FilmFest Australia — A–Z of films

What emotional life there is in this set up - and with so much is going on, there isn't much - is crushed by dreadful narration.

Despite its structural instability, Connolly still manages to find plenty of poignancy and to gather an emotional head of steam.

Courtin-Wilson's approach is graceful, impressionistic and with the heart of a poet.

A slow-burning, emotionally haunting film that thrusts the bond between mother and child under a microscope.

Beautiful Kate challenges familiar narratives of incest and abuse, presenting a far more subtle portrait of the disintegration of a group of people in a quietly desperate situation.

An affecting blend of warm comedy and high pathos, The Boys Are Back brings an unusual all-male perspective to its otherwise familiar themes of domesticity, death and dysfunction.

On stage, energetic performances can overcome slight characterisation and shallow plotting but onscreen, the wafer-thin characters and lack of plot thrust are exposed.

The scale is smaller and more personal, which adds to it credibility.

A garbled, unsatisfying mess that lacks any credibility or genuine suspense.

The concept is flawed. The aboriginals have been exploited, not in a bad way, but in order to make a film.

Has enough bite. Just.

Dogs in Space is less of a film and more of an experience, a poem rather than a conventional story.

A quite remarkable story of sacrifice, passion and commitment.

The characters never develop, some of the performances are questionably 'broad', and the quality of the digicam images evokes a cheap telesoap.

Testing a family for breaking points within a comic framework is not exactly new territory, but Watt's scripting is sharp and she plays fast and loose with audience expectation in the cliche department.

Francis positively relishes taking his viewers on deranged, demonic detours down uncharted byroads of body horror, too, with grand guignol as icky as it is utterly irrational.

Pure, stripped-down bleakness, both in the desaturated drabness of its appearance and in the last-days essentialism of its themes.

The movie works by getting under your skin in ways that you only realise when the situation turns sour.

Stone Bros is perhaps the first Australian film to take the rapidly shifting body politic of the nation's race relations and to roll it into fresh, full-flavoured comedy.

This is a cold and sombre environment from which is borne a cold and sombre film.