Palm Beach (2019)
Comedy | Drama
Lifelong friends reunite for a party at Sydney's Palm Beach.
Starring: Bryan Brown, Richard E. Grant, Aaron Jeffery, Jacqueline McKenzie, Heather Mitchell, Sam Neill, Greta Scacchi, Claire van der Boom
Director: Rachel Ward
Wide Sargasso Sea (1993)
Drama | Romance | Thriller
Director John Duigan brings Jean Rhys' difficult 1966 best-selling novel to the screen. It's a story meant to be a prequel to Charlotte Bronte's novel Jane Eyre, surmising what drove the first Mrs. Rochester mad in that novel. In Jamaica in the 1840s, slavery has been recently outlawed. Plantation owner Annette Cosway has become so poor that she marries a rich, boorish Englishman whom she does not love. Her husband, Paul Mason, is a sexist, racist tyrant who mistreats his servants and his wife. Paul flees to England after the servants and their countrymen revolt and burn down the mansion, killing Annette's young son. Annette goes insane and is consigned to the care of a servant. Her daughter Antoinette is placed in a convent until she is old enough to inherit the property, but the inheritance depends on her marrying a proper husband. By previous arrangement, she marries Edward Rochester. At first they are lustily in love, but Rochester proves to be as elitist who is as disrespectful as Mason. Rochester has title to all of Antoinette's property, but he despises Jamaica and wants to return to England. He also fears the black magic of Christophene, who mixes up a voodoo potion which ends up driving the couple farther apart.
Starring: Karina Lombard, Rachel Ward, Michael York, Martine Beswick, Nathaniel Parker, Paul Campbell
Director: John Duigan
Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid (1982)
Comedy | Crime | Mystery | Thriller
Parodies of the '40s hard boiled detective genre, with a very clever conceit: weaving the plot and production design around memorable movie clips (The Killers, The Big Sleep, Double Indemnity, The Lost Weekend, White Heat, This Gun for Hire, Sorry, Wrong Number, Notorious). Cool Rigby Reardon tries solving an incomprehensible mystery with the assistance of Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney, Burt Lancaster, Fred MacMurray, Ingrid Bergman, and Ray Milland, among others.
Starring: Steve Martin, Rachel Ward, Humphrey Bogart, Kirk Douglas, Burt Lancaster, Carl Reiner
Director: Carl Reiner
