The Boys

1998, Australia, directed by Rowan Woods

An exceptional piece of work that stands up well after twenty years, and numerous gritty Aussie crime pics/TV series in the interim, clearly owing a considerable debt to this picture. The Boys seemed like a start of great promise for Rowan Woods, so his subsequent career trajectory has to be rated a relative disappointment by that standard (it's hard to see what's specifically distinctive in his episodes of  the TV series Rake, for instance); perhaps, in the end, the distinctive aspects were mostly there in the original play, even if the visuals certainly seem to add a considerable depth to the portrait of this particular, unpleasant milieu.