beautiful Roxanne (Darryl Hannah) but is enlisted to help marble-mouthed Chris (Rick Rossovich) to woo her. The role of Cyrano scored Jose Ferr...

  Ride Like a Girl (2020) – Rachel Griffith’s film about the first female jockey to win the Melbourne Cup is an earnest  crowd-pleaser . Like most Hollywood takes on inspirational, incredible true stories, Ride Like a Girl hammers said inspirational, incredible true story into a somewhat familiar shape, but I appreciated its earnest and unjaded portrait of a Christian family and the nicely shaded performances of Teresa Palmer and Sam Neill.   The Patriot (1998) – An addendum to DeSemler , and probably the only Steven Seagal film I’ll ever cover on Down Under Flix. DP Dean Semler’s sophomore and swansong directorial feature after Firestorm , again with Stephen F. Windon lensing (adequately), the film stars Seagal as a former superstar immunologist turned regional GP and cattleman who faces off against a virus-spreading militia. Falling in the transitional period of Seagal’s stardom – no longer the star of lean & mean genre films or expensive Hollywood blockbusters, ...