Parky at the Pictures (DVD 6/10/2011)

Fourteen year-old Parker and 15 year-old Hulme meet at school in Christchurch while respectively recuperating from osteomyelitis and tuberculosis. However, they soon discover that they have much more in common than illness and begin concocting fabulous fantasies based around a mutual loathing for Orson Welles, a passion for singing star Mario Lanza and a conviction that they are members of the royal family of Borovnia in the imaginary Fourth World where all the restrictions placed upon them by an uncaring society are blown away. Unfortunately, their parents fail to recognise the benefit that this innocent dependence has for each girl and they decide to separate them amidst suspicions of lesbianism.

As Parker is ashamed of her working-class mother Honora (Sarah Peirse), who had never married her father Herbert (Simon O'Connor), she becomes the scapegoat for the pair, even though Hulme's academic father Henry (Clive Merrison) and prim mother Hilda (Diana Kent) are preparing to send their daughter to South Africa to avoid a scandal. Consequently, on 22 June 1954, Parker and Hulme use a half brick in a stocking to bludgeon Honora to death while on a walk in Victoria Park.

Co-scripting with wife Fran Walsh, Jackson places such emphasis on the seemingly harmless reveries that, even though it has an inevitability, the deadly deed still comes as a surprise. Indeed, the duo lapse back into make-believe as soon as they have committed the crime, as they rush to inform onlookers that Honora has injured herself in falling. But such is brilliance of Grant Major's production design that the potential for malevolence is always readily evident in the stylised dream world that evolves from the girls' giggly games with painted figurines and clay models and the letters that keeps them bonded during prolonged periods of enforced isolation.

The support playing is impeccable, with Sarah Peirse impressing as the put-upon mother trying to do the best thing for her child while her own life is falling apart. However, it is Winslet and Lynskey who dominate proceedings. The former's gushing enthusiasm and careless sense of superiority made her a star. But there's little nuance in evidence and, thus, it's Lynskey who delivers the better performance, as her surly resentment of Peirse melts away into untrammelled adoration whenever she keeps company or corresponds with Winslet. Moreover, while Winslet settles for a disconcerting haughtiness and intensity that never quite delves beneath Juliet's precocious surface, Lynskey succeeds in conveying the inner turmoil that prompted Pauline to kill her own mother.

Conflicted emotions are also key to actress Rachel Ward's directorial debut, Beautiful Kate, which transfers Newton Thornberg's 1982 novel from Chicago to a remote farm in the Flinders Ranges of South Australia. With Sophie Lowe exuding a naive brashness in the flashback sequences, this is a skilfully modulated drama that moves between time frames and emotional pitches with an assurance that suggests Ward's future may lie behind the camera. Moreover, she has also brought the best out of husband Bryan Brown, who seethes with accusatory regret as the dying patriarch paying the price for his tyrannical past.

Forty year-old author Ben Mendelsohn is not looking forward to seeing his father for the first time in two decades. Arriving with younger actress girlfriend, Maeve Dermody, he bonds instantly with long-suffering sibling Rachel Griffiths and tries to build bridges with Brown, whom he blames for the suicide of older brother Josh McFarlane following the car crash death of their vivacious sister, Sophie Lowe. However, Brown seems intent on humiliating him in front of Dermody and she eventually storms back to the city, as Mendelsohn becomes increasingly preoccupied with scribbling a memoir of his fearless twin and the nights of incestuous innocence they shared before his disregard for Brown's order to keep an eye on Lowe at a Christmas dance precipitated a dual tragedy.

A whiff of Southern Gothic pervades this simmering study of dysfunction, with the near-paralysed Brown taunting Mendelsohn in order to blot out his own culpability for the events that destroyed his family and ended his fading career in local politics. Dermody's abrupt desertion and Griffith's need to take care of business at the Aboriginal school where she works rather conveniently leave the embittered pair together. But this is the only contrivance in an unflinching, but discreet saga that is played with a flinty edge by the belligerent Brown and the self-loathing Mendelsohn that is deftly complemented by Griffiths's resigned good sense and Lowe's spirited sensuality.

Cinematographer Andrew Commis ably contrasts Ian Jobson's musty interiors with the outback expanses, while Gregory Perkins's guitar-led score perfectly fits the mood. And if there's a hint of cliché about the moonlight canoodlings between Lowe and Scott O'Donnell (as the young Mendelsohn), they are balanced the gruff erudition of Ward's screenplay and her storytelling's seamless transitions.

Jim Loach makes an equally solid feature bow with Oranges and Sunshine, a laudably restrained account of the Australian child migration scandal that was adapted from Margaret Humphreys's devastating 1994 book, Empty Cradles. Eight years earlier, Humphreys had been a Nottingham mother of two and a social worker with a typical caseload. But, when she was approached by an Australian woman asking for help in tracing her family, she began delving into the records and was appalled to discover that between 1869-1970 the Westminster government and its colonial counterparts had conspired to deport some 130,000 British children to homes around the globe.

Faced with a growing number of requests for assistance, Humphreys founded the Child Migrants Trust - which was initially supported by her local county council before it became a registered charity with offices in Melbourne and Perth - and she not only succeeded in reuniting countless family members, but also in shaming the British and Australian authorities into issuing apologies. But, even then, these were only forthcoming from Kevin Rudd and Gordon Brown in 2009 and 2010 respectively.

With Emily Watson making a quietly determined Humphreys, Loach chronicles the early days of the Trust with a steady mix of docudramatic reconstruction and domestic soap, as husband Richard Dillane (who is also a social worker) backs his wife's crusade to help Federay Holmes find barmaid Kate Rutter and newly reunited siblings Lorraine Ashbourne and Hugo Weaving track down the mother who seemingly never wanted to give them up in the first place.

But the narrative becomes a bit more fragmented and predictable once Watson begins to spend more time Down Under and finds her claims being challenged on radio talk shows and denied by institutions like the Christian Brothers. Indeed, her insistence that the home at Bindoon was built by child labour leads to a couple of attempted nocturnal assaults. But she finds willing backers in Weaving, cleaner Tara Morice and cocky self-made businessman David Wenham, who initially pours scorn on Watson's methods and then becomes her staunchest ally after she locates his long-lost mother.

Loach occasionally places Watson's work in a wider context by showing the impact her prolonged absences have on her own children. But she is encouraged to carry on by both Dillane and boss Kerry Fox and is rewarded for her sacrifice by poignant encounters with both Holmes and Rutter and Ashbourne and Weaving and by a moral victory over the Bindoon brothers, after Wenham (who is one of the home's biggest benefactors) invites her into the refectory and she reacts to their graceless hospitality with defiant dignity.

Indeed, Watson excels as she overcomes doubts about her suitability for such an arduous task to rise to the challenge with a mix of compassion, conviction and pluck. But the performances are universally admirable, with Weaving movingly conveying the emotional emptiness of a son who has never experienced the cherished love of a devoted mother and Wenham hiding his pain behind a façade of macho cynicism.

Denson Baker's largely handheld camerawork and Lisa Gerrard's discreet score are also notable, while, as in her script for Ken Loach's Ladybird, Ladybird, Rona Munro laces the action with an undercurrent of outrage. But the measured direction takes its tone from Watson's bureaucratic efficiency and ensures that this feels more like a polished teleplay than a gritty slice of social realism. Consequently, while it exposes the iniquities of the migration programme and the mental and physical abuses endured by the defenceless youngsters, it too often tends to follows the lead of Phillip Noyce's Rabbit-Proof Fence (2000) in being tastefully aghast rather than trenchantly irate.

New Zealand first-timer Rosemary Riddell's The Insatiable Moon had its share of false starts, with James Nesbitt and Timothy Spall at one time being attached to this adaptation of a 1997 novel by the director's onetime Baptist minister husband, Mike. Yet, despite taking seven years to bring to the screen (at a cost of a mere $340,000), this is a charming tale of simple faith and trusting humanity that rather poignantly receives its UK release just a week after the Christchurch earthquake.

Maori Rawiri Paratene lives in a boarding house for people with mental health issues run by the no-nonsense Greg Johnson in the affluent Auckland neighbourhood of Ponsonby. He claims to be the second son of God and pals Ian Mune and Lee Tuson are more than convinced of his telepathic talents, ability to see angels and power to do good. Community worker Sara Wiseman is also impressed when she witnesses Paratene calming the distraught mother of a suicide at the funeral of Mick Innes, a paedophile who had been allowed back into the community and who had hanged himself after assaulting a young girl.

Convinced he has found his Queen of Heaven, Paratene grows close to Wiseman and urges her to rediscover her religious faith. She is flattered by the attention she no longer receives from the worthy, but dull husband who has failed to get her pregnant and spends an enchanted night with the charismatic stranger. But, shortly afterwards, an estate agent files an over-crowding complaint against Johnson's premises and Paratene puts so much effort into fighting its closure that he is hospitalised.

If good intentions made great cinema, this would be an instant classic. An aura of inspirational sweetness pervades this gentle parable and it's impossible not to be moved by Paratene's simple message and the Riddells's sincere attempts to discuss such delicate issues as mental illness, alcoholism, child abuse, suicide and loneliness.

But, while there's a real rapport between Paratene and Wiseman and cinematographer Tom Burstyn ably creates a sense of both place and wonderment, this is very much a first-timer's film. In addition to struggling with structure and pacing, Riddell also seems unsure where to place the camera and when to move it. Consequently, the direction often feels haphazard and, while this to some extent suits the nature of the story, it serves to emphasise the increasingly melodramatic timbre of the action after Paratene escapes from his hospital bed, the hostel is saved by a miraculous donation and Mune receives a consoling visit from beyond the grave.

Constantly smiling and endlessly encouraging, Paratene makes a genial hero. But there's something patronising about the Maori mysticism and similar stereotyping recurs in the depiction of the other psychiatric cases. Yet, despite its shortcomings, this remains a feature with its heart in the right place.

James Nesbitt may have missed out on this project, but he finally got his trip to Oceania to headline Nadia Tass's Matching Jack, a commendable, if rather conventional study of parental despair and juvenile courage that contrasts starkly with the innovative freshness of similarly themed dramas like Gustavo Ron's Ways to Live Forever. Nevertheless, an intriguing plot twist and some earnest performances show that Tass and writer-cinematographer husband David Parker's Stateside teleplay stint hasn't entirely smoothed away the edges that made Malcolm (1986), Mr Reliable (1996) and Amy (1998) so idiosyncratically watchable.

Melbourne mother Jacinda Barrett is so anxious at nine year-old son Tom Russell's sudden tiredness while playing football that she checks him in for some blood tests. She is appalled to discover he has leukaemia and is distraught when she can't contact his architect father, Richard Roxburgh. He returns home from a weekend with mistress Yvonne Strahovski and immediately confesses to several other infidelities. But, instead of being furious with her cheating spouse, Barrett demands the addresses of his past partners in the hope that he sired another child who might be a donor match for Russell.

Her stress is hardly eased by the bluff reassurance of doctor Colin Friels and the irrepressible cheeriness of widowed Irish sailor James Nesbitt, whose son Kodi Smit-McPhee shares Russell's hospital room. But Barrett soon becomes accustomed to the far-fetched yarns that necessitate turning the beds into ocean-going vessels and not only comes to see Nesbitt as a shoulder to cry on, but also a possible lover.

A passing is inevitable. But Parker and co-scenarist Lynne Renew scrupulously avoid allowing it to descend into maudlin melodramatics and Tass is well served in this regard by the admirably mature playing of Russell and Smit-McPhee. The usually reliable Roxburgh is less impressive, however, although his glib self-absorption reinforces the contrast with the generously vulnerable Nesbitt and gives Barrett licence to fall for him.

Making the most of the evocative Williamstown dockside locations, Tass directs steadily. But, even though she might have resisted the twee Oirish twiddliness of Paul Grabowsky's score and could have handled the door-to-door episodes with more finesse, she invests plenty of raw emotion in the frightened exchanges between Barrett and Nesbitt, which feel all the more authentic for their use of despondent platitudes rather than polished speeches.

Another single mother struggles to know what's best for her children in Julie Bertuccelli's The Tree, a sincere, if slight adaptation of Judy Pascoe's popular novel Our Father Who Art in the Tree. Marking Bertuccelli's return to direction seven years after her moving debut, Since Otar Left, this fails to overcome the backstory deficiencies that might have explained the magnitude of the grief affecting Charlotte Gainsbourg and her brood after the sudden death of husband Aden Young.

Returning from transporting a cabin across the bush on a flatbed truck, Young expires at the wheel after stopping to give eight year-old daddy's girl Morgana Davies a lift home. But, while her unworldly mother takes to her room in abject despair, Davies becomes convinced that her father's spirit has come to reside in the Morten Bay fig tree that towers over their drought-parched property and burrows into the garden of snooty neighbour Penne Hackforth-Jones. Realising that the family needs money, older brother Christian Byers dismisses her fancy and takes a job at nearby lumber yard. But younger sibling Tom Russell is more willing to believe and he takes to sneaking out to converse with the tree, while Davies sets up camp in its branches.

Eventually rousing herself after eight months of solitude, Gainsbourg finds a job with plumber Marton Csokas and quickly responds to his tactful solicitations. However, when he offers to cut down the tree, Csokas incurs Davies's wrath and even toddler Gabriel Gotting starts talking to express his misgivings. Moreover, the tree itself begins to intervene in the family's lives, with a branch crashing through the window and slamming into Gainsbourg's bed. But an even more dramatic act of nature finally settles the tree's fate.

Imbuing the action with supernatural charm and wisely refusing to speculate about the true nature of the inexplicable occurrences, Bertuccelli directs this unusual melodrama with considerable delicacy. Nigel Bluck's cinematography and Olivier Mauvezin, Nicolas Moreau and Olivier Goinard's sound design are crucial to the heightening of the unsettling atmosphere, while the poised performances keep things rooted in realism.

Yet, for all its intimacy and restraint, this never quite convinces. More might have been made of the family's bliss before Young's demise to justify Gainsbourg's disturbing abnegation of her maternal duties and reinforce the children's disapproval of what they deem to be an inappropriate relationship with the concerned, but uncomprehending Csokas. Moreover, too little time is spent on the reaction of the brothers to their father's death and the eccentric behaviour of both their mother and sister. But, even though Grégoire Hetzel's score is a touch too coercive, this remains a poignant study of learning to live with loss that is worth seeing alone for Morgana Davies's exceptional display of feistily fragile innocence.

Finally, misfits of a very different kind congregate in a Victorian backwater in Patrick Hughes's debut feature, Red Hill. Something of an internet icon after his romantic short, Signs, attracted over four million hits on YouTube, Hughes has bolstered his reputation by directing commercials. But, while he and cinematographer Tim Hudson demonstrate a commendable technical mastery, the script for this hybrid of Bush Western and slasher horror relies too heavily on hoary generic conventions and fatally lacks a sense of gallows humour that has invariably informed the films of Anthony Mann, Sam Peckinpah, Sergio Leone, George Miller, Robert Rodriguez and Joel and Ethan Coen that Hughes so clearly admires.

Relocating from the city to the eponymous nowhere town because pregnant wife Claire van der Boom needs a quiet environment if she is to avoid another miscarriage, cop Ryan Kwanten quickly discovers that he could scarcely have chosen a worse beat. Having forgotten to pack his gun on his first morning, he soon realises that inspector Steve Bisley has taken an instant dislike to him, while colleagues Richard Sutherland and Christopher Davis can barely break off from giving him the cold shoulder to mock his efforts to ride a horse out to the scene of a cattle killing.

However, everything changes when Bisley hears a news report that scarfaced Aboriginal killer Tom E. Lewis has escaped from his maximum security prison and is most likely heading to avenge himself on the man who put him behind bars. Still traumatised by a shooting incident on his last patch, Kwanten is less than thrilled to be posted on the main road into town. But Lewis seems indifferent to his presence and uses his tracking skills to pick off Kwanten's colleagues before a flashback reveals a long-forgotten connection.

As much an anti-imperialist allegory as a splatterfest, this more than competently shifts from wry outsider study to violent vendetta. But Hughes isn't always certain whether to celebrate or subvert the familiar tropes and his confusion is reflected in the Dmitri Golovko score that parodies Ennio Morricone as much as extolling him.

The performances are well pitched, while Hudson makes evocative use of the darkness that shrouds much of Lewis's rampage. The decision to arm the attacker with museum weapons that had failed to defend his people against the rapacious white man is also shrewd. But the introduction of a mythical panther feels forced and over-balances a denouement already straining credibility. Nevertheless, Hughes does enough here to suggest that he is a talent to watch and that the Ozploitation spirit of Antony I. Ginnane (who somewhat surprising crops up in LAFF 2011 as the executive producer of Stealing Georgia) is still burning as brightly as the bonfires and lightning jags that light Lewis's path to perdition.