Source : the age
Every streaming platform has thousands of films available. To cut through that, here are 30 great movies that span genres, filmmakers, and languages. This week: ABC iview. For other movie choices, check out our guides on Stan*, HBO Max, Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Disney+ and SBS On Demand.
Ali’s Wedding (2016)
Stereotypes are no match for irreverent charm and heartfelt desire in this crowd-pleasing Australian update of the romantic-comedy, where a dutiful Muslim son (Osamah Sami) fakes his university career and then adds to the chaos by falling in love.
Annihilation (2018)
The answers aren’t entirely satisfying, but Alex Garland’s adaptation of Jeff VanderMeer’s cosmic horror novel – with Natalie Portman starring as a member of an all-female mission investigating an alien zone – is creepy, horrifying and memorable.
The Bank Job (2008)
The Jason Statham movie with the least amount of hand-to-hand combat, this 1970s heist thriller from veteran Kiwi director Roger Donaldson about a vault robbery is grounded, tense, and rife with telling detail.
The Big Steal (1990)
Boasting Ben Mendelsohn and Claudia Karvan as 18-year-olds, this wry Australian take on the teen comedy from director Nadia Tass is an endearingly sweet automotive caper complete with a hissable villain: Steve Bisley’s conniving used-car salesman.
Boy (2010)
Featuring Michael Jackson fantasies to match the Thriller-era 1980s setting, Taika Waititi’s breakthrough New Zealand film, where he plays the absent father to an exuberant 11-year-old (James Rolleston), is a terrific and idiosyncratic portrait of childhood hopes and trials.
Breaker Morant (1980)
Director Bruce Beresford sent a shockwave through Australia’s historic self-belief, with this superb Boer War biographical drama about a trio of Australian soldiers court-martialled for war crimes by their British superiors. An unrelenting depiction of military hypocrisy.
Brooklyn (2015)
The immigrant experience comes to painful, intimate light in this period drama about a young Irish woman (Saoirse Ronan, once again astounding) who discovers who she might be when she’s sent alone to 1950s New York to start anew.
Carol (2015)
Can two lovers defy a forbidding world? Cate Blanchett’s married housewife and Rooney Mara’s young department store clerk find out in this heartbreaking 1950s covert romance, directed with restrained desire by a masterful Todd Haynes.
The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1978)
Few films from the Australian New Wave movement of the late 1970s have endured better than Fred Schepisi’s frontier drama about an Aboriginal man (Tom E. Lewis) driven to violent breaking point by a racist society.
Collateral (2004)
Heat director Michael Mann returned to Los Angeles for this nocturnal thriller, where a ruthless hitman (Tom Cruise) takes a taxi driver (Jamie Foxx) and his car hostage, resulting in a cat-and-mouse thriller that becomes a spectral meditation on survival.
Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool (2017)
A rightful showcase for Annette Bening, this romantic drama is built on her performance as the former Hollywood star Gloria Grahame, whose fragile final years as a touring stage actor include an unexpected romance.
The Firm (1993)
A bracing Sydney Pollack thriller, with Tom Cruise as the young law graduate whose career dreams sour when he discovers that his prestigious new employer, along with Gene Hackman’s wily mentor, is an organised crime front that allows no resignation.
Game Night (2018)
Jason Bateman and Rachel McAdams are great fun in this cascading action-comedy about a get-together of friends that turns into a helter-skelter criminal conspiracy. The 1990s movie references are chef’s kiss for a Gen X audience.
Head On (1998)
A landmark Australian movie, this charged adaptation of the Christos Tsiolkas novel Loaded follows a hedonistic young Melbourne man (Alex Dimitriades) struggling to reconcile his conservative Greek heritage and his gay lifestyle.
Holding the Man (2015)
An Australian romantic drama, adapted from a posthumous memoir, that intertwines first love and inescapable tragedy, with Ryan Corr and Craig Stott as the young men who grew up gay in the 1970s but couldn’t escape the HIV virus in the 1980s.
The Last Days of Chez Nous (1992)
Written by Helen Garner and directed by Gillian Armstrong, this Australian drama is an unvarnished examination of a Sydney household in quiet turmoil. The emotional detail is acute, the humour sharp, the fallout painfully realistic.
Mystery Road (2013)
With Aaron Pedersen as Aboriginal police detective Jay Swan, a man caught between his people and his job, this lean crime film plays like a compelling modern-day western. The top-tier supporting cast includes Hugo Weaving and Jack Thompson.
Partisan (2015)
Before he directed multiple episodes of Andor, Australian filmmaker Ariel Kleiman debuted with this quietly twisted tale, set in the Balkans, of an isolated urban commune whose founder (Vincent Cassel) is teaching the children how to be assassins.
Primal Fear (1996)
This psychological thriller relies on some almighty twists, but it also has a pungent sense of the amoral as Richard Gere plays a limelight-seeking Chicago lawyer defending Edward Norton’s altar boy, who is accused of murdering a Catholic archbishop.
Shame (1988)
This underseen Australian classic stars Deborra-Lee Furness as a motorcycle-riding lawyer whose road trip reaches a small town where sexual violence against local girls has become the unspoken norm. Her defiant refusal to stay quiet forces a reckoning.
Shine (1996)
With Noah Taylor and Geoffrey Rush playing the different ages of the gifted, but struggling, classical pianist David Helfgott, this hit Australian biographical drama is a comeback tale that never shirks the sharp edges. The triumph is hard-earnt.
The Story of the Kelly Gang (1906)
While sizeable parts of the world’s feature-length narrative film have been lost, this abridged but restored version via the National Film and Sound Archive remains a remarkable piece of cinematic history and Australian folklore.
Strictly Ballroom (1992)
You can make the case that Baz Luhrmann’s first feature remains his best. Knowing with its glitziness and full-blooded in its humour, this underdog tale of a renegade ballroom dancer (Paul Mercurio) is uncut Luhrmann.
Sweet Country (2017)
As writer, cinematographer and director, Warwick Thornton captures the systemic injustice and bitter legacy of frontier life in 1920s Australia, as an Indigenous stockman (Hamilton Morris) faces brutal persecution. Bryan Brown and Sam Neill lead the supporting cast.
The Talented Mr Ripley (1999)
A richly refined psychological thriller, Anthony Minghella’s formidable period thriller stars Matt Damon as an ambitious young 1950s grifter who becomes obsessed with Jude Law’s charismatic but callous heir. A tender, unremorseful classic.
Top End Wedding (2019)
While it presents as a winning romantic comedy, this tale of a chaotic wedding in Darwin and beyond for an Indigenous lawyer (Miranda Tapsell) and her unprepared boyfriend (Gwilym Lee) is also an invocation of family and heritage.
Tracks (2013)
The complexities of achievement, pleasure and independence for a woman are convincingly captured by star Mia Wasikowska in this dramatic adaptation of Robyn Davidson’s memoir about her 1970s trek by camel across Western Australia.
Two Hands (1999)
With a taste for Tarantino, this Kings Cross crime comedy had star roles for Heath Ledger and Rose Byrne that were respectively over- and underwritten, but the duo has such natural appeal together that their scenes sing.
Up in the Air (2009)
With the global financial crisis as a grim backdrop, Jason Reitman upended the romantic comedy to show heartbreak’s eternal risk as George Clooney plays a human relations consultant who fires people connecting with Vera Farmiga’s fellow business traveller.
Wake in Fright (1971)
A scorching vision of the Australian outback as a barbaric purgatory that sends an indentured school teacher (Gary Bond) to the brink and then beyond. Canadian director Ted Kotcheff captured a vision of this country that seethes.
All information correct at September 2026. *Stan is owned by Nine, the owner of this masthead.
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