Grown up cinema

With cinemas nation wide about to be overwhelmed by pirates and gurning Keith Richards impressions, someone somewhere has been smart enough to release Jindabyne in an effort to provide alternative cinema-going for the majority of sentient homo sapiens. The plot is murky: a dead aboriginal girls turns up in the river during a fishing trip and rather than raising the alarm immediately the boys tie her up in the river and continue fishing for another day. Cue revulsion by the indigenous population, small-town outrage and a whole host of unanswered questions about why they would do such a thing. All this is set against a backdrop of a marriage between Gabriel Byrne and an impressive Laura Linney that is slowly falling apart. The film is not without its flaws -- it tries to tackle far too many issues at once -- but director Ray 'Lantana' Lawrence nonetheless reminds us that there remains space for serious, thought-provoking, adult cinema today.