Australian films about manipulators

Based on true events, 16 year-old Jamie falls in with his mother's new boyfriend and his crowd of self-appointed neighborhood watchmen, a relationship that leads to a spree of torture and murder.

An elite firm of assassins must face their own mortality as they are hunted down one by one by a mysterious assailant. Caught up in the drama is a disgraced journalist who is more connected to the assassins' world than he could ever know.

In 1950s Australia, beautiful, talented dressmaker Tilly returns to her tiny hometown to right wrongs from her past. As she tries to reconcile with her mother, she starts to fall in love while transforming the fashion of the town.

Based on true events, "Nitram" lives with his parents in suburban Australia in the mid-90s. He lives a life of isolation and frustration at never fitting in. As his anger grows, he begins a slow descent into a nightmare that culminates in the most heinous of acts.

The series follows two complete strangers, Lola and Chelsea, who intervene in a fatal carjacking while waiting at a suburban bus stop, and are subsequently thrust into a chase from authorities across Australia with a vehicle filled with cash. The strangers must rely solely on each other while they are on the run.

When young urbanites Ian and Sam decide to go camping, they arrive at their isolated destination to discover another tent already set up, but no sign of its owners. With the other campers at large, Ian and Sam's discovery of a child wandering alone sets off a terrifying chain of events that will push them to their limits – and beyond.

In the last days of a dying logging town, Christian returns to his family home for his father Henry’s wedding. While home, Christian reconnects with his childhood friend Oliver, who has stayed in town working at Henry’s timber mill and is now out of a job. As Christian gets to know Oliver’s wife Charlotte, daughter Hedvig, and father Walter, he discovers a secret that could tear Oliver’s family apart.

The story of Allan "Swampy" Marsh and his Maremma dog Oddball. Swampy convinced local authorities to allow Oddball to protect a colony of Little Penguins on Middle Island from wild cats and dogs. Oddball succeeds in his campaign and becomes a front runner for Maremma dogs being used to protect other endangered Australian wildlife.

Sixteen-year-old Billie’s reluctant path to independence is accelerated when her mother reveals plans for gender transition, and their time together becomes limited to Tuesdays. This emotionally charged story of desire, responsibility, and transformation was filmed over the course of a year—once a week, every week, only on Tuesdays.

A remake of 'Reservoir Dogs' by Quentin Tarantino, with the noticeable difference that all the male characters have been replaced with female ones.

A comedy film that looks into the loosely connected lives of people with strange sexual fantasies. A woman with a dangerous fantasy and her partner's struggle to please her. A man who begins an affair with his own wife without her knowing anything about it. A couple struggling to keep things together after a sexual experiment spins out of control. A woman who can only find pleasure in her husband's pain. A call centre operator caught in the middle of a dirty and chaotic phone call. And the distractingly charming new neighbour who connects them all.

Four friends lose themselves in a carefree South-East Asian holiday. Only three come back. Dave and Alice return home to their young family desperate for answers about Jeremy's mysterious disappearance. When Alice's sister Steph returns not long after, a nasty secret is revealed about the night her boyfriend went missing. But it is only the first of many. Who amongst them knows what happened on that fateful night when they were dancing under a full moon in Cambodia?

In 1989, known as Mendax, Julian Assange and two friends formed a group called the International Subversives. Using early home computers and defining themselves as white hat hackers - those who look but don’t steal – they broke into some of the world’s most powerful and secretive organisations. In the eyes of the US Government, they were a major threat to national security.

The Lovers is an epic romance time travel adventure film. Helmed by Roland Joffé from a story by Ajey Jhankar, the film is a sweeping tale of an impossible love set against the backdrop of the first Anglo-Maratha war across two time periods and continents and centred around four characters — a British officer in 18th century colonial India, the Indian woman he falls deeply in love with, an American present-day marine biologist and his wife.

Ray Liotta stars as Jack Malloy, a hardcore career criminal until a near-death experience causes him to turn his world around. But when his former partner Drake is released from prison, he tracks Jack down to blackmail him into one last job. Jack is a new man determined to lead an honest life. Drake is a charming psycho intent on vengeance. Sometimes, old friends can carry some extreme baggage. And for one of them, coming to terms with the past is going to be murder. Vanessa Gray and Andy McPhee co-star in this taut action/drama about good intentions, dark secrets and the harsh consequences of BAD KARMA.

Jack Irish is thrown into a world of club owners, drug dealers and killers when he is hired by a judge to find a mysterious red book.

Dylan discovers he has a knack for making paper planes. He has a chance to compete in a world championship, but he'll have to help rally his grieving dad, Jack, and face bullies and self-doubt to do so.

An Australian urban legend comes screaming on the Ozploitation scene. It’s said that if you drive down the creepy road of Lemon Tree Passage, and witness a sudden flash of light in the trees, you'll be forever haunted by the tormented spirit of a man killed by thrill speeding teenagers. Wanting to put this old wives’ tale to the test, a car-load of non-believers take the supposedly cursed journey and do indeed see a strange manifestation. But it’s not the one of popular myth - this sudden possession of one of their number involves another altogether more shocking crime. That of a young girl raped and murdered on the same stretch of highway. As one urban legend trumps another, the scared passengers must sort out the facts of both cases before vengeful justice from beyond the grave can be meted out with moody atmosphere, ghostly thrills and supernatural suspense.

A vampire relates his epic life story of love, betrayal, loneliness, and dark hunger to an over-curious reporter.

Locked up for a minor crime, 19 year old JR quickly learns the harsh realities of prison life. Protection, if you can get it, is paramount. JR soon finds himself under the watchful eye of Australia's most notorious criminal, Brendan Lynch, but protection comes at a price.

When a solar eclipse sends a colossal blast of super chilled air towards the earth, it then sets off a catastrophic chain of events that threatens to engulf the world in ice and begin a new Ice Age.

An adventure-loving couple convince their friends to explore a remote, uncharted cave system in the forests of Northern Australia. With a tropical storm approaching, they abseil into the mouth of the cave, but when the caves start to flood, tensions rise as oxygen levels fall and the friends find themselves trapped. Unknown to them, the storm has also brought in a pack of dangerous and hungry crocodiles.

A widowed reporter recruits the help of a federal agent to investigate her late husband's secrets, but the two become the target of unknown attackers. When FBI Agent John Nelson’s key informant, Miles, is abducted and shot, all that’s left is a severed finger. In order to find a new lead, Nelson travels to New York City to inform widowed magazine reporter Rebecca Scott that her long dead husband, Miles, had only recently been murdered to see if she had heard from him in recent years. Perplexed, Scott joins Agent Nelson in the wealthy enclave of Australia’s Gold Coast to find out what really happened. The two soon discover Miles may have been part of an elaborate “Ponzi scheme” to bilk investors, and a vengeful billionaire, out of millions of dollars. As more layers of Miles’ secret life are exposed, can the two stay ahead of the mysterious attackers who will stop at nothing to halt their investigation?

This pulse-racing real-life adventure follows two of Australia's greatest surf legends on their quest to hunt down and ride the Pacific's biggest and most dangerous waves. With 3D cameras installed on their boards, Ross Clarke-Jones and Tom Carroll defy middle age by pushing the limits of what they — and cinema technology — can do. (TIFF)

Travel plans for three men in ill-fitting wedding tuxedos goes horribly wrong.

Accompanied only by her faithful dog and four camels, an Australian satisfies her craving for solitude by embarking on a solo trip across the desert from Alice Springs to the Indian Ocean.

Big Mamma's Boy follows the story of Rocco as he struggles to choose between the love of his life, Katie and his doting, over-protective Italian mother. Fun, heart-wrenching and poignant, this spirited romantic comedy explores Australia's multicultural nuances with hilarious results and goes to show that being a big mamma's boy is a lot tougher than it sounds.

It’s 1929 on the vast, desert-like, Eastern Arrernte Nation lands that are now known as the Central Australian outback. Sam Kelly, a middle-aged Aboriginal man, works the land of a kind preacher, Fred Smith. After an ill-tempered bully arrives in town and Kelly kills him in self-defence, he and his wife go on the run as a posse gathers to hunt him down.

10 years after a global economic collapse, a hardened loner pursues the men who stole his car through the lawless wasteland of the Australian outback, aided by the brother of one of the thieves.

To escape the outback, a young Afghan cameleer falls in with a mysterious bushman on the run with stolen Crown gold.

A mysterious woman is perched between the harsh legacy of World War II and the hope of a new life in Australia. A sweeping romantic drama set in 1950s rural Australia following the lives of the Blighs, a wealthy and complicated pastoralist family, who lives in Inverness, NSW.

An indigenous detective returns to the Outback to investigate the murder of a young girl.

Explores the early events leading up to Red Dog's discovery on the road to Dampier, and his ultimate rise from ordinary dog to Australian legend.

Griff, office worker by day, superhero by night, has his world turned upside down when he meets Melody, a beautiful young scientist who shares his passion for the impossible.

A woman struggles with her son's illness and her husband's infidelity, but, after a chance encounter with an Irish sailor and his son, her life is turned upside down in a love story that defies explanation and breaks all the rules.

South Africa, 1978. Tim Jenkin and Stephen Lee, two white political activists from the African National Congress imprisoned by the apartheid regime, put a plan in motion to escape from the infamous Pretoria Prison.

A boy finds a strange creature on a beach, and decides to find a home for it in a world where everyone believes there are far more important things to pay attention to.

Aaron Falk returns to his drought-stricken hometown to attend a tragic funeral. But his return opens a decades-old wound - the unsolved death of a teenage girl.

Two years into an intergalactic invasion of Earth, survivors in Sydney, Australia, fight back in a desperate ground war. As casualties mount by the day, the resistance and their unexpected allies, uncover a plot that could see the war come to a decisive end. With the Alien invaders hell-bent on making earth their new home, the race is on to save mankind.

Vietnam War, 1966. Australia and New Zealand send troops to support the United States and South Vietnamese in their fight against the communist North. Soldiers are very young men, recruits and volunteers who have never been involved in a combat. On August 18th, members of Delta Company will face the true horror of a ruthless battle among the trees of a rubber plantation called Long Tân. They are barely a hundred. The enemy is a human wave ready to destroy them.

After another teenager disappears from the idyllic suburb of Sunshine Hills, Suzy, the girl-next-door of every boy's dreams, persuades Daniel, a fourteen-year-old with an obsessive crush, to help her uncover the truth.

Ellie Linton, a teen from an Australian coastal town, leads her friends on an excursion to a camp deep in the woods, dubbed "Hell." Upon their return, the youths find that their town has been overrun by an enemy army, and their friends and family have been imprisoned. When the hostile invaders become alerted to their presence, Ellie and her friends band together to escape -- and strike back against -- this mysterious enemy.

Blackfella Charlie is getting older, and he's out of sorts. The intervention is making life more difficult on his remote community, what with the proper policing of whitefella laws that don't generally make much sense, and Charlie's kin and ken seeming more interested in going along with things than doing anything about it. So Charlie takes off, to live the old way, but in doing so sets off a chain of events in his life that has him return to his community chastened, and somewhat the wiser.

In the harsh, yet beautiful Australian outback lives a beast, an animal of staggering size, with a ruthless, driving need for blood and destruction. It cares for none, defends its territory with brutal force, and kills with a raw, animalistic savagery unlike any have seen before.

The true story of Australia's cat-and-mouse underground mine warfare—one of the most misunderstood, misrepresented and mystifying conflicts of WW I. It was secret struggle BENEATH the Western Front that combined daring engineering, technology and science. Few on the surface knew of the brave, claustrophobic and sometimes barbaric work of these tunnellers.

Over the course of one night, Sarah meets the handsome, captivating and smooth talking Lewis, who aims to be the bait in a sick sexual trap set up by himself and his low-life, rich kid housemate Kenneth. When their ruse backfires, Lewis and Sarah are forced into an unlikely alliance with deadly consequences.

Adapted from the bestselling novel by Madeleine St John, Ladies in Black is an alluring and tender-hearted comedy drama about the lives of a group of department store employees in 1959 Sydney.

A woman grieving over the death of her daughter loses grip of reality when she begins to think her girl may still be alive.

A group of elite soldiers sent to infiltrate and extract the lead science team from Pine Gap, Australia's top secret underground military compound, after it comes under attack from unknown forces. The mission is compromised when they encounter a young woman with no memory of who she is or how she came to be there. As they try to escape, the group quickly discovers all is not as it seems and the facility has become a testing ground for something far more sinister.

Laura and Tyler are best friends and drinking buddies whose hedonistic existence falls under the creeping horror of adulthood when Laura gets engaged to Jim – an ambitious pianist who surprisingly decides to go teetotal.