Luke Buckmaster

Things eventually escalate, the pressure valve of pent-up emotions building and releasing. But it’s a long and demanding ride to get there, full of solemn looks and thousand-yard stares.

Bring Her Back is lighter on thrills and spills for the midnight movie and heavy with thick, abject horror and despair, featuring an intensely disturbing performance from Sally Hawkins.

Tamahori builds a largely credible aura, supported by uniformly strong performances and Gin Loane’s classy cinematography. But The Convert is one of those films with occasional moments that make you go “huh?”

The Way, My Way is hardly riveting viewing – but its softly inquisitive, life-affirming spirit is hard to hate.

You’ll Never Find Me builds a profoundly creepy and spiralling momentum before everything comes together in a shockingly brilliant final act with twists that nobody will see coming – or be able to forget.

This film drips with pot boiler-ish twists and turns, and is saturated with genre machinations – engaged, like many mystery scripts, in surprising and one-upping the viewer. But developments in the last act especially – and there are no spoilers here – contain some tough pills to swallow.

Mercy Road is an original, darkly idiosyncratic thriller; I’ve never seen another quite like it.

There are many provocative images: a winking statue of Jesus crucified, for instance, and occasions in which the “new boy” experiences stigmata. But Thornton revels in ambiguity and has no desire to provide viewers a clear pathway to understanding.

The cast, in weather-beaten and woebegone mode, are uniformly excellent, directed by Sen in beautiful unison, their performances different notes in the same melody.

This extraordinarily mundane film – a combination of words I’m fairly certain I’ve never used before – is a tremendous achievement and, in a subtle way, an amazing work of art.

There’s a sense everything is up for grabs and the end is nigh: of consensus reality; of cinema and copyright legislation as we know it. Pop culture’s infinite cycle always spits out and reassembles content; here the process is explicit, amplified, and turbocharged.

Atkins uses these settings as pretty scaffolding for otherwise ordinary scenes.

The cast of True Spirit had no such chance: the schmaltz and mushiness overpower everything. The film’s daytime-soap vibes render an unquestionably inspiring true story into an experience that feels so false, so rinky-dink, I had to remind myself it was based on real life.

The result is a hot, sticky, trippy fusion of wild style and painfully genuine emotion, with plenty of moments that take your breath away.

Sissy is a deranged pleasure to watch, though a strong stomach and an appreciation of genre protocols is highly recommended.

The Stranger avoids both neat explanations and contrived ambiguity, when narrative pieces are shuffling around to confuse audiences.

There’s a feminist undercurrent in You Won’t Be Alone, its observations of the patriarchy emerging in ways totally germane to the experience. An odd kind of eroticism also emerges: neither sensual nor entirely gross, and certainly not from the male gaze. Sometimes the film doesn’t even feel like it’s from a human gaze.

This unquestionably ambitious film works best as a mood piece: it’s big, bold, cerebral and intensely unsubtle.

Kiah Roache-Turner keeps the camera moving and the cuts regular, setting a cracking energy that’s particularly important for midnight movies like this, concerned more with relishing carnage than telling a story.

Streamline’s narrative doesn’t go in the expected direction, with structural and emotional surprises making good on its promise to deliver a different kind of sports story, even if its final stretch is a tad neat.

Gold is a minimalistic production, story and setting wise, with an interesting kind of contextual ambiguity: we know there is a wider world beyond the frame, though we don’t know what it looks like. Sparseness is intriguing, but this film is so damn sparse.

The aesthetic of the animation is, like the script, rather nondescript, with boilerplate-looking gloss and shine – like any number of less memorable DreamWorks or Pixar productions

This is a tremendously well-made film with a burning vitality: without question one of the most important Australian documentaries of the 21st century so far.

Perhaps the ultimate value of Nitram has nothing to do with its qualities as an intensely disquieting tone poem – though on that level the film is brilliant, marking another extraordinary achievement from Kurzel, who has a penchant for evoking gut-sinking emotional atmosphere.

Director Robert Connolly’s adaptation is a very gripping and polished film, commandingly performed and directed, with an airtight sense of tonal cohesiveness – despite lots of, well, air in the frame, derived from countless mid- and long-shots capturing barren exterior locations in a fictitious Australian outback town.

There is a great, moving story to tell about the real Sam Bloom – but this film only gets part of the way there.

Baby Done is funny; it’s sweet; it means something. Most of all it’s charming.

The autistic characters feel more like dramatic tools to improve the circumstances of neurotypical people, rather than fully-fledged humans who think, feel and act on their own terms.

You wouldn’t want to overstate the film’s achievements, given that a lot of it comes across as weird, self-pitying flapdoodle. But this is, as they say, progress of a kind.

It is a human-oriented drama that builds a thoughtful and contemplative space, empathising with characters grappling with difficult circumstances outside the common experience. It is also the kind of drama you sometimes want to grab and shake to life.

Rams is a lovely, even-tempered drama about men and rural life, gentle but firm of spirit, with a down-to-earth pith and a way of entertainingly and unpretentiously exploring potentially difficult subjects such as masculinity.

If all the money in the world is no guarantee of a good story, all the technical innovations – the dressing of sets, the creation of effects, the careful management of what is in and out of the frame – is of course no guarantee of one either.

Dirt Music eventually arrives at a deep, thought-provoking moment – but it takes the entire film to get there.

There is much to appreciate in this film; much to like. You don’t just watch it in big bright colours; you remember it in big bright colours too.

It is a lean and likeable, if slight and a little trite, celebration of the legendary Australian-American singer, feminist and anthem-creator Helen Reddy, shot with a rich neo-noirish texture by Oscar-winning cinematographer Dion Beebe.

Fundamental to Relic’s psychological oomph are three excellent performances, perfectly complementing that sticky-icky ambience.

Despite such a heavy context, the tone of the film is soft and pensive rather than polemical, constructed with a lightness of touch. It is often inspirational, in a quiet sort of way, and this is derived almost entirely from Hoosan himself.

Clearly marketed as inoffensive feel-good pap, I didn’t go into the film expecting a nuanced commentary on the racing industry. But nor did I expect what often felt like a thinly veiled 98-minute advertisement, interspersed with occasional moments of warmth and humanity.

Frustratingly, Lowenstein doesn’t let the musician’s talent speak for itself.

If some elements of Angel of Mine are simplistic, Rapace’s magnetic performance is anything but.

This very fine film has a way of pulling you towards its wavelength.

Is this outrageous comedy sexy or revolting? Elliott proves – though this feels like the least of his achievements – that a film can be both.

The way it subverts (to say the least) traditional concepts around a parent/child relationship gives it uniqueness and value.

After a lax first half, Palm Beach slowly settles into a groove, growing in complexity and nuance. However, Ward’s laidback approach is not remotely cinematic (this feels more like a filmed play), and never is there a sense of urgency or stakes.

The final reel is visually interesting in ways nobody could anticipate; it is also smugly perplexing, as if the filmmaker took joy from the knowledge virtually nobody would understand it.

In the new film, by literally creating a bust of the bird – as if a clump of stone or plaster could compare with the natural majesty of wings and feathers – the meaning has been accidentally inverted: a story about how something can never die becomes about how it will never live again.

The Breaker Upperers is Sami and Van Beek’s show through and through. The film coasts off the energy and rapport of this affable pair, whose smart-mouthed performances are full of pep and fizz. What they lack in wit they compensate for with sheer likability.

This is a fun film constructed in a smart way: an anti-high art picture that happily prioritises embellishing legend over recreating life.

This is an enthralling drama: the best and most interesting Australian biopic since Chopper in 2000.

What could have been a who’s-sleeping-with-who, tangled-web-we-weave drama quickly evolves into something much more compelling as Nation blurs the line between thriller, psychological drama and character study.

This is a film in which you will hear a letter read aloud, with a voice-over saying the words “you dared to dream”, delivered without irony. It is, as they say, what it is. Perhaps most interesting is Walker’s depiction of the mosque congregation. With its politics and divided factions, this part of the film feels utterly authentic and is dramatically interesting.

Structurally the film is a little shaggy but each time you feel it starting to dip, Stewart (and Harvey) brings it back on track.

A masterpiece in minimalist horror.

Campion offsets what could have been a morose drama with an atmosphere that becomes increasingly, and unnervingly, mystical.

Mad Max has always radiated an otherworldly vibe, a slightly sickly sensation that something at its core is fundamentally wrong.

One terrific moment in which Pat sees what he believes are the killer's shoes underneath a toilet stall door and berates him while Pamela climbs into the green van outside is reminiscent of another scene that arrived years later and was also labelled "Hitchcockian" – the footsteps down the hallway confrontation in the Coen brothers' No Country For Old Men.

The film itself is a kind of free spirit, and one that has made an indelible print on Australian cinema.

A young Russell Crowe is spellbinding in this ugly but unforgettable film that remains hard-hitting and shockingly violent more than two decades on.

A feast of kitsch and gaudy colour, set to the tune of an 80s synth soundtrack, the film plays like a G-rated music video. And Trenchard-Smith maintaining a buzzing energy throughout.

More than just an Aussie horse opera, this film employs stunning scenery, technical flair and Kirk Douglas in two roles in its pursuit of an uplifting conclusion.