He's the Australian filmmaker who made the very Sydney romance Better Than Sex and the very Gold Coast crime comedy Gettin' Square.
Now Jonathan Teplitzky is directing a film about one of Britain's great icons, Prime Minister Winston Churchill, at a crucial stage of World War II.
After success with another World War II film, The Railway Man, Teplitzky has started shooting Churchill in Scotland. It's described as a "a ticking clock thriller" about the tense 48 hours leading up to the D-Day landings.
Brian Cox (The Bourne Identity and Supremacy) plays Churchill in what is described as "a unique, challenging and intimate portrait" of the besieged leader as he clashes with his generals, deals with escalating tensions with the US and wrestles his inner demons.
Miranda Richardson (The Hours, the Harry Potter films) plays Churchill's wife Clementine, with John Slattery (Mad Men) as General Eisenhower and James Purefoy (The Following) as King George VI. The script is by historian Alex von Tunzelmann.
Teplitzky, who has been directing such television shows as Rake, Broadchurch and Indian Summers since The Railway Man, is thrilled to be shooting the film.
"To work with Brian Cox and see him play such an icon will be an incredible experience," he says.
The real Winston Churchill during a visit to Washington in 1953. Photo: Camera Press
The producers describe D-Day, the Allied invasion of Normandy that began liberating northern Europe from Nazi control in 1944, as one of the most important moments in 20th-century world history.
"Telling the untold story of Churchill's political and personal conflict through this time will show him in new, triumphant light," they say.
Psycho-sexual thriller for streaming service
Memo: Naomi Watts. Australian streaming service Stan has commissioned its first feature film – the "psycho-sexual thriller" The Second.
Director Mairi Cameron tells Short Cuts her debut feature film explores an intense relationship between two women with a shared history.
"These two friends are reunited after decades apart at an isolated family property where they spent many summers together as teenage girls," she says. "A secret from the past emerges while a current tension brews as well over the contents of a novel that one of them has written ...
"She's calling it an erotic memoir but it's actually her friend's life that she's used."
After being selected over three other Queensland filmmaking teams, The Second's $1 million budget will be fully funded by Screen Queensland.
But Cameron is considering whether to chase a top-flight cast – "Naomi Watts maybe" – for a bigger production.
"They're both very strong, intelligent, flawed and intriguing characters at war," she says. "We're thinking they are such good roles for women we might actually get someone with quite a high profile."
She is hoping to shot the film, with writer-producer Stephen Lance (My Mistress), in Queensland around September-October this year.
"We're looking for a beautiful old family home, something quite grand but also with that real sense of isolation. That's where the thriller comes in: they are trapped out in the middle of nowhere."
The state's premier and Arts Minister, Annastacia Palaszczuk, says The Second will get an "event" theatrical and festival release and exclusive subscription-video-on-demand distribution through Stan, which is owned by Nine Entertainment and Fairfax Media.
Stan's original Australian content already includes the series No Activity and Wolf Creek.
Superhero movies top $110m in ticket sales
No wonder Hollywood keeps making comic book superhero movies.
Quashing any suggestion the genre has been running out of steam, Australian cinema-goers have spent more than $110 million buying tickets to these movies in the past 15 weeks.
Short Cuts estimates that more than 7.5 million tickets have been sold – 500,000-plus cinema visits a week – to watch superheroes in action.
For 11 out of those 15 weeks, a comic book instalment has been the biggest movie in Australian cinemas.
It started with Deadpool – the year's highest grossing film so far – then continued with Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, Captain America: Civil War and, last weekend, X-Men: Apocalypse.
While the reviews were far from glowing, director Bryan Singer's new X-Men movie took $6.4 million with a solid cinema average of $11,200.
With Captain America: Civil War taking another $1.8 million to reach $31.4 million, the only other movies to take more than $1 million were The Angry Birds Movie ($1.9 million to reach $5.1 million) and Bad Neighbours 2 ($1.1 million to reach $6.4 million).
There are more superheroes on the way with Suicide Squad, starring Will Smith, Margot Robbie and Jared Leto, opening on August 4.
Robbie takes charge
Margot Robbie as Jane and Alexander Skarsgard as Tarzan in The Legend of Tarzan.
Margot Robbie is continuing to take control of her rising Hollywood career by producing as well as starring in a noir thriller, Terminal, that is shooting in Hungary.
Written and directed by Vaughn Stein, a former assistant director on In the Heart of the Sea and floor runner on the final Harry Potter movie, the film follows two hit men (Dexter Fletcher and Max Irons) who, while on a borderline suicide mission for a mysterious employer, discover a dynamic woman (Robbie) may be more involved than they suspected.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, Simon Pegg and Mike Myers have joined the cast.
Barely more than five years after her final episode of Neighbours screened, Robbie has Whisky Tango Foxtrot in cinemas with Suicide Squad and The Legend of Tarzan still to come this year.
She will also produce and star in a Suicide Squad spin-off movie, based on her character Harley Quinn, that she pitched to Warner Bros.
And there have also been reports she will produce and star in I, Tonya, about infamous American figure skater Tonya Harding, through her company LuckyChap Entertainment.
Morrissey wins board vote
Despite lobbying by the Australian Directors Guild for director Samantha Lang, agent Mark Morrissey has been voted onto the board of the Australian Academy for Cinema and Television Arts.
Chief executive Damian Trewhella says that Morrissey, who helped launch the carers of such actors as Chris Hemsworth and Jai Courtney and produced the mini-series Molly, would bring "invaluable expertise to the board and, in particular, the organisation's 'next gen' development work."
Trewhella has told the academy's annual general meeting that "growing the organisation's year-round screen culture and industry development member events program remains a key pillar" of its five-year strategic plan.
Record for Beauty and the Beast teaser
The power of the trailer as a marketing device – and the scale of the female movie audience – was shown when the teaser for Disney's live-action version of Beauty and the Beast was watched a record 91.8 million times in the first 24 hours.
It featured just a brief glimpse of star Emma Watson who speaks just the word "hello" but, according to Disney, out-ranked the second teaser trailer for Star Wars: The Force Awakens, which registered 88 million views last year.
And there is plenty of time to build more hype: Disney's latest new version of a classic animated movie doesn't open for 10 months.
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