Tom Donald

The Battlers

Fairly sensitive melodrama about life on the back-roads in Australia at the height of the Great Depression. Centring on the developing romance between two drifters this presents a commendable level of period detail. Based on the novel by Kylie Tennant.

Big ideas

Selling compost brings a boy inventor (Justin Rosniak) and his widowed mother (Gosia Dobrowolska) into conflict with their neighbor.

High Hopes

Slice-of-life look at a sweet working-class couple in London, Shirley and Cyril, his mother, who's aging quickly and becoming forgetful, mum's ghastly upper-middle-class neighbors, and Cyril's pretentious sister and philandering husband. Shirley wants a baby, but Cyril, who reads Marx and wants the world to be perfect, is reluctant. Cyril's mum locks herself out and must ask her snooty neighbors for help. Then Cyril's sister Valerie stages a surprise party for mum's 70th birthday, a disaster from start to finish. Shirley holds things together, and she and Cyril may put aside her Dutch cap after all.