It used to be that Australian cinema seemed to come in two basic flavours: solidly historical (Gallipoli, Breaker Morant) and colourfully quirky (The Adventures of Priscilla: Queen of the Desert, Muriel's Wedding).
Today, much of the talk of the film-festival circuit and the indie-film underground is the new style of darkly intense genre movies that Australian director/writers are crafting.
From the horrors of Greg McLean's Wolf Creek and James Wan's original Saw to the Hitchcock-style thrill ride of Joel and Nash Edgerton's The Square, it's not your father's Aussie film wave anymore.
The latest addition to the scene is Sundance Grand Jury Prize winner Animal Kingdom, a sweaty, brutal little crime thriller set on the back streets of Melbourne from first-time features director David Michod.
"There's a certain energy [happening] that's been rare in Australia for the last eight or nine years," Michod says in an interview.
"If this generation has a defining feature, it's an embrace of genre but doing it in a smart way. ...
"You get this feeling there's a new generation of film-makers who want to make films like the ones they grew up on."
In fact, Michod and the Edgertons are part of a loose-knit collective called Blue Tongue Films, a bunch of film-makers whose vision seems to revolve around "a real urban-noir aggressiveness ... a violence coupled with a humour," Nash Edgerton told the New York Times.
Says Michod, "Me, Nash and Joel all work quite closely together and there's a genuine influence".
Animal Kingdom stars Ben Mendelsohn (Knowing) and Jacki Weaver (Cosi) as the heads of the thieving Cody family and Guy Pearce (Memento, The Proposition) as the investigator tasked to bring them down.
Trapped in the middle is teenage Josh (newcomer James Frecheville), a nephew who moves in with the Codys after his mum dies. (The camaraderie of the new Aussie film-makers is evidenced by the casting of Joel Edgerton as one of the Codys.) A silent character in the film is the city itself.
"For Australians, Melbourne is a bit like San Francisco, a 19th-century gold-rush town with ornate Victorian architecture and trams," Michod says.
"But it's a big, sprawling 20th-century city with lots of weird and beautiful corners. I wanted to shoot those corners."
Michod had been working on the story for several years before shooting a frame of film.
"I had moved to Melbourne [from Sydney] when I was 18 and, in the course of discovering this big new city, I discovered a couple of books by a guy who'd been the chief police reporter for The Age [newspaper]," he recalls.
"He covered this quite strange period in Melbourne's criminal history where there was this palpable antagonism between hardened crews of armed robbers and a hardened armed-robbery squad.
"I went to film school in Melbourne and, when I came out, all I wanted was to write a script that was inspired by that world.
"It took me a long time to write. I was just a kid with no clue."
Even though he had never shot a feature-length film, Michod - who no doubt had made some industry connections as the editor of Australia's Inside Film magazine - approached Mendelsohn, a 25-year veteran of the Australian film industry, with his finished script.
"[The script] was quite long at the time," remembers Mendelsohn, seated next to Michod.
"[But] I thought there was something extraordinary going on there."
Michod also sent the script to Pearce as he was his first choice for the role.
"I didn't know him but he responded very quickly," Michod says.
"It was about a year before we got to shoot but he stayed attached."
The film opened to rave reviews in Australia and has done well on the festival circuit.
The response has caught Michod a little bit by surprise.
"By the time I'd finished the film, I felt quite good about it," he says.
"I felt that it was going to find an audience, but I didn't know how big that audience might be.
"And then when we went to Sundance, and there was that screening and it was the first time in front of a proper audience of strangers, it was quite exhilarating."
It could be an American breakthrough role for Mendelsohn - who has since completed the action movie The Killer Elite starring Jason Statham, Robert DeNiro and Clive Owen.
"Someone had a Facebook page called Ben Mendelsohn Would Be Famous If He Could (Be Bothered).
"I'm unsure how to respond to that other than to say 'whatever'," Mendelsohn (41) says.
"I have it pretty good [in Australia].
"You have periods of famine and feast but the good thing about it is I'm not going to get stuck doing one thing.
"I can go from doing Animal Kingdom to a rom-com without skipping a beat."
As for Michod, who co-wrote the American indie film Hesher starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Natalie Portman and Rainn Wilson, he wouldn't mind working in Hollywood.
But he doesn't want to end up like some of his Australian predecessors, such as Jocelyn Moorehouse who made the celebrated indie film Proof in 1991 and then stumbled with her first all-star Hollywood entry, How to Make an American Quilt.
"There's no way I want to throw myself into something I don't completely love just for the sake of being a Hollywood director," he explains.
"It's such gruelling, hard work and so emotionally taxing. If I found myself on a film I didn't believe in, I'd be trying to find a way to get out of it."
