Canicule

I am confused, is this movie set in the present day or is it 10 years ago? The birth certificate said 1973 meaning ellie died in 1990 at 17 but the cop said she was killed 20 years ago, it makes no sense is eric bana meant to be playing a 37 year old????

Eric Bana commands the screen, ably supported by Genevieve O'Reilly but the direction just lacked spark. This was a film that begged to be evocative, yet it just plodded through, getting the job done with no standout atmosphere. Robert Connelly is a journeyman director. Solid but unremarkable. If it were not for Bana, this film would have passed by unnoticed. By comparison Iven Sen creates slow burn, outback, damaged detective films that burst with atmosphere and leave you with red dust up your nose.

Eye-catching vistas, heroes, villains, red herrings and good-looking actors doing realistic acting. This story runs along nicely with good use of flashbacks to bring storylines together. Having not read the book I did not know what to expect and actually had to clarify a couple of things via a web search afterwards when a crucial discovery went straight over my head. I left the cinema happy to have spent money on this film, knowing that I'd seen a good one.

I'm sorry, but the Australian press is simply incapable of unbiased reviews of Australian movies. I read a number of positive reviews for The Dry, but the reviews simply didn't match the movie. The acting was terrible, the dialogue cliched and the plot twists absurd. (SPOLIER ALERT:) The idea that the teacher, simply murdered three people including a young boy, over pokie gambling debts was just inane and silly. Only matched by the "finding," of the backpack TWENTY YEARS LATER in the nook of the tree, with the diary in pristine readable condition. I am amazed Eric Bana starred in such a dreadful movie.

I watched this movie with great anticipation. I had read the book which did a great job painting a distressed town in the grip of a devastating drought. In the book one could feel the heat and hear the desiccated undergrowth crackle. Emotional conflicts were also handled nicely. The writing and the way the book paints the landscape and the people masks the weakness in the plot and the poorly developed unveiling of the perpetrator Sadly the movie fails to show any emotional depth in any characters. The town is greener and far less bleak than shown in the book. To make matters worse the way the crime is solved is even more abbreviated than in the book. As a consequence it fails as both an Australian outback movies as well as a crime movie. My adult son who had not read the book described it as boring.