Streaming on Foxtel until December 2026 - Rod Bishop reports on NICK CAVE’S VEILED WORLD (Mike Christie, UK, 2025)

Nick Cave performs in Zagreb

The Australian/American bass player from the Red Hot Chilli Peppers opens this extraordinary documentary: 

“The amazing thing about the world Nick created through the movies, books and the songs is that they are full of the most divine, beautiful characters. And then, there’s the most pathetic of victims, the most ruthless of evildoers and just the worst of humanity. (Flea)

Other excerpts from the documentary’s first 10 minutes:

“Nick, I think, was very interested in the outlaw, the kind of Old Testament type world. So called norms of society and what is considered acceptable. What is just. The outlaw challenges all those things.

Ned Kelly was an outlaw figure that loomed very large in our imaginations. Nick actually grew up in Kelly country. There’s a direct lineage to some of the very dramatic things that were happening in Melbourne when Nick was growing up…But we’re also in a very extreme part of the world. It’s like another planet and we are the uninvited.” (John Hillcoat, The Proposition)

“For me, it’s always been fundamentally important that I’m seen as an Australian performer. I mean, it’s always been my thing. It’s my schtick and that the Bad Seeds are an Australian band.” (Nick Cave)

“I think Nick could only have come from Australia. Now, when Australian art is at its very best, someone like Barry Humphries, there’s a poetic nature to it. There’s a playfulness. There’s a sort of sacredness, and there’s a profanity to it.” (Warren Ellis, Bad Seed)

“It wasn’t many moons ago, that they thought we were a bunch of rough diamonds down there. But you know we’ve got more culture than a penicillin factory in Australia.” (Barry Humphries as Sir Les Patterson)

“The Australian morality is like the criminal morality…Like the rules that you’re taught at school are very much jailhouse rules. In Australia, you had to be good, or the audience would rip you apart.

The Birthday Party and the early Bad Seeds are confrontational music. The idea was to provoke. You got the feeling that when you went to see them, that anything could happen, violence could erupt. It was like they were ready to die onstage.

Nick was always a figure of myth. Just like Jesus or something. Do you know what I mean? Or like the Evil Jesus of Melbourne.

I met Nick at the drug dealers. I was just like an innocent private school boy working on my first heroin habit and I walked in, and there was the Prince of Darkness sitting on the couch watching a documentary about earth worms. I asked him ‘What are you watching?’ and he just turned around and bared his teeth at me.” (Andrew Dominik, Chopper, This Much I Know To Be True, One More Time With Feeling).

Although the documentary is only 65 minutes long, the density, contemplation and profundity of those interviewed holds true throughout, making it easily the most insightful documentary yet made about Cave. 

Nick Cave and Rowan Williams at the Coronation of Charles III

Others interviewed include the surprising Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, referred to by The Guardian as “the rock star” of Nick Cave’s Veiled World.There’s Wings of Desire director Wim Wenders; Florence Welsh (Florence and the Machine), Colin Greenwood (Radiohead), Irvine Welsh (Trainspotting); Thomas Wydler (Bad Seed), Seán O’Hagen (co-writer with Cave of Faith, Hope and Carnage); Bella Freud (fashion designer and maker of Cave’s suits), Polly Borland (photographer); Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard (20,000 Days on Earth); Nick Launay, Pete Jackson and Isabelle Eklöf (The Death of Bunny Munro); Thomas Houseago (sculptor); and Mick Harvey (former Bad Seed).

All focus on Cave’s enormous creativity through his long career of songs, soundtracks and books - the saints and sinners, the addicts and angels, and his fusion of biblical imagery with punk music. Only his remarkable internet dialogues with his fans in The Red Right Hand Files is missing.

At the end of the film, now no longer the drug addicted Prince of Darkness with ‘the scent of sulphur’ coming off him, who once challenged and provoked his audiences, Cave is a man whose grief has led him further into religion and spirituality, with a new and deep respect for the humanity of his audiences. 

In a final concert clip, he’s like a gospel preacher, rousing an audience into an uplifting celebration of “Joy” from his last album Wild God. Rowan Williams appears once more for his last contribution, a piercingly learned insight into the differences between joy and happiness.

Bob Dylan was there:

“Saw Nick Cave in Paris recently at the Accor Arena and I was really struck by that song Joy where he sings 'We've all had too much sorrow, now it’s the time for joy. ' I was thinking to myself, yeah that's about right.”⁠

A New Book on French Cinema by Australian Film Critics - FAR FROM THE MASTERS: EXPERIMENTATIONS IN POST-NEW WAVE FRENCH CINEMA

 Cinema Reborn stalwart supporter Philippa Hawker is a contributor, along with seven other Australian film critics, including another stalwart supporter Jake Wilson, to a new book on French Cinema published by Melbourne-based Index Press.

 

FAR FROM THE MASTERS: EXPERIMENTATIONS IN POST-NEW WAVE FRENCH CINEMA Edited by  Conall Cash and  Corey P. Cribb. 

 

Philippa has sent through some early critical reactions to the book.

 

Jacques Rivette

“From the metaphysics of Le Pont du Nord and the relation of Racine to L’Amour fou to the rich diversity of Marc’o’s career, not to mention the challenges of Jeanne Dielman, this is a compact illustration of the unrecognised brilliance and sheer liveliness of the best Australian film criticism.” 

— Jonathan Rosenbaum, film critic at the Chicago Reader 1987–2008

Agnes Varda

“French filmmakers who emerged in the ’50s and ’60s (including Chris Marker, Jean-Luc Godard and Agnès Varda) collectively proclaimed in 1967 that they were, in every sense, “far from Vietnam.” In Australia today, a like-minded group of film scholars and critics declare that they are geographically far from France, and especially far in time from its glorious Nouvelle Vague. So, their curiosity and intellectual inventiveness fastens, by identification, on the intriguingly “belated” phenomenon of post-New Wave French cinema: that loosely bundled generation including Chantal Akerman, Marc’o, Maurice Pialat, and Patrick Deval—without forgetting the post-68 experiments of Varda, Jacques Rivette, and François Truffaut—who forcefully questioned the limits of cinema and opened new ways of thinking and feeling. Far from the Masters is an indispensable assemblage of superbly written, inquisitive, and trail-blazing essays.”

— Adrian Martin, Australian film critic far from Australia

 

Maurice Pialat

“What does it mean to come “after”? Far from the Masters is a book marked by two belated arrivals: first, the generation of French filmmakers who emerged in the wake of the nouvelle vague, figures like Maurice Pialat, who extended and contested the work of his still better-known precursors; and second, a group of Australian critics who, two decades into the twenty-first century, took a collective look back at that earlier moment. Out of this temporal décalage, new perspectives open—not only on some of the most important French filmmakers of the era, but equally on a present moment of cinephilic community.”

— Erika Balsom, Reader in Film Studies at King’s College, London

 

ENQUIRIES ABOUT SALES 

mail@index-press.com

CINEMA REBORN – JANUARY NEWSLETTER ANNOUNCING THE FIRST TITLES and MULTI-TICKET DISCOUNT VOUCHERS

 

Shirley MacLaine, Artists and Models

Cinema Reborn 2026 is off and running with screening details announced of our first four titles. We’ve taken over the Classic Matinees and Make it Musical weekend time slots at the Ritz (1-10 May) and the Lido (8-17 May) and we’ll be presenting four Australian premieres of four films from Hollywood’s Golden Age all in beautiful new 4K restorations. We’re also announcing here details of our multi-ticket concession price passes which you will be able to buy and use to book these titles as well as the eighteen titles to come. 

The Heiress (Dir. William Wyler, USA, 1949)                                                                               

‘It’s a peerless, super-controlled movie … Wyler’s greatness here is that he can hold the elements of the film in his palm without constricting the actors. He frees them.’ – Pauline Kael, The New Yorker

‘It’s immaculately acted and crafted – it’s one of the finest films ever made about nineteenth-century America.’ – Martin Scorsese

In mid-nineteenth-century New York, the timid and ungainly Catherine Sloper (Olivia de Havilland) lives with her wealthy father (Ralph Richardson), who spitefully measures her up against his beloved late wife. When Catherine is courted by the beguiling but fortuneless Morris Townsend (Montgomery Clift), her father’s resistance leads to grievous revelations about the true feelings of both men. 

Montgomery Clift, Olivia De Havilland, The Heiress

Based on a stage play adaptation of the 1880 Henry James novel Washington Square, William Wyler’s elegantly mounted character study is a prime example of classical Hollywood filmmaking and among the director’s finest achievements. It was the biggest winner at the 1950 Oscars, taking home awards for art direction, costume design, Aaron Copland’s score and de Havilland’s performance.

For session times and bookings at the Randwick Ritz click here

For session times and bookings at the Hawthorn Lido click here

Only Angels Have Wings  (Dir. Howard Hawks, USA, 1939)

‘A completely achieved masterpiece … drawing together the main thematic threads of Hawks’s work in a single complex web.’ – Robin Wood

‘The most amiable great movie ever made.’ – Michael Sragow, The Criterion Collection

Cary Grant, Rita Hayworth, Only Angels Have Wings

In South America, a group of intrepid pilots led by the laconic Geoff Carter (Cary Grant) navigate treacherous conditions to deliver airmail across the Andes, facing the possibility of death with every flight. Director Howard Hawks drew from his own experiences with aviation in creating this seminal adventure drama, which represents a masterful synthesis of the themes of his 1930s output. Co-starring Jean Arthur as spirited outsider Bonnie Lee – whose emotional openness contrasts Geoff’s stoicism – alongside Richard Barthelmess and Rita Hayworth in her first major role, Only Angels Have Wings is perhaps the quintessential demonstration of Hawks’s unparalleled ability to balance existential preoccupations with dazzling action sequences, humour and warmth.

For session times and bookings at the Ritz click here

For session times and bookings at the Lido click here

Artists and Models (Dir. Frank Tashlin, USA, 1955)

‘Provided the Dean Martin–Jerry Lewis duo with its finest screen hour … a dizzily reflexive play on movie illusion.’ – Adrian Martin

Comic book addict Eugene (Jerry Lewis) has lurid dreams about the adventures of avian superhero Vincent the Vulture. In waking hours, his favourite character is sexy crime fighter Bat Lady; unbeknownst to Eugene, however, not only is the comic strip’s creator Abigail (Dorothy Malone) living in the very same apartment block, but Abigail’s flatmate – and model for Bat Lady – Bessie (Shirley MacLaine) has taken a shine to him. Meanwhile, Eugene’s own roommate, self-assured painter and ladies’ man Rick (Dean Martin), has his sights set on Abigail – and, thanks to Eugene’s habit of talking in his sleep, an idea for a sneaky new business opportunity … 

Jerry Lewis, Dean Martin, Artists and Models

Shot in glorious VistaVision and featuring colour schemes that only Hollywood could invent, Frank Tashlin’s musical romantic comedy Artists and Models satirises mid-’50s moral panics over the supposedly corrupting influence of comic books while offering a sublime canvas for Martin and Lewis’s legendary double act.

For session times and bookings at the Ritz click here

For session times and bookings at the Lido click here

One Hour With You  (Dir. Ernst Lubitsch, USA, 1932)

‘This charming, richly detailed film is a jewel in the director’s crown, and one of the finest musical comedies of the early sound era.’ – Wheeler Winston Dixon, Senses of Cinema

Maurice Chevalier, Jeannette MacDonald, One Hour With You

Even though this pre-code reimagining of his 1924 silent film The Marriage Circle was originally handed to a young George Cukor to direct, Ernst Lubitsch stepped back in midway through production to take the reins, lending his inimitable style to this comic tale of a loving couple simultaneously encountering opportunities for infidelity with each other’s unscrupulous friends. Brightened by a dash of Viennese operetta, some Parisian boulevard humour and recurring fourth-wall breaks from male lead Maurice Chevalier, Lubitsch’s musical also benefits from the gorgeous voice of fellow star Jeanette MacDonald and eight songs mostly composed by Oscar Straus and Leo Robin. Nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards, One Hour With You is a fine example of the slyly subversive sex comedies that Lubitsch and his contemporaries perfected in early 1930s Hollywood – the likes of which would shortly be wiped out by the arrival of the censorious Motion Picture Production Code.

For session times and bookings at the Ritz click here

For session times and bookings at the Lido click here

MULTI-TICKET DISCOUNT PASSES

We are responding to public demand by introducing a discount pass for those who want to see the maximum of Cinema Reborn at the lowest possible price. Five ticket passes are $80 and ten ticket passes are a super-bargain at $140. Each ticket allows a maximum of two redemptions per session.

To buy a pass for sessions at the Ritz click here and fill in the box for which Voucher  you wish to purchase

To buy a pass for sessions at the Lido click here and fill in the box for which Voucher  you wish to purchase

Volunteers

Cinema Reborn always has a need for volunteers to help on our information desk and to monitor the door at the screenings. If you would like to know more send your name to cinemareborn2025@gmail.com and mention which city you are in and your availability (Nights, Weekends, Daytime). If you would like to know what it’s like to volunteer then here’s a glowing testimonial from one of those who worked on the 2025 program.

“I’m happy to share that I’ve been involved as a volunteer with the Cinema Reborn film festival 2025. Over the course of the festival, I assisted with the smooth running of ten film sections, welcomed audiences and supported venue operations. Grateful to be part of a passionate community celebrating film heritage and restoration. Special thanks to Grace Boschetti and Kevin Cassidy for creating a warm, supportive environment for all the volunteers; it made the experience even more memorable! Looking forward to more opportunities like this in the future!

If you know a young person who might enjoy being involved in the presentation of Cinema Reborn don’t hesitate to pass this newsletter to them and suggest they contact cinemareborn2025@gmail.com to make known their interest.

Charitable Donations

The major cost of presenting Cinema Reborn comes from the screening fees paid to archives and producers. Since our inception supporters have understood the need for continuing support to ensure that the annual season is able to present the very latest and very best international and Australian film restorations.

Tax deductible charitable donations have enabled us pay these fees and keep our admission charges to regular Ritz and Lido prices (with the lowest student concessions of any similar film-related event). We have once again set up a page via the Australian Cultural Fund to receive donations of any size,  from large or small. You can find it IF YOU CLICK ON THIS LINK

The Current Cinema - David Hare runs through his best films of 2025 - Richard Linklater and Kelly Reichardt star

 Let me start with the two best movies of last year. 

The four screens above show Ethan Hawke in Blue Moon wiping out the set with his performance of Larry Hart in Richard Linklater’s frankly dumbfounding six scene re-imagining of Larrys last Night in Sardi's to horn in for a moment on Rodger's new triumph, Oklahoma! with his new lyricist, the appalling but brilliant Oscar Hammerstein II, and Larry's loss to him. 

 

Coming as this does after watching Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague earlier this year, but made after that one, itself a totally winning and transparently affectionate song to Godard and 1960 from someone who loved and remembers it for those of us who lived through it and remember it too. 

 

With Blue Moon, I think Linklater has confected a six scene Kammerspiel in a single Sardi's set in a remembered 1943 on that night of the Oklahoma! premiere. The first fifty minutes are almost entirely a monologue in what might be the Oscar winner for the year, but it's more than a tribute from me to Ethan Hawke to characterize such a complex and paradoxical genius as Hart with so much finesse, never allowing the gloom and self-pity to overrun the brilliance, nor pure fancy free to undermine the razor sharp ear for dirty truths. His humour stands beyond everything and the delivery is up there in lights at the level of a Hildy Johnson/Ros Russell high speed soliloquy. 

 

Unlike Nouvelle Vague, in which Linklater so brilliantly and lovingly homages the cinephilia and the whole art of mise-en-scene, Blue Moon does a Dreyer-esque containment to the six movement structure of the kammerspiel and orchestrates the rivers of dialogue, all of it brilliant (because perhaps largely reported truth) with the sheer, simple grace of the cinema's most primal tools, slow diagonal tracks, tight close shots to medium close shots. Minimum resort to shot/reverse, constant and regular staging in depth to entail conversations and moveable lighting to encase and amplify the mood 

 

And of course the music. 

 

Kelly Reichardt's new movie, The Mastermind is another total surprise formally from Kelly for me if not quite at the smoothly-paced and endlessly rewarding movie about achievement, her previous Showing Up from 2023 in which the simple but painfully difficult act of creating art succeeds to give its own reward. 

 

The Mastermind spends the first half of the picture simply showing us the unravelling of a man (Josh O'Connor, above) who is both doomed to failure, but who it seems may have no other options in life. After the distinctive slow-cinema tempo of the first half the movie takes off into a catastrophic narrative disconnection for a man, by now alone without any badly needed love except for his remaining friend played by a wonderful John Magaro (with O'Connor, screen below). Magaro may be the last friend he'll ever have.

 

If you've got the patience for Kelly's pacing and quiet, clear headed and endlessly rewarding observational cinema this work satisfied me and moved me very greatly. Up there with Blue Moon for the year. 

 

Not everything in the USA is going to hell in 2025 if these two movies can come out of arthouse/studio streaming funding .

 

…and now some more.

 

Paula Beer, Miroirs No. 3

Petzold’s Miroirs No. 3. Paula Beer, as usual radiant, and joined deftly if too late in the piece by the very appealing Enno Trebs with whom she was coupled initially in Petzold’s last film Afire/Rote Himmel from 2023. That film for me is a masterpiece. If  Miroirs No. 3 doesn’t come near its emotional intensity and impact, I can only think Petzold wanted to make a return to his blurred and displaced/missing identities pictures from earlier titles like Barbara and Phoenix. Regardless, I’ll watch everything he makes.

 

And a callout for del Toro’s big, blousy Frankenstein. What can I say? Oscar Isaac gives a characterization of the doctor that puts him beyond Oscar territory. Like Ethan Hawke, albeit somewhat younger, Isaac really is a dedicated actor’s actor, peerless in appeal - the first movie I watched him in was the Coen’s very fine Inside Llewyn Davis. I also found him/find him totally babe-licious. Never hurts does it? 

 

Oscar Isaac, Frankenstein

Back to Frankenstein, is there anything more wonderful than Del Toro’s sumptuous love for and recreation of the sublime Romantic world of Gothic Horror. Is there any greater genre? And his work continues, with Universal that studio's fantastic transition of 20s Weimar Germany with all its magic and miracle then to America’s and Laemmle’s Universal Studios literally rebirthing the total UfA tradition. Del Toro’s new movie is not his best - I find a few too many gestural narrative steps that seem redundant to the pacing. But who else is doing this stuff anymore? And so well?

 

And a mention in anticipation of P.T.Anderson’s new gig, One Battle After Another which will be viewed when the UHD disc arrives next week.

 

Also running high, Ozon’s big return to seductively transgressive form with Quand Vient l’Automne. It’s as he were if in radical gay brotherhood with his younger colleague, the great Alain Guiraudie, whose hilariously subversive social undermining takes the bejesus out of French Provincial bovinity in Miséricordia in which only the old Catholic priest seems to get laid.

 

Quand Vient l’Automne

The Goddess knows the world needs all the anarchists and transgressives it can get in these terrible dying days of rotting, corrupt Western Societies.

The Current Cinema - Barrie Pattison takes another look at NOUVELLE VAGUE (Richard Linklater, USA, 2024)

Nouvelle Vague, the new Richard Linklater film, has arrived. It is an Academy frame black and white effort, in English sub-titled French, claiming to present the break out film-making of the sixties as we follow Jean-Luc Godard putting together À bout de souffle/Breathless.

Lookalikes appear as the celebrities of the French film making scene - Jean Cocteau, (“Art is not a business. It’s a priesthood”) Jean-Pierre Melville in his cowboy hat or Roberto Rossellini hitting up his driver for a loan. They are filmed in the original locations in the Paris of Linklater’s After Midnight. There's Guillaume Marbeck/Godard’s contemporaries grouped outside the Le Champo display with a Jerry Lewis poster prominent, a script conference on a bench in Richelieu-Drouot Metro, wheeling Matthieu Penchinat/Raoul Coutard’s camera concealed as a baby carriage  down the Champs Elysées following Zoey Deutch in her Jean Seberg Herald-Tribune T-Shirt or the unit playing pin ball in (is that?) the bar where they launched into spontaneous dance in Bande à part. Visitors on the nude scene shoot include Georges de Beauregard because he’s the producer and José Bénazeraf because he’s a lech.  There is a nice moment where Benjamin Clery, their Pierre Rissient, has a camera set up calculated to film the Latin Quarter street lights coming on. 

Aubry Dullin & Zoey Deutch and the Arc de Triomphe

Linklater was clearly aiming at evoking Godard’s free-wheeling style, which was so electrifying to those sixties audiences I saw sit stony faced through the earlier, master-crafted classic French films which I absorbed with such enthusiasm.

Linklater is likely to bluff viewers who didn’t live through that era but I’m continually distracted by departures from narratives with which I’m familiar. The story was that Godard made off with Cahiers du Cinéma’s petty cash to bankroll his first attempt at filmmaking. Here he uses it to get to the Cannes festival. We heard Truffaut's credited original story for A bout de souffle was a handwritten page which he scribbled to provide name prestige from his bonanza success with Les 400 Coups to fundraising.  

I haven’t handled a copy of the film but wide screen was firmly established by 1959 and the film's projections that I watched all seemed to fit comfortably on that.  We heard that Godard’s first cut was stunningly boring, so he just went through and lopped out the bits he didn’t like, joining up what was left and claiming to have invented the jump cut, which incidentally was already part of the classic film vocabulary. Look at William Wyler’s 1958 archetypically traditional The Big Country! What about the nose job Belmondo got between his earlier Godard short and their feature.Throw in an inexplicable glimpse of Françoise Arnoul’s birthday party.  

History is repeating itself here when unknown Aubry Dullin and lively visiting U.S. starlet Zoey Deutch get to animate the original movie star characters. 

Guillaume Marbeck & Richard Linklater

I’m a fan of Linklater and I can see the appeal of his version to the director of Dazed & Confused or Boyhood  but personally I’m getting over-familiar with the Godard narrative - the Richard Gere Breathless, Kristen Stewart in Seberg. By and large, I find Michel Hazanavicius’ 2017 Godard mon amour, with Lou Garrel as a  cantankerous Jean-Luc, battling middle-aged celebrity, more convincing. He always struck me as someone disturbingly undisciplined, who lucked out because he recruited talented people like Seberg and Belmondo, Raoul Coutard and Michel Legrand and I don’t know that we need two Godard bios, while Agnes Varda’s beautiful study of Jaques Demy,  Jacquot de Nantes, is all but unknown.

Maybe I’d have regarded the uneven J-LG output with more sympathy if he hadn’t been unable to come up with the names of any of the Monogram movies he’d dedicated  À bout de souffle to, when called on, a plausible test of poltroonhood.

********************************

For another report on the film click here to read Rod Bishop's thoughts

The Best Awards Night in Australia - Nominations for the Film Critics Circle of Australia Awards - All welcome - 11 February at the Rose of Australia Hotel Erskineville

N0MINATIONS FOR THE BEST AUSTRALIAN FILMS OF 2025

 

 

BEST FILM

 

Inside

INSIDE                                                                                               

PRODUCERS: KATE GLOVER, MARIAN MacGOWAN

KANGAROO ISLAND                                                                     

PRODUCERS: TIMOTHY DAVID, PETER HANLON, BETTINA HAMILTON, DANIEL M ROSENBERG, LEONA CICHON

THE SURFER                                                                                    

PRODUCERS: LEONORA DARBY, JAMES HARRIS, ROBERT CONNOLLY, JAMES GRANDISON, BRUNELLA COCCHIGLIA, NATHAN KLINGHER, NICOLAS CAGE                                                                     

THE CORRESPONDENT                                                               

PRODUCER: CARMEL TRAVERS            

BRING HER BACK                                                                          

PRODUCERS: SAMANTHA JENNINGS, KRISTINA CEYTON

 

BEST DIRECTOR

Bruce Beresford

BRUCE BERESFORD, THE TRAVELLERS

LORCAN FINNEGAN, THE SURFER 

DANNY PHILIPPOU, MICHAEL PHILIPPOU, BRING HER BACK   

KRIV STENDERS, THE CORRESPONDENT

CHARLES WILLIAMS, INSIDE

BEST PERFORMANCE BY A MALE ACTOR IN A LEADING  

ROLE

Richard Roxburgh, The Correspondent

LUKE BRACEY,THE TRAVELLERS

BRYAN BROWN, THE TRAVELLERS

VINCENT MILLER, INSIDE

GUY PEARCE, INSIDE

RICHARD ROXBURGH, THE CORRESPONDENT

BEST SCREENPLAY

Kiah Roache-Turner

PETER DUNCAN, THE CORRESPONDENT

DANNY PHILIPPOU, BILL HINZMAN, BRING HER BACK

KIAH ROACHE-TURNER, BEAST OF WAR

CHARLES WILLIAMS, INSIDE

                                                                      

BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY

Radek, Ladczuk

ANDREW COMMIS ACS, INSIDE

GEOFFREY HALL ACS, THE CORRESPONDENT

RADEK LADCZUK, THE SURFER

AARON McLISKY ACS, BRING HER BACK
MARK WAREHAM ACS, BEAST OF WAR

 

BEST PERFORMANCE BY A MALE ACTOR IN A

SUPPORTING ROLE

Jai Courtney, Dangerous Animals

JAI COURTNEY, DANGEROUS ANIMALS

COSMO JARVIS, INSIDE

JULIAN MCMAHON, THE SURFER

JONAH WREN PHILLIPS, BRING HER BACK

 

BEST PERFORMANCE BY A FEMALE ACTOR IN A LEAD

ROLE

Rebecca Breeds, Kangaroo Island

REBECCA BREEDS, KANGAROO ISLAND

SALLY HAWKINS,  BRING HER BACK

SUSIE PORTER,  THE TRAVELLERS

DAISY RIDLEY, WE BURY THE DEAD

LILY WHITELEY, KANGAROO

 

BEST PERFORMANCE BY A FEMALE ACTOR IN A

SUPPORTING ROLE

Deborah Mailman

ADELAIDE CLEMENS, KANGAROO ISLAND

MARTA DUSSELDORP , WITH OR WITHOUT YOU

DEBORAH MAILMAN, KANGAROO

BROOKE SATCHWELL, KANGAROO

BEST DOCUMENTARY FEATURE

BUT ALSO JOHN CLARKE, DIRECTOR: LORIN CLARKE, PRODUCER: RICHARD KEDDIE

EDGE OF LIFE, DIRECTOR: LYNETTE WALLWORTH, PRODUCER: JO-ANNE McGOWAN

JOURNEY HOME, DAVID GULPILIL, DIRECTORS: MAGGIE MILES, TRISHA MORTON-THOMAS, PRODUCERS: RACHEL CLEMENTS, JIDA GULPILIL, LLOYD GARRAWURRA, TRISHA MORTON-THOMAS, MAGGIE MILES

THE WOLVES ALWAYS COME AT NIGHT , DIRECTOR: GABRIELLE BRADY, PRODUCERS: JULIA NIETHAMMER, ARIUNAA TSERENPIL, RITA WALSH

YURLU | COUNTRY, DIRECTOR: YAARA BOU MELHEM, PRODUCER: YAARA BOU MELHEM, MAITLAND PARKER, TOM BANNIGAN PARKER, TOM BANNIGAN

                                                                                                            

BEST MUSIC (ORIGINAL SCORE)

Cornel Wilczek (left)

MATTEO ZINGALES, JOSIE MANN, KANGAROO

ARIEL MARX , KANGAROO ISLAND

FRANCOIS TETAZ, THE SURFER

CORNEL WILCZEK, BRING HER BACK

MICHAEL YEZERSKI, DANGEROUS ANIMALS 

 

BEST PRODUCTION DESIGN

Sheree Phillips

NICHOLAS DARE, TOGETHER

ESTHER ROSENBERG, BEAST OF WAR

FIONA DONOVAN APDG, THE CORRESPONDENT

VANESSA CERNE, BRING HER BACK

SHERREE PHILLIPS, WENT UP THE HILL

 

BEST EDITING

Kasra Rassoulzadegan

TONY CRANSTOUN, THE SURFER

VERONIKA JENET, THE CORRESPONDENT

GEOFF LAMB, BRING HER BACK

KASRA RASSOULZADEGAN, DANGEROUS ANIMALS   

STEPHEN EVANS, KIAH ROACHE-TURNER,REGG SKWARKO,                            BEAST OF WAR       

                                                                                                     

BEST ANIMATED FEATURE

Lesbian Space Princess

LESBIAN SPACE PRINCESS, DIRECTORS: EMMA HOUGH HOBBS, LEELA VARGHESE, PRODUCER:TOM PHILLIPS

MAGIC BEACH, DIRECTOR: ROBERT CONNOLLY, PRODUCERS: CHLOE BRUGALE, ROBERT CONNOLLY, KATE LAURIE, LIZ KEARNEY

THE LOST TIGER, DIRECTOR: CHANTELLE MURRAY, PRODUCERS: NADINE BATES, RYAN GREAVES, CHANTELLE MURRAY, KRISTEN SOUVLIS

 

SPECIAL AWARD IN HONOUR OF DAVID STRATTON

 

THE DAVID STRATTON AWARD FOR INTERNATIONAL

CINEMA

BUGONIA, DIRECTOR: YORGOS LANTHIMOS

EMILIA PEREZ, DIRECTOR: JACQUES AUDIARD

I’M STILL HERE, DIRECTOR: WALTER SALLES

ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER, DIRECTOR: PAUL THOMAS ANDERSON

Emilia Perez

DATE: WEDNESDAY 11TH FEBRUARY 2026

 

TIME 7PM FOR 7.30 START

 

VENUE: THE ROSE OF AUSTRALIA HOTEL, ERSKINEVILLE 

1 Swanson Street Erskineville (just near Erskineville Station)

 

TICKETS: $35 PER HEAD (INCLUDES A LIGHT SUPPER)

 

CASH ONLY EVENT: BOOKING ESSENTIAL. BOOK @ filmcriticsaust@bigpond.com

 

DRESS CODE CASUAL/LOUNGE

 

DRESS CODE: CASUAL/LOUNGE