What do films about occult practices, delicious porridge, Mongolian herders and a very cranky shark have in common? They’re all among the best Australian features released in 2025. To be eligible for this list, films must have had an Australian release outside the festival circuit in 2025, either theatrically or via streaming. All of the listed streaming or cinema information is correct at time of publication.
***
10.
Bring Her Back
Where to watch: stream on Prime Video or rent/buy on Apple TV, Prime Video and YouTube
Many years of watching horror movies has given me a steely stomach – but some of the images in Bring Her Back really got to me; they’re truly grotesque and I’m not sure I can ever forgive directors Danny and Michael Philippou (whose previous film was the fiendishly great Talk To Me). But Bring Her Back is certainly no rinky-dink midnight movie: the aesthetics are polished and the acting excellent – including one helluva performance from Sally Hawkins as Laura, a foster mother grieving the loss of her young daughter.
Laura takes into her care two siblings: the vision-impaired teenager Piper (Sora Wong) and her older brother Andy (Billy Barratt). Also in the house is Laura’s other (very creepy) foster child Oliver (Jonah Wren Phillips). The initial feeling that things aren’t quite right with Laura boils over into abject horror when occult practices take centre stage.
***
9.
The Correspondent
Where to watch: available to rent/buy on Apple TV, Prime Video and YouTube
Richard Roxburgh specialises in projecting a slippery kind of charisma; a preacher in Prosper, and a devilishly smooth lawyer in Rake. In Kriv Stenders’ grittily immersive biodrama, the Rox delivers a very different performance as Latvian Australian journalist Peter Greste, giving him a pragmatic mindset and an approachable everyday aura. The Correspondent joins other fine Aussie films that capture journalists caught up overseas in very trying circumstances, a la The Year of Living Dangerously and Balibo.
It could be considered a “legal drama with a difference,” though “legal” might be giving the Egyptian authorities too much credit: Greste was pushed through a sham trial and sentenced to seven years in prison, ultimately spending 400 days there. I was initially unsure about the film’s use of flashbacks, but the full arc of the narrative gives them real purpose and impact.
***
8.
The Golden Spurtle
Where to watch: now in cinemas
Constantine Costi’s utterly charming documentary about the world’s annual porridge-making championship in Scotland – taken very seriously by a colourful cast of oat-cooking competitors – goes straight to the pool room. It’s not life-changing viewing but if you like the sound of the premise you’ll probably love it. As I wrote in my review: “This film is a pleasure to watch – with endearing salt-of-the-earth subjects, a lovely ebb and flow, and a tone that feels just right: neither overly serious nor tongue in cheek.”
***
7.
Fwends
Where to watch: still in some cinemas
It doesn’t take long for Sophie Somerville’s dramedy about two twentysomething friends, Em (Emmanuelle Mattana) and Jessie (Melissa Gan), to work its low-key charm. Consisting of lots of talking and ambling through Melbourne’s streets, their chit-chat segueing from frivolous banter to D&Ms, this is a great example of an invigoratingly good indie film offering something refreshingly different from the usual multiplex churn. The apparent effortlessness of the film’s staging belies the talent and flair needed to sustain this kind of storytelling over a feature-length run time. Imagine a less polished, Melbourne-set equivalent of Richard Linklater’s Before trilogy and you’re in the right ballpark.
***
6.
Ellis Park
Where to watch: stream on DocPlay or rent/buy on Apple TV, Prime Video and YouTube
The first documentary from the great auteur Justin Kurzel is a richly cinematic portrait of Warren Ellis, the Bad Seeds and Dirty Three musician who co-founded the titular wildlife refuge in Sumatra, Indonesia, that rehabilitates injured animals then releases them back into the wild. There are shots of cute animals, but those au fait with Kurzel’s oeuvre (which includes Snowtown, True History of the Kelly Gang, Nitram and the TV series The Narrow Road to the Deep North) will know not to expect cuddly sentiment.
As I wrote in my review, it “quickly evolves into a work with a living, breathing, morphing energy, as if the film – which is drifty and amorphous, in a good way – is swelling and shrinking, expanding and contracting, right in front of us”.
***
5.
Beast of War
Where to watch: available to rent/buy on Apple TV, Prime Video and YouTube
A second world war film featuring a gigantic shark that periodically chomps into shipwrecked soldiers – hang on, what?! Don’t look for too much historical accuracy in Kiah Roache-Turner’s hellzapoppin spectacle, which mostly unfolds on the debris of a sunken Australian warship. A bunch of Anzacs including Leo (Mark Coles Smith) hang around like fish food, debating local beer and steeling for a fight with a great white, who is clearly an ancestor of Bruce from Jaws – if not in bloodlines, certainly as a purveyor of a similar kind of carnage.
The tone is shrewdly balanced: it is not exactly tongue-in-cheek, but close to it. And atmospherically it is a cracker, with particularly striking use of mist that imbues its environments with surreal, almost hallucinatory properties.
***
4.
Every Little Thing
Where to watch: stream on Paramount+ or rent/buy on Apple TV, Prime Video and YouTube
This gorgeous big-hearted documentary explores hummingbirds and Beverly Hills resident Terry Masear, who has devoted much of her life to studying and rehabilitating them. Inspired by Masear’s 2016 book Fastest Things on Wings, the film is a love letter to the world’s smallest birds – though it never veers into anything mawkish or syrupy. Quite the opposite: it’s threaded with gently melancholic observations often drawn from easily overlooked moments and details; a hummingbird feeding its offspring, for instance, or simply flapping their lil wings – a gorgeous sight we see a lot of.
Both Masear and director Sally Aitken have a knack for taking small events and using them as mirrors to reflect the behaviour and preoccupations of the wider world. This film is directed with flair and a wide-eyed vitality that matches the subject perfectly.
***
3.
The Surfer
Where to watch: Stan
Many films have channelled the woozy, sunstruck look of Wake in Fright but few have conjured a scorched earth aesthetic like Lorcan Finnegan’s nightmarish head trip – and none (until now!) have starred Nicolas Cage. The great showman goes full Cage as a businessman who returns to a small Australian coastal town, wanting to buy the house he grew up in, only to be harassed by a gang of local ruffians who hit him with their mantra: “Don’t live here, don’t surf here.”
Audaciously based mostly in a beach car park, visions of an idyllic life close but oh so far away, the protagonist is sent through the wringer and then some; he’ll soon be a beat-up, moneyless, rambling mess, sizing a dead rat up for its nutritional value. The visuals are wild, the direction feverish, the acting gloriously outre.
***
2.
Inside
Where to watch: available to rent/buy on Apple TV, Prime Video and YouTube
Perhaps the most impressive thing about writer/director Charles Williams’ prison drama is that it manages to pull off a non-cheesy epistolary voiceover. The letter is being read by 18-year-old protagonist Mel (Vincent Miller), who has been transferred to a maximum security prison where he meets two vaguely mentor-like older inmates: Warren (Guy Pearce) and Mark Shepard (Shōgun’s Cosmo Jarvis). Mel is brought in by Warren on a plan to kill Mark, but will he go through with it?
Don’t expect a redemption drama with smooth edges and a beach ending (looking at you, The Shawshank Redemption). Instead expect characters and images that’ll be branded on to your psyche – though the film also manages to be tender and thoughtful.
***
1.
The Wolves Always Come at Night
Where to watch: stream on DocPlay or rent/buy on Apple TV, Prime Video and YouTube
Gabrielle Brady’s vividly textured and deeply immersive hybrid documentary is a transportative window to the world. Centering on a family of Mongolian herders in the Gobi Desert, it’s a great example of a production that feels both unerringly lifelike but also follows the rhythms of interesting drama.
Daava (Davaasuren Dagvasuren), Zaya (Otgonzaya Dashzeveg) and their four children don’t so much tend to the land as survive it. Their lives are hard, even before a storm arrives that changes everything.
This is a film of quiet but incredibly striking power; a film that demonstrates the amazing power of motion pictures to put you in somebody else’s shoes. The frame itself seems to disappear as the film finds a harmony between the facts of life and the poetry of great, evocative cinema.
***
