Australia

The Babadook contains DNA from such disparate influences as Roman Polanski, Joe Dante, Georges Méliès, German expressionism, and Roald Dahl, but Australian writer-director Jennifer Kent’s very impressive feature debut is an intensely emotional horror film that feels completely unique in the current film landscape. It’s an allegory on grief, love, loss, and maternal trauma, and is as consistently unnerving as many a Polanski movie (and is the scariest thing with Roald Dahl blood since Tim Burton’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory).

Watching Drift is akin to feeling like Milhouse van Houten. He howled, in that long-ago Simpsons episode on the school bus, “When are we getting to the fireworks factory?”Drift, a period piece about the surging popularity of surfing in Western Australia, spends far too much time withholding surfing footage, presuming that what audiences would rather watch is discussions about surfing instead. Once the characters stop talking about the business of surfing, or the equipment related to surfing, or the feeling that one gets while riding a particularly radical wave, and they get on their boards and start riding said waves, Drift comes alive.

My Australia Written and directed by Ami Drozd Israel/Poland, 2011 In the social and economic fallout that followed World War 2, ten-year old Tadek and his older brother Andrzej become victims of the decaying zeitgeist in post-war Poland.  They benightedly join a gang of hooligans with neo-Nazi attitudes, but after being arrested for beating up …

Dreamland Dir. Ivan Sen (2010, Australia, 84 mins.) Dreamland is aptly titled; watching the film is much like watching a dream, albeit someone else’s dream. I make this distinction because, whist a dreamer instinctively knows what is happening in a dream without explanation, someone else trying to watch the same dream would be lost. This …