Down Under Flix

  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...