Engaging stories with characters we relate are luring us back, writes Karl Quinn.
Which Australian movies did you see at the cinema last year? If you're like most Australians, the answer is probably none. But in 2015 there's a good chance you saw at least one.
  Maybe it was Mad Max: Fury Road. Or Last Cab to Darwin or The Dressmaker or Russell Crowe's wartime romp The Water Diviner. Or maybe it was one of the surprise family hits, Paper Planes or Oddball. Each of them has taken more than $7 million from Australian punters.
This has been a record year for Australian movies, which have collectively taken $84 million at the local box office, or 7.7 per cent of the total. That's the biggest result ever in raw dollar terms, and the best share since 2001. 
What makes it truly remarkable is that just a year ago the local industry looked to be in terminal decline.
In 2014, Australian movies accounted for just 2.4 per cent of the total Australian box office. Only once since 1977, which is as far back as the Screen Australia database goes, has it been lower; the 1.3 per cent share in 2004 makes that Australian cinema's annus horribilis.
Last year's result ($26.2 million) came on the back of a poor 2013 as well ($38.5 million, a 3.5 per cent share). Had it not been for The Great Gatsby ($27.4 million), 2013 would have been a complete disaster.
Why has Australian cinema bounced back, and is this recovery sustainable?
Are this year's movies just
better?
Some people would answer with a resounding "yes", but let's just remember that for every person who thinks film A is a work of genius, there's usually another (or another 10) who think it's not.
Reviews for Russell Crowe's The Water Diviner (released on Boxing Day 2014) were mixed, both in Australia and abroad, but it did terrific business here and in Turkey (though it tanked in the US). On imdb, it gets a rating of 7.1 from the averaged votes of more than 45,000 people. On metacritic.com. it scores just 50/100 from professional critics. So, is it a good film or not?
One of the most lauded Australian films of 2014, The Babadook, barely registered at the Australian box office. But it did solid business overseas, catapulted writer-director Jennifer Kent into the Hollywood hot zone, and got stellar reviews.
What is different, says Village Cinemas general manager Gino Munari, is that this year's crop appears to have been made with a clear intention to engage audiences rather than simply satisfy the creative urges of the filmmakers.
"I think there's a commercial sensibility that's crept into the psyche of the Australian filmmaking community," he says. "The magic is in telling stories that people want to hear, stories where they can engage with the characters."
We're beginning to see the light?
The idea that we only make dour, introspective dramas about inner-city junkies is as reductive (and wrong) as it is popular, but looking at this year's hits a couple of things stand out: they mix comedy and drama, they aren't afraid of a bit of sentimentality, and family is at the heart of many of them.
Is there darkness? Well, yes. Last Cab to Darwin is about a man with stomach cancer who drives 3000 kilometres to meet a doctor he hopes will kill him. But there are laughs along the way, a bit of romance, and an interesting take on black-white relations.
Death casts a shadow in Paper Planes, Oddball and The Dressmaker too. And it's at the very heart of Holding the Man.
Perhaps the reason these movies have resonated is precisely because they don't shy away from the dark stuff.
Goodbye, Sir Les and your ilk?
Have we really consigned the ocker stereotype to the garbage bin of history? Hell no.
Have you seen The Dressmaker? Last Cab? Oddball? These movies all dabble in caricature. What makes them work is a lightness of touch, a willingness to draw on the stereotype while seeking to flesh it out - to make the familiar just a little surprising. Michael Caton's cabbie is instantly recognisable as a type - but the relationship with his Indigenous neighbour Polly (Ningali Lawford) adds shades and detail that we at first don't expect.
The success of these three movies in particular suggests there's still as much appetite for characters from "the land". We just want them to be a little less like cartoons these days.
Surely you knew it was on?
One of the reasons some of last year's Australian movies failed at the cinema was that people were given scant opportunity to see them. A week or two on a dozen or so screens with scant marketing barely counts as a release strategy when you're up against Hollywood movies on 500 screens with saturation advertising.
Those that cut through this year, though, tended to benefit from a wide release and hefty promotion. The Water Diviner went out on 299 screens, Oddball 289, The Dressmaker 384 and Mad Max: Fury Road a Hollywood-sized 542 screens.
A wide release means a distributor can target their campaign around a narrow window of time, maximising bang for buck. But it takes a certain kind of product for distributors to have the confidence to go wide.
"You can't reverse engineer it," says Screen Australia chief Graeme Mason. "If the distributors are spending millions of dollars - literally - putting it out there, they're not going to do that unless they see something commercially appealing in it."
How many stars did you give it?
Fairfax Media's reviewers weren't especially kind to Oddball. But if the critics were lukewarm, audiences were anything but. Our guys liked Mad Max: Fury Road more - Jake Wilson gave it 3\xC2&#189; stars, saying it was "finally, a sequel that doesn't disappoint", while Craig Mathieson gave it 4\xC2&#189;, calling it "gloriously twisted".
It's hardly Hollywood, is it?
Few Australian movies can compete with Hollywood in the visual stakes, but Mad Max: Fury Road is an exception. Generally, though, we work cheaper and make more modest films (though our budgets are considerably higher than those in the United States' indie sector, whose films are our direct competition for arthouse screens).
Is that a turn-off? Not at all, says Village's Gino Munari. "We don't need to spend tens of millions on films, we just need to tell stories that connect," he says.
So, is everything OK now?
The trouble with setting a new high is that there's a great chance it will be followed by something lower, and that creates the impression of relative failure. The truth is, the movie business is cyclical. This has been a big year for cinema generally - and Star Wars will likely push it to a record - but the fundamental challenges for Australian cinema remain.
Screen Australia chief Graeme Mason is bullish about what lies ahead - he has high hopes for Simon Stone's The Daughter, an adaptation of Henrik Ibsen's The Wild Duck; and Lion, based on Saroo Brierley's memoir about searching for his birth parents in India. What matters for Mason is that our filmmakers think first and foremost about making movies with an audience in mind.
"I don't mean everything has to be at the multiplex, but there's got to be a story that could - if the stars align - really resonate and connect with an audience."