Halloween Home Video (2012 edition) is your one-stop shop for Halloween rental recommendations. Sean Byrne’s The Loved Ones comes closer to the spirit of the original 1974 Texas Chain Saw Massacre than any movie in the last thirty-five years.

This article is filed under Australia, Horror, Movies, Movies & TV, Thrillers.

We place Jacki Weaver, as Grandma Smurf, on the Mount Rushmore of female movie gangsters, along with Faye Dunaway (Bonnie and Clyde), Helen Mirren (The Long Good Friday) and Gena Rowlands (Gloria). Except that Weaver gets to occupy the highest point of the peak.

This article is filed under 100 Greatest Gangster Films, Australia, Movies, Movies & TV.

This weekend, Peter Weir graces us with The Way Back, a tale of daring escape by prisoners of war. In due fashion this week’s Listicle salutes the soldier in film. From comedy to adventure to stark, sobering drama, soldiers have faced a great deal on the movie screen.

This article is filed under Australia, Best Movies, Biography, Espionage, Germany, Great Britain, Historical Fiction, History, Humor, Military, Movies, Mystery, Philosophy, Politics, Psychology, Southeast Asia, The Fourth Wall, Vietnam.

His cold restraint, often criticized, is the source of his tremendous power as a novelist. His themes—displacement, power, the value of literature, the fictive possibilities of personal history—are worked and reworked into novels which shine hard like diamonds, unbreakable.

This article is filed under Australia, Fiction Reviews.

“I thought I should live closer, but I didn’t want to be on the same piece of land as my mother…She was a hard person to get on with, and not a very good mother. In all our lives with her, my brother and I never got a hug or a kiss. She was that kind of mother, and my father was anywhere but at home. At the same time we were raised with a sense of duty, and duty to me is as important as love, if not more important. My book, An Indecent Obsession was about duty.”

This article is filed under Australia, Fiction Reviews, Writers.