ppgooding This is a good movie, and might have been an almost great movie if a rather large story element had not been left unresolved at the end. I won't spoil it with details. However the film is well worth watching just for the terrific portrayals by the two principals in the story. The plot is part love story and part crime story, and the love story works to near perfection. The crime story needs either a more complete ending, or a little re-work. Even with this flaw I give it a 7. Well worth the 90 minutes of your time. Ms. Hendrickx and Mr. McInnes have beautifully understated a pretty powerful story line and are totally believable as the reclusive, troubled rancher, and desperate woman being tracked by some pretty bad people. At least one reviewer here has complained loudly about the use of flashbacks, but I think the strategy works, because it lets the play center around what is going on between the two main characters, with the flashbacks being used to provide some needed background to her plight.

Seamus2829 Normally, I tend to avoid re-made films like the plague. I had no prior knowledge that 'Unfinished Sky' was a Australian re-make of a 1998 Dutch film entitled 'The Polish Bride',about two damaged souls being thrown together by chance. In this case, it's about a sheep farmer who finds a wounded Afghan woman on his property,who has escaped from a life most nasty (she was brought into the country as an illegal alien to work in the sex industry). Little by little, the lives of the two begin to come together,despite the fact that neither speak the others language. Despite this, they overcome the usual obstacles. The film does manage to gloss over some details about the woman (actually played by the same actress that played in the Dutch original),but does wear it's heart on it's sleeve,rather nicely. As this film has no U.S. distributor, it may be a bit of a find. Worth taking a look at (especially if you've seen the original version).

Tim Johnson I do not think another country in the world could make Unfinished Sky; it is a film rooted in this country and to try and replant it somewhere else would simply kill it.Diane and I watched it in Perth at Paradiso this morning and we both were moved by it and thought the film provoking and demanding of our attention. It is a worthy successor to, what now has become an Australian genre, such films (in no particular order) Japanese Story, Oyster Farmer, Peaches, Paperback Hero: in short, films that examine Australian life with no apologies to anyone. Offhand I cannot recall other countries whose cinema so carefully dissects its own people as our filmmakers do regularly. This examination does not focus on the Big Pictures of human existence; rather they examine the minutia of people's existence; the events that do not involve car chases or fights or explosions but whose existence presupposes an individual examination of small events that cause huge reverberations on the individuals involved. And isn't this what happens day in and day out to all of us? People might think my comments daft after viewing a film involving illegal aliens, shootings, road accidents (unseen) accidental death(again unseen)as being a little over-the-top for your average suburban dweller. However, only a casual reading of the newspaper will give more examples of these all too human events than this movie contains. I, nor my wife, saw anything in this story that was too much for reality. Rather we saw superb actors bringing a sad story to the screen that, as I said, provided ample script to chew on after the credits rolled.Hendrickx and McInnes acted so well; the movie is worth seeing just to watch their portrayal of two people thrown together and living now with each other's difficult pasts. The symbolism of the empty sky, as alluded to in the movie's title, plays a particular role in the story and, as I am sure the viewers will appreciate, becomes increasingly important as glue by which the entire film holds together.I am sure any viewer will be captivated by this film and will have been grateful to have seen it.

Balthazar-5 This film demonstrates how fragile film aesthetics are. Quite possibly as a novel, which takes time to read and allows us to accommodate shifts in our emotions, it could be fine. But here we have, essentially two conflicting stories that are jammed onto one another with destructive results.One story is a tough, indeed brutal, issues movie dealing with justice, male dominance and humanist sentiments, the other is a touching romance about two vulnerable people trying to heal each other from their emotional scars. Neither of these is very original and the one, in my view, emotionally precludes the other. When we are steamed up about injustice, we cannot access the very fine-tuned emotions associated with love.One of the greatest things about the film medium is its ability to twist time and integrate the past into the present. But here, that is the film's undoing. If the story had been told chronologically, we would at least have been able to get the nastiness out of the way and empathise with the romance, but the threat and extremely crude depictions of the 'horrors of the brothel' keep bursting back in, destroying any subtle emotions that have been generated.