My Brilliant Career

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

Davis gives a lively and humanistic performance, and the direction by Gillian Armstrong (MRS. SOFFEL, HIGH TIDE), in her feature debut, matches her heroine's character: strong, with a good sense of wanting to get something done and then doing it. The mise-en-scene is well composed, and the story is well told in this wonderful Australian work. Read full review

Armstrong's first feature is a terrific job, a universally appealing story told with an integrity, humanity, warmth and humor you can taste. It is beautifully shot and performed with a style and sensitivity worthy of England's best actors. Russet-haired, bold-eyed, defiantly freckled Davis is like a summer storm, and Sam Neill has the rueful charm of a young James Mason. [22 Oct 1979, p.101]

My Brilliant Career doesn't need to trumpet either its or its heroine's originality this loudly. The facts speak for themselves — and so does the radiance with which Miss Armstrong and Miss Davis invest so many memorable moments. Read full review

Through a miracle of timing, Davis landed the lead role in Gillian Armstrong's assured debut feature My Brilliant Career fresh out of performance school, and it's impossible to imagine anyone else playing the part. Read full review

My Brilliant Career is a calm and sunny movie, carrying a family-film G rating despite its essentially grown-up theme. As a bonus it contains a delicious performance by Australian actress Judy Davis -- a clear-eyed beauty whose character long-sufferingly endures countless insults about her "looks" because of a turn-of-the-century Australian prejudice against freckles! [4 June 1980, p.18]

This Australian film is a charming look [from the book by Miles Franklin] at 19th-century rural days in general and the stirrings of self-realization and feminine liberation in the persona of a headstrong young girl who wants to go her own way. Read full review

If the narrative is slightly schematic in the way it sets up a binary between Harry and freedom, it’s never didactic. That’s thanks to Armstrong’s clear-eyed direction, which never feels the need to underline its points, relying on selections from Schumann’s “Scenes from Childhood” to lend the film a mood of droll wistfulness. Read full review

This is a modest, clear sighted film, and it profits considerably from a lack of the bravura landscape photography that most directors would have used to puff up a movie set in Australia. Read full review

The action and sentiments are familiar to the point of cliche, and there isn't much life in Gillian Armstrong's academic direction—she keeps pushing ideas over events, and meanings over emotions. But Judy Davis, as a teenage girl who dreams of transcending her rural background to become a cultivated, independent woman, grants the film much charm and passion. Read full review

This conflict between love and ambition is finely depicted as far as it goes, and the period setting, in a time when birth control problems made the choice of marriage a commitment to unlimited family life, could have reinforced the poignancy of the choice. But because the character has been thinly written, her decision seems selfishly arbitrary. [14 March 1980, p.17]

This Australia film - the pictorial re-creation of a late-Victorian novel - shows considerable charm and craft, though it's essentially taxidermy.

The period atmosphere is evoked with careful delicacy, but the characters rarely become more than stereotypes with performances (Judy Davis excepted) to match. Read full review