Geoff Brooks Movies

In this unusual romantic drama from Australia, Harry (John Lynch) and Kate (Jacqueline McKenzie) are both patients at a psychiatric care facility. While in therapy, the two meet and fall in love, in spite of their troubled pasts. Despite the potential complications they might foresee with the relationship, Harry's main sources of support, his brother Morris (Colin Friels) and Morris's wife Louise (Deborra-Lee Furness), are more concerned with Harry's stability and happiness than anything else, and they soon give him their blessing to marry Kate. However, it soon becomes obvious that love does not conquer all. Kate becomes pregnant, and her doctors try to persuade her to have an abortion. They believe that her mental illness could be passed along to her child, that she would not make a fit mother, and that her medication for schizophrenia could have a harmful effect on the fetus. Kate is convinced that the angel Astral speaks to her, and that the child she carries is his earthly incarnation; she refuses to have an abortion, but compromises by not taking her medication while pregnant. Harry stops taking his as well, but the couple's happiness is short-lived when their increasing instability leads to tragic consequences. Angel Baby won seven Australian Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Actor, and Best Actress. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

Tim Burstall directed this adaptation of D.H. Lawrence's semi-autobiographical novel recalling his experiences in Australia in the early 1920s. The film, set at the height of World War I, begins at the English coastal home of writer Richard Somers (Colin Friels) and his German-born wife Harriet (Judy Davis). Since Somers is a conscientious objector and his wife is the nationality of the enemy, the British police pay him a visit. Somers is then drafted and undergoes a humiliating physical examination at the draft board. Seeing harassment in the air, Somers and his wife decide to leave England for the relative calm of Australia, where their neighbors are a pair of earthy suburbanites, Vicki (Julie Nihil) and Jack Calcott (John Walton). Jack, disillusioned by the war, has joined a fascist paramilitary group called the Diggers, led by a wealthy old general with the code name "Kangaroo" (Hugh Keays-Byrne). The Diggers want to stifle the emerging union movement in the country, and Kangaroo hopes to enlist Richard in the cause because "a country does not exist until it has found a voice." But Somers finds himself torn between opposing camps, since the Socialist trade unionists also want to utilize his writing skills for their own ends, looking for Somers to help them carry through "a partnership between poetry and power." ~ Paul Brenner, All Movie Guide

Fresh out of medical school, Paul Armstrong (Simon Burke) has landed a job at an Australian urban venereal and sexual disease clinic. While he understands the medical stuff he learned in school pretty well, he is stuffy and a bit of a prude. Most of all, he hasn't yet adjusted to the idea that homosexuals are real human beings. However, in this fast-paced yet gentle comedy, which focuses on the intern's clinical encounters, he swiftly learns the ropes and changes his tune on a lot of issues, as he encounters women and men with all sorts of social and sexual problems. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide