The 25 best Australian movies on Stan
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Loading... - Randy Watson
- 25 May 2022
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Australia’s own original streaming service, Stan, has a bumper crop of excellent homegrown cinema—so many, in fact, that winnowing them down to just 25 movies was a stressful exercise. Scroll for a bloody impressive list of films.
Acute Misfortune (2019)
Actor and director Thomas M. Wright boils down journalist Erik Jensen’s biography of self-destructive artist Adam Cullen into a tight and uncomfortable two-hander. Daniel Henshall is Cullen, an enfant terrible outsider artist driven to provoke chaos and conflict at almost every turn. Toby Wallace is Jensen, the young journo who grasps that the chance to profile Cullen is a career-making opportunity. The meat of the matter is the relationship between the two, by turns antagonistic, euphoric, destructive and creative. One of the best Australian films of recent years.
Animal Kingdom (2010)
A drim down under crime saga from David Michôd that sees a recently orphaned young man, J (James Frecheville), taken under the wing of Machiavellian matriarch Smurf (Jacki Weaver) and her bank robbing sons (Joel Edgerton, Ben Mendelsohn, Sullivan Stapleton and Luke Ford). Guy Pearce’s cop sees J as a chink in the family’s armour, but J already has his hands full trying to navigate the paranoid, hyper-violent criminal world he finds himself in. A stunningly assured debut.
The Castle (1997)
Working class battler Dale Kerrigan (Michael Caton) moves heaven and earth to save his resoundingly average suburban family home from being torn down to make way for an airport extension because, while it might not look like much, “you can’t buy what I’ve got!” Possibly the greatest Australian comedy of all time, The Castle comes to us courtesy of the Working Dog team and boasts a fantastic cast (Anne Tenney, Stephen Curry, Anthony Simcoe, Sophie Lee, Charles ‘Bud’ Tingwell and Eric Bana), capturing the Aussie suburban experience with pinpoint accuracy.
Chopper (2000)
Eric Bana transformed from amiable television comedian to dramatic heavyweight overnight with his turn as Mark Brandon “Chopper” Read, the criminal-turned-author whose dubious tales of lowlife hijinks made him a lowbrow literary sensation back in the day. Writer and director Andrew Dominik left a permanent scar on Australia’s cinematic psyche with this gritty, hallucinatory, queasily compelling portrait of a self-aggrandising thug, capturing both Read’s rough charisma and the hypocrisy in his heart. Easily one of the best Australian crime films ever made.
Crocodile Dundee (1986)
Aussie bushman Mick Dundee (Paul Hogan) puts his outback skills to work in the Big Apple when American journo Sue (Linda Koslowski) takes him there after profiling him for a magazine. Perhaps the second greatest Australian comedy of all time, Crocodile Dundee put the myth of the larrikin Australian manhood up on the big screen for all to see and remains the highest grossing Australian film of all time. Hogan’s sheer charisma is the engine that drives the whole enterprise, abetted by Russell Boyd’s gorgeous outback cinematography.
The Final Quarter (2019)
A painstaking account of the last stage of Indigenous player Adam Goodes’ football career, when he was confronted with repeated booing and abuse by racist fans at every match he played. Working with only archival footage and newspaper articles, director Ian Darling eschews emotional manipulation for a drier but, paradoxically, more compelling account of the controversy, forcing us to contend with the racism still apparent in our national sporting culture.
Jindabyne (2006)
Following on from the acclaimed Lantana, Ray Lawrence adapts the Raymond Carver story So Much Water So Close to Home. Gabriel Byrne, John Howard, Stelios Yiakmis and Billy Simon Stone are four friends on a weekend fishing trip who discover the body of a murdered girl. They decide to put off reporting the find so they can finish their trip, forcing their wives (Laura Linney, Deborra-Lee Furness and Leah Purcell) to question exactly what sort of men they are. Lawrence is a master of cutting through the veneer of suburban normalcy to reveal the anxieties beneath; this is one of his finest. Read More…
