Three films about…Australia: The Nightingale (2018), True History of the Kelly Gang (2019) and Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)

Why am I writing about these movies now?

Well, I’m moving my back catalogue of movie (and occasionally TV) reviews from another site to Medium — covering many of the best-known releases of the last decade, as well as more obscure fare. To make it a bit more fun, I’ll be grouping them thematically (as here), but unless I spot actual errors I’m not doing any editing…so my opinion may have changed since I first wrote them!

My reviews of new cinema, streaming and disc releases, as well as retrospectives on old (and not-so-old) classics, will mostly continue to appear on the Medium publication Frame Rated.

Anyway, here goes. Enjoy…

The Nightingale

This second feature from writer/director Jennifer Kent, whose debut was The Babadook, makes that wondrously inventive horror exercise look like a kiddies’ movie. And indeed it might be argued that The Nightingale piles on the grimness and misery too heavily — not because convicts in 1820s Tasmania were not treated badly, and Aboriginals treated even worse, but because it runs the risk of seeming to wallow in the terrible for its own sake.