SWEET COUNTRY 1st July 2018
'Sweet Country makes brilliant use of the Australian outback as the setting for a hard-hitting story that satisfies as a character study as well as a sociopolitical statement. ' - Rotten Tomatoes critic consensus ''Rangy and lean as a cattle dog, Warwick Thornton’s 1920s-set tale of racial tension and rough justice in Australia’s Northern Territory is an intriguing mongrel mix of cinematic bloodlines. The most obvious influence is the western. When Indigenous Australian farm worker Sam (Hamilton Morris) is forced to shoot a drunken white landowner in self-defence, he and his wife, Lizzie, (Natassia Gorey-Furber) head out into the bush, pursued by dogged lawman Sergeant Fletcher (Bryan Brown) and a posse that includes Sam’s friend and employer, Fred Smith (Sam Neill). The “decent man forced into violence” is a stalwart of the western tradition – there’s a touch of the stoic resignation of Gregory Peck in Henry King’s The Gunfighter in Sam’s tac