Cities on screen: Melbourne’s starring roles

This article is part of FT Globetrotter’s guide to Melbourne

History waits in the strangest places. For many years, the Tivoli Arcade on Bourke Street drew gentle mockery as a dowdy sore thumb in Melbourne’s Central Business District. “The dullest place in Melbourne,” a blog devoted to the city once said of the ragbag of nail bars and barbers. Yet it was the site of something seismic: the location of Australia’s first screening of moving pictures.

That landmark moment took place in 1896, just a year after the world’s first film showing in Paris. The fantastical invention arrived with an American magician, Carl Hertz, who acquired the new technology in London to present a series of short movies at what was then, briefly, Melbourne Opera House — where the Tivoli Arcade would later stand.

The story doesn’t end there, of course. Nowadays, the connection between Melbourne and film radiates out in big-name talent: Marvel actor Chris Hemsworth; gifted director Kitty Green; force of nature Cate Blanchett. She returned to her hometown last year with “Euphoria”: an epic video installation staged in Melbourne Town Hall in which she played a speaking tiger, quoting Karl Marx in a supermarket. 

From the Town Hall, walk a little further and you reach Fed Square. Here, the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) now champions the breadth of the country’s filmmaking. (A case in point: Beneath Roads, a video work from Jenna Rain Warwick that is screening at ACMI until August, uses archive film, iconic road movies and new film of an Aboriginal motorcycle club to give insight into the Indigenous experience.)

The past, present and future of film, then, all held inside a few hundred metres of central Melbourne. Yet that still leaves the rest of town to discover. And so we also present this collection of Melbourne films — a showcase for endless different angles on the city, not one of which could ever be called dull.

‘Mad Max’ (George Miller, 1979)

Released this year, director George Miller’s Furiosa is the fifth Mad Max saga since the 1979 original. It also brought things full circle in starring Melbourne’s Chris Hemsworth, the first Mad Max having been shot in and around the city. “They’re heading for population!” went the panicked cry as the first dystopian goon sped east on Cherry Lane, towards a city that would provide backdrops including the old Port Melbourne gasworks, rendered as the decrepit Halls of Justice.

Where to watch “Mad Max”: Apple TV, Amazon Prime

The Castle (Rob Sitch, 1997)

Nobody knows anything, goes the Hollywood cliché, proven true once more by The Castle. Made as a low-budget indie with modest expectations, the film quickly became a box office hit — and a cultural phenomenon, seen by many Australians as the country’s answer to It’s a Wonderful Life. The story concerns the Kerrigans, an irrepressible family in the Melbourne suburb of Coolaroo, their beloved home earmarked for compulsory purchase. Somewhere in the David and Goliath story and mass of quotable dialogue, it turned out, was a national treasure.

Where to watch: Amazon Prime Australia, Amazon Prime US, Stan

‘Animal Kingdom’ (David Michôd, 2010)

If the Kerrigans of Coolaroo made an enduringly warm vision of Melbourne family life, quite another came with Animal Kingdom. Here, the city was nothing but underbelly, and the stage for an inky crime drama of drugs, violence and police corruption, with Guy Pearce, Jacki Weaver, Ben Mendelsohn and Joel Edgerton among the cast. The fictional Cody family at the heart of the story were based on Melbourne’s real-life Pettingill crime family. It was probably a relief for those protective of the city’s image that the later, long-running TV series relocated the story to southern California.

Where to watch: Amazon Prime/Studiocanal Presents

‘The Big Steal’ (Nadia Tass, 1990)

Anyone who saw Ben Mendelsohn’s icy turn in Animal Kingdom might need a second to adjust to the actor they encounter in The Big Steal. Here, Mendelsohn was 20 years younger, not long out of his own Melbourne high school — and he gleamed with sweetness as a lovestruck teenager, desperate to impress the object of his affections by driving a Jaguar. Director Nadia Tass also made the fondly regarded Malcolm, a 1986 Melbourne comedy about a socially awkward obsessive that doubles as a portrait of suburban Collingwood and the city’s Central Business District.

Where to watch: Amazon Prime US

‘Celia’ (Ann Turner, 1989)

After the sugar frosting of The Big Steal, another kind of coming-of-age takes place in Celia, one of the most underrated films in Australian cinema. The girl of the title is nine years old, growing up in the 1950s Melbourne suburbs amid the turmoil of family life and anti-communist paranoia. Brilliantly executed, the movie is a childhood fable splashed with horror, pointing the way for director Guillermo del Toro and future classics such as Pan’s Labyrinth. 

Where to watch: Amazon Prime

‘Lion’ (Garth Davis, 2016)

Lion is a journey: the true story of Saroo Brierley, adopted by an Australian couple (played by Nicole Kidman and David Wenham) after the extraordinary events that took him as a lost five-year-old from an impoverished home in Khandwa, India, to a government centre for abandoned children a thousand miles away in Kolkata. Brierley is played in adulthood by Dev Patel, and the film charts his return to his birth mother. But before that is Melbourne, where Brierley pieces together the realisation of where he came from with only distant childhood memories and Google Earth: the city a way station in a real-life odyssey.

Where to watch: Apple TV, Amazon Prime, YouTube Movies

‘Chopper’ (Andrew Dominik, 2000)

Ten years before Animal Kingdom, the Melbourne underworld was also the subject of Chopper, the cult biopic of grandly notorious criminal Mark “Chopper” Read. Much of the film is eye-wateringly violent, but often darkly funny too, built around the crackerjack performance of Eric Bana, then best known as a TV impressionist. Bana gave the movie a delirious comic edge. He also brought it Melbourne authenticity — he grew up amid the city’s many diasporas with a German mother and Croatian father. 

Where to watch: Apple TV, Amazon Prime

‘Of an Age’ (Goran Stolevski, 2023)

While Eric Bana has roots in Croatia, spiky gay romance Of an Age also connects Melbourne to the Balkans. Director Goran Stolevski came to the city at 12 from North Macedonia, taking advantage of the local film scene to discover the movies of Pedro Almodóvar and Wong Kar-wai. A nip of inspiration from Australian landmark Strictly Ballroom may have sneaked in there too, given the story here, in which a ballroom dancer from a Serbian family falls for his dance partner’s brother.

Where to watch: Apple TV, Amazon Prime, YouTube Movies

‘Mary and Max’ (Adam Elliot, 2009)

The sad and charming stop-motion animation Mary and Max is the kind of film you want to stop strangers in the street to tell them to see. The urge to communicate is also what inspires Mary, a lonely eight-year-old in 1970s suburban Mount Waverley, to randomly pick a name from a New York phone book to write to — introducing herself to what turns out to be a middle-aged man with Asperger’s, Max. Over the coming decades a long correspondence follows, the characters voiced by Toni Collette and the late Philip Seymour Hoffman. The movie spans time and continents — yet somehow is always brilliantly and definitively Melbourne.

Where to watch: Amazon Prime US

Cities on Screen

This article is part of a wider FT Globetrotter series, Cities on Screen, in which FT film critic Danny Leigh takes us on a journey around the world’s great cities in film.