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Australian and New Zealand indie distributor Umbrella Entertainment will launch Brollie, a free of charge, ad-supported streaming service later this month. It will lean on Umbrella’s library of classic content and claims to be the first free streaming platform specializing in Australian film and TV content.

Brollie will launch on Nov. 23 with over 300 titles including: “Babadook”; “Two Hands” (dir. Gregor Jordan, 1999); cult classics “Sweat”; “Erskineville Kings”; and “Cut” starring Kylie Minogue.

Brollie will also have a section for Indigenous Australia, including a collection of films starring Aboriginal screen legend David Gulpilil. These include “Walkabout”; “Storm Boy”; and “The Last Wave”.

A documentary slate includes “Servant or Slave” and “Ablaze”.

Subscribers will be invited to be part of the Brollie Film Club, where Brollie’s in-house team handpicks the best of the catalogue twice a month. Members can terrify themselves with the ‘Australian Nightmares’ collection exploring the best of Aussie...

‘Point of No Return.’

Vincent Monton is understandably chuffed that Australians have the chance to discover – or rediscover – his telemovie Point of No Return 25 years after it premiered on Network 10.

Umbrella Entertainment released a digitally restored version of the drama written and directed by Monton, which starred Marcus Graham and Nikki Coghill, on DVD and VOD this month.

Graham played the dual roles of Grady, a former soldier who is traumatized by his experiences in war and prison, and his murdered brother Kristian.

Grady escapes from custody after attending Kristian’s funeral. Coghill is Kate, the girlfriend of the protagonist who later hooked up with his brother.

The producer, the late Phillip Emanuel, had raised the budget to make a telemovie about a prison break but was not happy with the script so he approached Monton. The offer was to write a screenplay in three weeks, which he could...

If you’re looking to dive into the best of independent and foreign filmmaking, The Criterion Channel has announced their August 2020 lineup. The impressive slate includes retrospectives dedicated to Mia Hansen-Løve, Bill Gunn, Stephen Cone, Terry Gilliam, Wim Wenders, Alain Delon, Bill Plympton, Les Blank, and more.

In terms of new releases, they also have Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles’ Bacurau, the fascinating documentary John McEnroe: In the Realm of Perfection, the Kenyan LGBTQ drama Rafiki, and more. There’s also a series on Australian New Wave with films by Gillian Armstrong, Bruce Beresford, David Gulpilil, and Peter Weir, as well as one on bad vacations with Joanna Hogg’s Unrelated, Ben Wheatley’s Sightseers, and more.

See the lineup below and explore more on their platform. One can also see our weekly streaming picks here.

25 Ways to Quit Smoking, Bill Plympton, 1989

The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T, Roy Rowland,...

Little Johnny, Robbie and Blue in ‘Robbie Hood.’

Sbs will mark Naidoc Week 2019 (July 7-14) with a raft of programming that celebrates the success and shares the unique stories of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, starting July 5.

Ludo Studio’s Robbie Hood, a short-form comedy series from writer-director Dylan River, will premiere on Sbs On Demand on July 5 and on Sbs Viceland on July 9.

The six episodes follow precocious 13-year-old Robbie (Pedrea Jackson) and his friends Georgia Blue (Jordan Johnson) and little Johnny (Levi Thomas) as they skirt the law to right the wrongs they see going down in their Alice Springs home town.

Also screening on the free streaming platform that week will be Indigenous-themed classic movies including Bruce Beresford’s The Fringe Dwellers, John Honey’s Manganinnie, Steve Jodrell’s Tudawali and Philippe Mora’s Mad Dog Morgan.

The new free-to-air movie channel Sbs World Movies will...

‘Top End Wedding’.

It’s been a quiet start for the year for Australian films at the national box office, particularly compared to last year when Peter Rabbit and Sweet Country were drawing crowds.

However exhibitors are very optimistic about the outlook for the rest of the year, including Wayne Blair’s Top End Wedding which opened yesterday, Rachel Ward’s Palm Beach and Kriv Stenders’ Danger Close: The Battle of Long Tan (both August 8) and Rachel Griffiths’ Ride Like a Girl (September 26).

Ten new releases plus holdovers collectively racked up $9.06 million through April 30, according to the Motion Picture Distributors Association of Australia.

That’s way below the first four months of 2018, which generated $32 million, with Will Gluck’s Peter Rabbit making $25.4 million en route to a final total of $26.7 million and Warwick Thornton’s Sweet Country $2 million.

Shawn Seet’s Storm Boy pocketed nearly $5 million, not a bad result,...

‘Storm Boy’ (Photo: Matt Nettheim).

Shawn Seet’s Coorong-set re-imagining of Henri Safran’s 1976 classic Storm Boy drew families and older folks last weekend, resonating particularly strongly in South Australia, as takings overall were flattened by the heatwave.

M. Night Shyamalan’s horror movie Glass was the top title, albeit opening below its Us trajectory. Josie O’Rourke’s period drama Mary, Queen of Scots had a respectable debut while Joe Cornish’s action-fantasy The Kid Who Would be King tanked.

Paolo Sorrentino’s Loro, a biopic on Italy’s scandal-plagued former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, fared Ok on limited release after earning tidy sums at festivals.

The top 20 titles collectively harvested $19 million, down 7 per cent on the previous weekend according to Numero.

The sequel to Split and follow-up to 2000’s Unbreakable, Glass yielded $3.3 million on 421 screens for Disney. Pro-rata, that trailed the estimated $40.5 million Us debut for the film...

Colin Thiele’s 1963 children’s novel about a boy and his beloved pelican receives tender and touching treatment in its second film adaptation. Adding a contemporary wrap-around story to the 1950s-set tale, and wringing well-judged changes to Henri Safran’s much-loved 1976 film, this version of “Storm Boy,” directed by excellent Aussie small-screen helmer Shawn Seet, has the emotional heft and visual splendor to win the hearts of domestic and international family audiences. Sony will release the film Down Under on Jan. 17, during the summer school holiday season. U.S. theatrical release via Good Deed Entertainment is scheduled for April.

In purely cinematic terms “Storm Boy” has all the ingredients for commercial success. How well it performs will depend at least partly on public response to controversy surrounding top-billed star Geoffrey Rush, also one of the film’s executive producers. Australia’s Federal Court will soon deliver a decision on the...

(L-r) Jai Courtney, Finn Little and Shawn Seet.

Shawn Seet was 12 when he saw Henri Safran’s Storm Boy, the 1976 family drama based on Colin Thiele’s acclaimed novel.

The director was born in Australia but lived in Malaysia until he was 12. His uncle took him to the movie which made such an impression he kept the film’s poster, which still adorns his bedroom.

So when producers, Ambience Entertainment’s Michael Boughen and Matthew Street asked him to direct a contemporary re-imagining of the movie, he did not hesitate.

“It was amazing,” Seet tells If. “I asked them, ‘Do you know my history?’ Safran’s film was wonderful, a classic, and as I left the meeting I wondered if I had what it takes to pull it off.”

Enthusiastic responses to previews staged by Sony Pictures and screenings at the St George OpenAir Cinema suggest he’s nailed it.

Shawn Seet’s remake of the Australian film, which stars Geoffrey Rush, makes jarring missteps in its final act

There are elements of the author Colin Thiele’s classic children’s book Storm Boy that, if not adapted for the screen with the right sensibility, risk creating an experience about as uplifting as a story involving drug addicts collapsing in the gutter with needles in their arms.

The director Henri Safran got the balance right in his excellent 1976 version, infusing an elegantly constructed film with light and dark elements that resonate across all age groups, evoking the child in the adult and the adult in the child.

‘Storm Boy’

Good Deed Entertainment has acquired the North American rights to Ambience Entertainment’s Storm Boy.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, who broke the news, the distributor plans to release it during the American springtime, with the deal brokered by Kathy Morgan International.

In Australia, Sony Pictures Releasing will launch the film during the summer school holidays on January 17.

Studiocanal previously held the rights to the film locally, but Sony swooped on it after the deal did not pan out.

Shot in South Australia, Storm Boy is based on the classic novel by Colin Thiele, and is directed by Shawn Seet, produced by Matthew Street and Michael Boughen, and written by Justin Monjo. Leading the cast are Jai Courtney, newcomer Finn Little and Geoffrey Rush.

Rush plays Mike ‘Storm Boy’ Kingsley, a retired businessman who starts to see things which at first he can’t explain. When his grand-daughter...

Sue Milliken and Bruce Beresford (centre) with the cast of ‘Ladies in Black.’

Bruce Beresford’s Ladies in Black has grossed $11.4 million in seven weeks, encouraging Sony Pictures, which acquired the worldwide rights, to start devising plans to release the comedy-drama in offshore markets.

“The film was always required to establish itself here first before leveraging that success internationally,” Sony Pictures Releasing executive VP Stephen Basil-Jones tells If.

Produced by Sue Milliken and Allanah Zitserman, the 1959-set film is heading for $13 million here and in New Zealand is about to surpass $NZ1 million, which Basil-Jones rates as a superb result, particularly considering Oz films often struggle when they cross the ditch.

In Los Angeles last week he discussed with his colleagues rolling out the film, which stars Julia Ormond, Angourie Rice, Rachael Taylor, Ryan Corr, Alison McGirr, Noni Hazlehurst and Vincent Perez, in the UK and North America. Also he...

Australia’s answer to Free Willy and E.T. emotively celebrates an unconventional friendship – minus the super serve of cheese

Films about the relationship between children and their pets often embody one of the most powerful themes in coming of age stories: the idea of loving something and learning to let it go.

Movies such as Free Willy and E.T. distill that theme into actual visual moments – the whale jumps over the rocks, the alien flies off with the mothership – while others, like director Henri Safran’s 1976 heart-tugger Storm Boy (based on author Colin Thiele’s children’s book) avoid postcard moments in favour of richer and more subtle gestures.

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Casting is underway for The Daughter, a movie which theatre director Simon Stone is adapting from his radical re-imagining of Henrik Ibsen.s The Wild Duck.

Producers Jan Chapman and Nicole O.Donohue are collaborating with Stone, who made his screen debut directing Robyn Nevin, Richard Roxburgh and Cate Blanchett in a segment of Tim Winton.s The Turning.

Shooting is due to start in September. Screen Nsw funded development of the project. Scripted by Stone and Chris Ryan "after Ibsen," the stage production of his 1884 play is set in contemporary rural Australia.

The Belvoir production had rave reviews, typified by Fairfax Media.s Cameron Woodhead who said, .Go see this production of The Wild Duck. Theatre of such delicacy and distillation is vanishingly rare. The ensemble performance is magnificent, the writing effortlessly overheard, the design possesses a chiselled power, and the direction confirms Simon Stone as one of our...