The Dressmaker

Tilly Dunnage, sent away from her town twenty-five years earlier accused of murder, learns dressmaking in Paris and comes back to Dungatar. She means to look after her unstable mother and to work out what really happened in her childhood. Her only weapon is a sewing machine and the women of the town wanting to look beautiful. Jocelyn Moorhouse directed, from Rosalie Ham's 2000 novel. Moorhouse described the film in her own words as Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven with a sewing machine. Kate Winslet plays Tilly and Judy Davis plays her mother, with Liam Hemsworth and Hugo Weaving in the cast. It opened at number one in Australia and became the second-highest-grossing Australian film of 2015, taking around 26 million dollars worldwide against an 11.9 million budget. It led the AACTA Awards with 13 nominations and won five, including Best Lead Actress for Winslet and Best Supporting Actress for Davis. Rotten Tomatoes sits at 58 percent. The critics split, and the consensus says it plainly: a strong central performance sits next to real narrative weirdness. Who it is for: viewers who like revenge stories, costume and films that leap between registers. Who it is not for: anyone wanting a consistent tone. It moves from comedy to tragedy without warning, and for some viewers the jumps do not land.