My Brilliant Career — Netflix
Written in 1901 under the pen name Miles Franklin, Australian feminist writer Stella Maria Sarah Miles Franklin’s book was most famously adapted in 1979 as a feature film starring Judy Davis and Sam Neill and directed by Gillian Armstrong.
Now showrunner Liz Doran brings a new extended series adaptation. Written when she was a teenager and withdrawn from publication until after her death, Franklin’s story follows Sybylla (Philippa Northeast) a free-spirited young woman growing up in an early 20th-century rural Australian town whose ambitions of becoming a writer are upset by her romance with a young man named Harry (Christopher Chung).
A Cry in the Dark — Prime Video
Another “Down Under” drama, this 1988 dramatisation of the infamous case of the disappearance of baby Azaria Chamberlain from a campsite at Ayers Rock and her parents’ long struggle to convince the public and media that they had no part in it.
Directed by Fred Schepisi and starring Neill and Meryl Streep, in another Oscar-nominated performance, as the embattled Chamberlains, it’s also the film that gave popular culture the misquoted phrase “a dingo ate my baby!”
Solo Sunny — Mubi.com
Konrad Wolf and Wolfgang Kohlhaase’s 1980 drama about a young East German singer with big pop star ambitions was a smash hit on its release there — not because it reflected the communist ideals of the authorities but rather because it offered hope to a collective dream of individuality.
Starring Renate Krössner in a Berlin-winning performance as Sunny, the former factory worker turned lead singer of the Tornados, now intent on pursuing her solo ambitions, the film offers a time capsule of the sounds, styles and life of the youth of East Germany, it’s a bittersweet peek behind the Iron Curtain.
Tuner — buy from Apple TV+
Oscar-winning documentary director Daniel Roher (Navalny) makes his feature debut with this smart, easily enjoyable crime caper thriller starring Leo Woodall as Niki White, a piano tuner with a heightened sensitivity to sound.
When his mentor Harry (Dustin Hoffman) racks up a fortune in medical debt, Niki decides to put his gifts to less noble use as a safe cracker, until inevitably real criminals become involved and things get real quickly. Bouyed by the chemistry between Woodall and Hoffman and a light touch from Roher, the results are, as one critic put it, “like the Safdie brothers in chill-out mode”.
Humour and Melancholy: The Films of Martin Rejtman — Mubi.com
Argentinian director Martin Rejtman is a key figure in the New Argentine Cinema of the 1990s whose deadpan humour and “languid melancholy” have earned him comparisons to directors such as Jim Jarmusch and Aki Kaurismaki.
Mubi offers a curated programme of a career spanning selection of Retjman’s off-kilter, quietly surprising comedy gems, including 1992’s Rapado considered by many to be the film that kickstarted a new wave of Argentine cinema that helped to resurrect the fortunes of the country’s film industry and put it firmly on the critical map.
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