A range of British films – big-budget and small – opening with Helen Mirren and Jim Broadbent in The Duke.
Older audiences will enjoy seeing Timothy Spall as a 90-year-old making a trip from John O’Groats to Lands End by bus, in the appropriately titled The Last Bus. As the old man reverses the journey he took with his wife to Scotland 70 years earlier we see British countryside and encounter a range of characters.
Spall appears in another selection, The Obscure Life of the Grand Duke of Corsica. More than a touch of the weird and eccentric with Spall as an arrogant architect invited to design a mausoleum for the self-styled duke in Malta during a malaria epidemic.
The older female audience is invited Off the Rails. Three middle-aged women take the daughter of their recently deceased friend on a trip r-living a holiday when they were young – Paris, Italy, then Spain.
The War Below, set in WWI, tells the story of the industrial diggers who were hired to tunnel under no-man’s land to destroy German installations.
Documentary film-maker, Nick Bromfield, has been making significant films for 50 years. In My Father and Me, he turns his attention to his photographer father (whose photos of industrial Britain after World War II are well worth seeing).
An unexpectedly effective film is Boiling Point. It is one night at a London restaurant, filmed as a single take, it immerses us into the work of the characters, giving glimpses of their lives and problems, as well as the customers. It becomes more and more involving.
Dates by city
ADELAIDE: 3 Nov – 1 Dec
Palace Nova Eastend Cinema & Palace Nova Prospect Cinema.
BRISBANE: 3 Nov – 1 Dec
Palace Barracks & Palace James St
BYRON BAY: 3 – 21 Nov
Palace Byron Bay.
CANBERRA: 3 Nov – 1 Dec
Palace Electric.
PERTH: 3 Nov – 1 Dec
Luna Leederville, Luna Luna SX, The Windsor & Palace Raine Square.
SYDNEY: 3 Nov – 1 Dec
Palace Norton St, Palace Central, Palace Verona & Chauvel Cinema.
MELBOURNE: 5 Nov – 1 Dec
Astor Theatre, Palace Balwyn, Palace Brighton Bay, Palace Cinema Como, Palace Westgarth,
Kino Cinemas & Pentridge Cinema.