What, if anything, have they in common, apart from their critical success? It would be easy to say that individuality is their distinguishing characteristic, but this doesn’t get us far. They seem, though, to have been made, whatever gross commercial considerations impelled their backers, without surrendering creative integrity to the satisfying of conventional expectations or box-office potential. There is a note of guarded optimism at the end of, say, Disgrace or Samson & Delilah, but that doesn’t erase all trace of what has disturbed us in the preceding hour or so. I don’t mean that these are merely ‘quirky’ films (I regard ‘quirky’ as only slightly less dubious than the dreaded ‘feisty’): they are all serious, though not solemn, in their pursuit of a sustaining, personal idea or – indeed – vision.

 They are a long way from the ‘franchise’ school of cinema, which probably requires resources beyond the reach of any of the filmmakers concerned. Just think what good might be achieved by the distribution of the budgets needed for the Harry Potter or Spiderman series to the needy of the world. But this is to digress. The films listed above are essentially art-house rather than multiplex in their orientation and exhibition, though that distinction is no longer clear-cut. At Melbourne’s Cinema Nova, for example, Samson & Delilah rubs shoulders with Johnny Depp and Harry Potter.

It is unequivocally true that all these films are intended for adults. One doesn’t have to submit to a comic-strip surface on the off chance of a serious subtext or the ‘darker’ implications of digitally conceived high jinks precariously strung together as plot. Instead, these films offer narratives thematically welded by potent issues of race and ethnicity in Disgrace, Bastardy, Samson & Delilah and Cedar Boys, of parent-child relations in Last Ride, Beautiful Kate and Blessed (films that question what ‘home’ might mean), of political tyranny and cover-up in Balibo, and of loneliness and how it might be assuaged in Mary & Max. These aren’t just issues-driven films, but they have more in mind than killing time painlessly.

Four of the listed films are feature débuts. Warwick Thornton’s Samson & Delilah is a triumph of compassionate and rigorous filmmaking. In contrast with the baroque inanities of Baz Luhrmann’s Australia, Thornton, the director, exercises an austere hand over Thornton the cinematographer. We are perhaps a half hour into the film before the camera pulls back to take in the whole Aboriginal community in which the action has been taking place. It is the people – Samson (Rowan McNamara), waking, sniffing petrol; Delilah (Marissa Gibson), making a fire, waking an old woman and these two getting on with their painting – that matter; the location gradually emerges through their interaction with it. This is executed with minimum dialogue and in calm, unfussy visual terms. If there are vestigial elements of romantic comedy in the way the couple is being set up, we can’t take comfort from such a genre echo. There is no sentimentality in Thornton’s unsparing and non-exploitative account of tough lives – there are brief moments of ugly violence and a harrowing awareness of their limited prospects – and the closing note of muted affirmation has been earned by not eliding the pain that has preceded it.

A different take on the Aborigine in Australian society emerges from Amiel Courtin-Wilson’s documentary, seven years in the making, which chronicles the life of Jack Charles, who founded an Aboriginal theatre company when he wasn’t otherwise engaged as a cat burglar. Jack talks most of the time, as the film slips between different periods, and very engagingly, too. He asks no indulgence for the kind of life he has led, taking philosophically a spectrum that includes success on stage – ‘I just flew with it,’ he says – and sleeping rough in seedy urban streets, shooting up where and when he can. ‘If I was to hide anything, this doco wouldn’t be a true depiction of my life,’ he tells us with candour, assuring us of the ‘sheer pleasure of drugs’. As a burglar, he claims: ‘I never broke into a place – I opened the place.’ His lack of self-pity and resilient good humour charm us into accepting this life without judging it. Director and writer Courtin-Wilson has unobtrusively but persuasively contextualised Jack’s story via the black-and-white re-enactment of the arrival of the First Fleet, in the similarly monochrome newspaper headlines about Aboriginal children’s removal from their parents, and in the inserts that recall Jack’s career as a performer.

Aboriginal life is less central but still visible in two films otherwise preoccupied: Beautiful Kate and Last Ride. Both, at heart, are studies in familial relationships in remote areas, but the former acknowledges the support the daughter-carer has received from the local Aboriginal community, and in the latter the protagonist claims his ‘great-grandma was a full-blood’, cajoling the Aboriginal park ranger to let him and his son, against rules, camp in the National Park.

‘What’s gonna happen to us?’ the small boy, Chook (Tom Russell), asks his father Kev (Hugo Weaving) towards the end of Last Ride. Kev replies, ‘Trust me.’ This is the last thing Chook should do. What anchors Glendyn Ivin’s feature début, gives it coherence, is the father–son relationship. The unpredictable way in which Kev treats Chook – sometimes with violence, sometimes just irresponsibly, sometimes with moving tenderness – is the film’s core. In terms of genre, Last Ride is both a road movie and a coming-of-age study. The narrative takes Chook and Kev on a trek, by bus, stolen car or whatever comes to hand, through the South Australian outback (it was largely shot in the Flinders Ranges). Kev is on the run, though from what is not made clear; this isn’t a thriller-style chase movie. He has had a tormented background, perhaps involving sexual abuse, a prison term, a failed marriage; he is not a good candidate for an adult with responsibility for a small boy on an aimless journey. The coming-of-age aspect is worn lightly but crucially, and there are moments along the way that indicate how Chook is quietly coming to terms with the facts of his unsatisfactory life, as when they fetch up at the home of Kev’s former girlfriend (played with restrained feeling by Anita Hegh) and Chook asks if he could stay with her. He is becoming aware of what his life lacks and will eventually take steps to change the situation.

A tonally different father–son relationship is at the heart of director–writer Rachel Ward’s first feature, Beautiful Kate. Forty-year-old Ned (played with convincing early-middle-age disillusion by Ben Mendelsohn), with a bimbo actress-aspirant in tow, returns to the drought-ravaged farm of his dying father, Bruce (Bryan Brown). Painful family secrets emerge as Ned recalls his father’s curmudgeonly dealings with his children when their mother died, his sister Kate’s grief, Ned’s comforting of which led to an incestuous passion between them, and the suicide of their brother. There are echoes of other films here – tales of people going home (Mendelsohn followed this trail in Mullet, 2001) to lay ghosts and exorcise guilts, and Gothic dramas of familial dysfunction – but Ward has effected a seamless interaction of past and present, resisting the potential for sensationalism. I wish she had avoided the final shot of birds in flight as a symbol of liberation from the past and of hope for a freer future. However, the strands of the complex plot move persuasively towards some sort of reconciliation, as Bruce’s old fingers reach for the head of the weeping Ned, and when, at the grave-side, with members of the black and white community present, Ned pays tribute to his sister Sally (a touching study in selflessness from Rachel Griffiths) as Bruce’s ‘greatest achievement’.

The fourth feature is Serhat Caradee’s urban thriller, Cedar Boys, in which three young Lebanese-Australian men aspire to the rewards of a materially better life. How they go about this involves some dangerous drug-dealers. This element is briskly handled, but what is more interesting is the whiff of everyday life in which Tarek (Les Chantery) is seen in relation to his family and his panel-beating job. The cultural adjustments a young man of different ethnic background might have to make provide a thoughtfully conceived context for what might have been a more conventional film.

I have written about Steve Jacob’s version of J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace (ABR, June 2009), in which difficult father–daughter relations are played out against a background of sexual and racial politics. Disgrace belongs very much with the group of films discussed here, both in terms of its addressing of significant issues and of its impressively austere control of film’s resources.

Disgrace may seem to have little in common with Mary & Max, but, thematically, Adam Elliot’s claymation fable also engages with the notion of lonely people reaching out to each other. If this sounds solemn for a film so wittily conceived in visual and verbal terms, I should add that, for most of its length (and, at ninety-two minutes, this is a little excessive), Elliot’s film is utterly endearing. Solitary Mary, whose favourite colour is brown, establishes contact with the obese, middle-aged, Jewish Max, who lives in a black-and-white version of New York, attends Overeaters Anonymous and suffers from Asperger’s Syndrome. This improbable pair shares a love of chocolate, but in the flow of letters between them what emerges is a therapeutic exploring and explaining of themselves to each other. The sparing use of colour, just a flash of red on lips or tongues or a letterbox, is in itself a commentary on the world each inhabits. The film manages to be both funny and affectionate as it creates (and the ‘creation’ involved is stunning in its painstaking detail) two lives waiting for something to give them meaning.

Sarah Watt’s new release, My Year Without Sex, and her directorial début in 2005, Look Both Ways, are both urban films concerned with people coping with health crises. They are original and daring in the way they approach their subjects. The new film gives a wonderfully observed sense of family life under strain when Natalie (Sacha Horler) collapses as a result of an aneurysm. Her husband Ross (Matt Day) weeps, partly for Natalie, partly for how he’s going to manage everything alone, as she now can’t work. It is not just a year without sex but one minus the support on which he has always relied. The film is lit by humour: when the little boy weeps, they think he’s upset about his mother but it proves to be because his football team has lost; the daughter, Ruby, wonders if she can take her mother to school as a show-and-tell item. Each month is announced with a playful monthly report, via a cartoonish image and caption. This never seems strained, but points to a film-maker maintaining balance, a saving humour in the presence of daunting challenges. The marvellously achieved performances of Horler and Day eschew any sort of obvious star image; as a result of utter immersion in the minutiae of their characters, they create a sense of whole lives.

‘Whole lives’ are not what Balibo depicts. The ‘Balibo Five’, journalists for Australian television networks, are depicted at a crucial moment in their lives, in 1975. Generically, this film might be thought of as a political thriller, but this is complicated by our knowing its basis in alarming and contentious historical events. For me, perhaps the most telling moment occurs when journalist Roger East (Anthony LaPaglia) quarrels with Jose Ramos-Horta (Oscar Isaac) about what he will report back in Australia. East, initially reluctant to go to East Timor at Horta’s urgent invitation, now ‘want[s] justice for these five young journalists’. East suggests that Australians won’t care about thousands of ‘brown deaths’ but that an account of five journalists killed in the crossfire of the Indonesian invasion of East Timor will make front-page news. As though anticipating our reaction to the newspaper habit that highlights the odd Western death in a dangerous conflict but can’t grasp the wider catastrophe, director Robert Connolly (co-writer with David Williamson) includes at the film’s end statistics relating to 183,000 Timorese deaths. Balibo is gripping as a political thriller, but, framed as it is by an interview with a Timorese woman who was a child at the time, it raises issues of journalistic function and integrity and of Australia’s reputation in 1975 – and now.

Ana Kokkinos’s Blessed, deftly adapted for the screen from the multi-authored 1998 play Who’s Afraid of the Working Class?, may be the most exciting of all these films. There is daring enough in taking five diverse plot strands, involving children at odds with mothers, and uniting these strands by coherence of vision. There is even more in repeating the first half of the film, which focuses on these children at large in fraught urban milieux, in the second half, but asking us to adjust our perspective on the day’s action to understand the mothers. Kokkinos has never shied away from confronting harsh truths, and her iconoclastic approach to her material here is matched by the rigour of her storytelling. She is served by a uniformly remarkable cast – Deborra-Lee Furness, Frances O’Connor, Monica Maughan, Sophie Lowe and others – which distinguishes between kinds of mothers (none is just a slut or a bitch) and children (none is a stereotyped delinquent). In the fragments of screen time allotted to them, Kokkinos keeps track of their trajectories of pain, despair and tenacious loving. It may just be a great film.

Quentin Tarantino, recently in Australia to promote his Inglourious Basterds, was quoted as saying, ‘My thing would be that you should do more genre films’, citing the 1980s when ‘You had your gum-tree films and your kangaroo films and your Hanging Rock films’(The Age, 3 August 2009). I think Quentin is out of touch with what’s been happening here and, from the sound of his quoted remark, never had much grasp of Australian cinema. The last couple of years have shown an efflorescence of locally inflected genre filmmaking and, though the 2009 crop isn’t especially slanted towards genre, they aren’t without genre affiliations. However, what these films do achieve, within or without generic parameters, is to evoke a sense of Australian society, whether in isolated communities or in suburbia or its multicultural fringes, offering, as films inevitably – and here acutely – do, some feeling for the life of the time and place that generates them. Australian society has been subjected to uncompromising scrutiny in these ten films. Its film industry has not just come of age but has reached a new maturity in the ranks of international cinema.