Wolf Creek
Greg McLean 2004 Australia 4th time; DVD
Screenplay: Greg McLean; Producer: Greg McLean, David Lightfoot; Photography: Will Gibson; Editing: Jason Ballantine; Music: Frank Tetaz; Cast: John Jarratt, Cassandra Magrath, Kestie Morassi, Nathan Phillips.
Three backpackers, an Australian male and two English tourists, get stranded in the Outback, and take the offered help of a seemingly genuine local.
Effective, confident piece of filmmaking; it looks marvellous, presenting beautiful images of the Australian landscape as if from a postcard, which are contradicted by the brutal violence which occurs. The opening hour is a subtle lesson on how to absorb and ultimately wrong-foot an audience, and after that it is a tremendously sustained gore-fest reminiscent of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. McLean plays wonderful tricks with character point-of-view... he sets up three main characters, for instance, and makes a point of showing them all together and then in pairs without the other one, and even sometimes alone, so that it is very much a film about three people. But when the terror kicks in, the perspective shifts from one victim to the other, and it is from this (and the brilliant acting helps too) that McLean can induce panic or terror or hope in his audience with ease. The disturbing factor in the scene in which one of the girls is tortured, for instance, stems from the significant fact that we are only seeing it from the other girl's perspective; it would create a very different feel if the camera were to move elsewhere, or if it were the male through whom we were watching the scene. Very bleak, cinematic, and rewarding.

Hannah and Her Sisters
Woody Allen 1986 USA 2nd time; DVD
Screenplay: Woody Allen; Producer: Robert Greenhut; Photography: Carlo Di Palma; Editing: Susan E. Morse; Cast: Mia Farrow, Barbara Hershey, Carrie Fisher, Michael Caine, Woody Allen, Dianne Wiest, Max von Sydow.
Three sisters' love lives intertwine over a two-year period: one of them has an affair with the other's husband, while the third falls for the second's ex-husband.
It is very interesting to note that while many films made in the eighties have dated rather badly, this masterpiece seems to have been made a decade earlier alongside the director's Annie Hall or Manhattan. It has a deceptively complicated visual structure, that looks on the surface very austere but to a keen eye is very stylised and significant in creating meaning; most of the scenes are not only in long-take, but with the characters filmed in long- or medium-shot, which is interesting in itself, but heightened even more by the lengths to which Allen goes to maintain a real sense of space for his actors to be swamped in - the camera tracks and pans so eloquently that it often goes unnoticed. Narrative shows Allen at his best, too; he rarely gets credit for experimenting with the medium, but there are plenty of things to be found here: various characters offering internal monologues that contradict the actions being played out, which allows the film to be funny and psychologically perceptive simultaneously. His best film...?