Get out of the house on the third Wednesday evening of each month and enjoy films on the big screen with us!

The Drill Hall Film Society screens classic films at an affordable price in comfortable tiered seating in our air-conditioned theatre. Grab a delicious snack and beverage from the bar, and be part of our lively film discussions after each show.

Become a Film Society subscriber for just $75 and gain entry to 11 films/year (or $60 if you’re a Drill Hall Theatre Company associate member). Casual guest rates cost $10/film.

Renewals due in July.

Contact Peter on [email protected] for more information or to become a member.

Wednesday January 21st @ 7pm

Hugo, an enchantment from movie history lover Martin Scorsese, is very entertaining, serious, beautiful, wise to the absurdity of life and in the embrace of a piercing longing. The movie is based on the children’s book The Invention of Hugo Cabret, by Brian Selznick, a relative of movie producer David O. Selznick.

The movie involves a lonely, melancholic orphan, Hugo (Asa Butterfield), who in the early 1930s tends all the clocks in a Parisian train station. Seemingly abandoned by his uncle, the station’s official timekeeper, Hugo lives alone, deep in the station’s interior, in a dark, dusty, secret apartment that was built for employees. There, amid clocks, gears, pulleys, jars and purloined toys, he putters and sleeps and naturally dreams, mostly of fixing a delicate automaton that his dead father, a clockmaker (Jude Law), found once upon a time. The automaton is all that remains of a happy past.

Hugo finds himself on an adventure involving the station’s toy-store owner and his goddaughter, Isabelle. A beloved, wanted child, she brings Hugo into her life, which is how he discovers that the cantankerous shopkeeper with the white goatee and sad, watchful eyes is Georges Méliès (Ben Kingsley) himself.

A magician turned moving-picture pioneer, Méliès began his new career after seeing one of the first public film projections in Paris in 1895. Méliès enthralled audiences with fantasies and trick films like our recently screened A Trip to the Moon (1902). The final sequences of the movie brings to life the fantastic life of George Méliès.

We invite you to bring children to this PG rated film for FREE.

Wednesday 18th February @ 7:00pm

To love the films of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, among the most mischievous and inventive of all cinema poets, is to accept that there’s more to life than you’d previously imagined: more colour, more humour, more love, more blissful confusion. In those terms, A Matter of Life and Death is the quintessential Powell-Pressburger movie. It’s a fantasy love story, imaginative to the point of being hallucinatory, one of the most out-there pictures of the last century. Yet it’s a wide-awake film, not a dreamy one. This is a post WW2 work that both reckons with its recent history and hustles to move beyond it: it’s the perfect metaphor for a society ready to stride forth into the sunlight, fighting every minute against being pulled backward. The title is both a wry joke and a concession to a self-evident truth: between life and death, what else is there, other than everything?

To recount the plot sounds a bit insane: British squadron leader Peter Carter (David Niven), leaps from his burning plane without a parachute – but not before conversing, by radio, with an American stationed in England, June (Kim Hunter). In their brief conversation, in a blink, they’ve fallen in love. Miraculously, or so it seems, Peter survives his jump into the English Channel and washes ashore, stumbling through the sand unsure of whether he’s in England or heaven. It’s a little of both. June, headed back to her quarters, happens to be cycling nearby. The two meet and recognise each other immediately, because that’s the way love is.

But Peter is wanted elsewhere – heaven! A celestial clerk, an 18 th Century French dandy, appears out of nowhere to escort him to the after-world. But he has slipped up as he was delayed by mucky English weather. His heavenly higher-ups have ordered him back down to fetch Peter, pronto. But he’s too late, at least as far as earthly matters go. Peter isn’t ready to leave. He has fallen in love, and could anything matter more than love? He’s willing to fight to stay in the land of the living. It’s decided that Peter must stand trial, with a jury of the deceased deciding his fate.

The film doesn’t sugarcoat the idea of death; it acknowledges that once we leave our earthly life, there’s no going back. The words life and death, as Powell noted, were just facts and there’s so much in between. How do you put all the “in between” and all the “beyond” into one movie? It is a work of great audacity and joy. This is the universe. And yes, it’s bigger than we’d ever imagined.

Wednesday 18th March @ 7:00pm

A hugely successful buddy cop movie written and directed by John Michael McDonagh. His first feature, this was his breakthrough at the age of 44.

He is married to the Australian film producer Elizabeth Eves and he wrote our very own Ned Kelly, in the Heath Ledger incarnation, based on Robert Drewes’ novel, Our Sunshine.

He won several awards for the film including the BAFTA Award for Best Original Screen Play. Sergeant Gerry Boyle (Brendan Gleeson) is a police officer in the Connemara district of the west of Ireland. He is crass and indulges in drugs and alcohol while on duty but is concerned for his ailing mother, Eileen.

The FBI sends agent Wendell Everet (Don Cheadle) to liaise in hunting four Irish drug traffickers led by Francis Sheehy-Skeffington, believed to be awaiting a massive seaborne delivery of cocaine from Jamaica.

“As a director, McDonagh avoids the grand gesture and focuses on his web of odd characters that call to mind the comedies of Preston Sturges.” – Screen International.

“The film-making crackles with energy, from Chris Gill’s crisp editing and Calexico’s ever-inventive score to Larry Smith’s dynamic camerawork.” – Variety.

“This sly, witty and provocative Irish black comedy is an exceptionally funny crowd-pleaser and a playful cine-literate exercise, laced with arcane movie references.” The Times.

“Scabrous, profane, violent, verbally adroit and very often hilarious, this twisted and exceptionally accomplished variation on the buddy-cop format is capped by a protean performance by Brendan Gleeson.” – The Hollywood Reporter

The Guard is the most successful independent Irish film of all time in terms of box office receipts.