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The Reel McCoy Film Group

Screening world cinema and forgotten gems since 1990

The Reel McCoy Film Group is a not-for-profit film society that since 1990 has been catering for people interested in cinema, particularly those who like to see timeless classics and overlooked gems at low cost.

Our membership fees are:

$50 for 12 months
$35 for 6 months
$20 for 3 months
Membership runs from the date of joining.

With very grateful support from



Canberra Museum and Gallery
Members of CMAG are welcome to join the Reel McCoy at a substantial discount:
membership for a year for only $20.


Screenings are held in the Theatre of Canberra Museum and Gallery (on the corner of London Circuit and City Square, Canberra City) at 12:30 pm on two Sundays of each month from February through November.

Next screening:

Sunday, 13 July 2025 at 12:30 pm

THE GO-BETWEEN
UK · 1971 · 116 min.
Director Joseph Losey
Cast Julie Christie, Alan Bates, Margaret Leighton, Dominic Guard

A young boy (Guard) becomes a messenger for a secret love affair between a wealthy young woman (Christie) and a farmer (Bates). This British period drama explores themes of social class, innocence, betrayal, and the impact of the past on the present. Joseph Losey is known for his collaborations with playwright Harold Pinter who wrote this screenplay. The cinematography, by another long-term collaborator Gerry Fisher, is noted for its lush portrayal of the English countryside. The musical score was composed by the well-known musician Michel Legrand. The film won the Palme d’Or at the 1971 Cannes Film Festival.


For more information, e-mail us or come along to a screening

The Reel McCoy Film Group is a member of the Australian Film Societies Federation. Contact them to learn how to start and run a film society or group of your own.


Programme for the second half of 2025:


Sunday 2 February 2025

THE WEDDING BANQUET
Taiwan / USA · 1993 · 106 min.
Director Ang Lee
Cast Gua Ah-Leh, Lung Sihung, May Chin, Winston Chao, Mitchell Lichtenstein

Wai-Tung and Simon are a happy gay couple living in Manhattan. When Wai-Tung’s parents pester him to get married and have grandchildren he decides to enter into a marriage of convenience with Wei-wei who needs a green card. Things get more complicated when his parents fly in from Taiwan to attend the wedding. Director Ang Lee’s first international hit proved he could master any genre. Here he combines comedy, both subtle and raucous, with acute social asides by reinventing the screwball comedy. Along with the usual farce, secrets, and disguises he adds ideas about modernity and tradition, globalisation, and cross-country manners.


Sunday 23 February 2025

THE CONVERSATION
USA · 1974 · 113 min.
Director Francis Ford Coppola
Cast Gene Hackman, John Cazale, Allen Garfield, Cindy Williams, Harrison Ford, Frederic Forrest

Harry Caul (Hackman) is a professional wiretapper wracked by guilt for his complicity in a previous job that ended in three deaths. Hired by a mysterious client to monitor a couple as they walk through Union Square in San Francisco, Caul records a statement rich in menace: "He'd kill us if he got the chance." Tormented by the prospect of again incurring responsibility for the death of others, Caul descends into a spiral of paranoia and intrigue. It is a masterpiece that unites the sensibilities of the European New Wave cinema with classic American crime.


Sunday 9 March 2025

MEET ME IN ST. LOUIS
USA · 1944 · 113 min.
Director Vincente Minnelli
Cast Judy Garland, Margaret O'Brien, Lucille Bremer, Tom Drake, Mary Astor, Leon Ames

This enchanting musical focuses on an American family in St. Louis in the year of the World Fair, 1903. The family is more than comfortable (father is a banker) but still faces all the problems that would soon become staples of American sit-coms, including the raising of four precocious daughters. One is Judy Garland who has a ball singing wonderful songs such as The Boy Next Door, Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas, and The Trolley Song. The youngest is scene-stealer Margaret O’Brien who won a special Oscar® for Best Child Actress. It’s beautifully directed by Vincente Minnelli who typically explores the emotions from melancholy to ecstatic.


Sunday 23 March 2025

DIVA
France · 1982 · 117 min.
Director Jean-Jacques Beineix
Cast Wilhelmenia Wiggins Fernandez, Frédéric Andréi, Richard Bohringer, Thuy An Luu, Jacques Fabbri

This is Jean-Jacques Beineix’s directorial debut, after his being an assistant director for years. It was worth the wait, becoming a huge hit in France and screening in Paris continually for 12 months. It was also a cult favourite in the USA and Australia. Its mixture of suspense, wry humour, cool fashion, beautiful music, and exquisite cinematography was irresistible. Film critic Pauline Kael wrote: "Beineix has a fabulous camera technique and understands the pleasure to be had from a picture that doesn’t take itself too seriously. Every shot seems designed to delight the audience." The plot: a young postman makes a bootleg recording of a famous diva and finds himself in hot water.


Sunday 13 April 2025

SMOOTH TALK
USA · 1985 · 96 min.
Director Joyce Chopra
Cast Laura Dern, Treat Williams, Levon Helm, Mary Kay Place

Adapted from a short story by Joyce Carol Oates, Smooth Talk explores the fast developing maturity of 15-year-old Connie Wyatt (Dern). Connie's life of days at the beach with friends, flirting with schoolboys. and shirking chores takes an unexpected turn with the appearance of a mysterious stranger, Arnold Friend (Williams). Certainty and assurance yield to anxiety. A masterpiece of realism, Smooth Talk conveys the confusion and emotion of Connie's experience with extraordinary skill. Alternately straightforward, ambiguous, and suspenseful, this is a forgotten gem with uniformly strong performances and a very strong script.


Sunday 27 April 2025

WILD TALES
Argentina / Spain · 2014 · 121 min.
Director Damian Szifron
Cast Ricardo Darin, Oscar Martinez, Erica Rivas

One promotional slogan for this film confessed that we can all lose control. The pressures of modern life drive some to depression, but this portmanteau film with its six blackly comic tales shows those who explode. The stories are connected by the threads of revenge and catharsis with the added spice of coincidence and absurd misunderstandings. The film's wicked humour endeared it to the critics. It received many awards and nominations and its popularity was further enhanced with the participation of the Almodóvar brothers as producers. It also holds the record as the most-seen Argentinian film of all time.


Sunday 11 May 2025

GUN CRAZY
USA · 1950 · 87 min.
Director Joseph H. Lewis
Cast Peggy Cummins, John Dall, Berry Krueger

Gun Crazy follows the gun-obsessed Bart (Dall) who falls in love with Annie (Cummins), a sharpshooting carnival performer. When times become hard, the couple start committing crimes together and Bart is dragged deeper into crime and destruction, torn between his love for the bad-but-beautiful Annie and his moral compass. A forerunner to films like Bonnie and Clyde and Badlands, Gun Crazy is a landmark in film noir, blending romance, suspense, and action. It is directed by Joseph H. Lewis, a highly regarded B-movie director, and written in part by blacklisted Dalton Trumbo.


Sunday 25 May 2025

LADY WINDERMERE'S FAN
USA · 1925 · 89 min. · Silent with music
Director Ernst Lubitsch
Cast Irene Rich, May McAvoy, Bert Lytell, Ronald Coleman

Lady Windermere (McAvoy) discovers that her husband Lord Windermere (Lytell) is having an affair with the notorious Mrs. Erlynne (Rich). She leaves her husband for another man, the ardent Lord Darlington (Coleman). However, all is not what it seems and when Mrs. Erlynne finds out, she needs to move fast to prevent a scandal. Lubitsch's decision to make a silent movie out of the most famous play by Oscar Wilde without using a single line of Wilde's dialogue was called a mad stunt, but Lubitsch was able to replace verbal wit with visual wit and created an enormous hit that captures the essence of Wilde's play.


Sunday 8 June 2025

LOLITA
USA · 1962 · 147 min.
Director Stanley Kubrick
Cast James Mason, Sue Lyon, Shelley Winters, Peter Sellers

On its initial release, the film came with the tagline: How did they ever make a movie of Lolita? It was a fair question. The book concerns a literary academic who becomes obsessed with his landlady’s teenage daughter, and invites us to see the resulting tragedy from his point of view. In 1953, no reputable publisher would touch the book, but it became a bestseller anyway; and by 1962, MGM was more than eager to distribute the movie. After close collaboration between the book's author, Vladimir Nabokov, and a soon-to-be-legendary director, the material translates brilliantly to the screen, far better than could have been hoped for.


Sunday 29 June 2025

WASTE LAND
Brazil / UK · 2010 · 99 min.
Director Lucy Walker
Cast Vik Muniz

This uplifting documentary follows Brazilian artist Vik Muniz in his attempts to artistically engage a handful of recycling trash pickers. The impoverished catadores (literally collectors) are a part of the many thousands working in Rio de Janeiro's Jardim Gramacho, the world's largest landfill site. They're initially bemused by the eccentric, enthusiastic Muniz, but the beauty he helps generate from their garbage opens doors into their world, with all its intended, and some unintended, consequences. The director, Lucy Walker, documents the lives of these socially shunned workers with sensitivity and compassion, with the mood ably supported by a soundtrack from her occasional collaborator, Moby.

Followed by our
ANNUAL GENERAL MEETING
Come along and have your say


Sunday 13 July 2025

THE GO-BETWEEN
UK · 1971 · 116 min.
Director Joseph Losey
Cast Julie Christie, Alan Bates, Margaret Leighton, Dominic Guard

A young boy (Guard) becomes a messenger for a secret love affair between a wealthy young woman (Christie) and a farmer (Bates). This British period drama explores themes of social class, innocence, betrayal, and the impact of the past on the present. Joseph Losey is known for his collaborations with playwright Harold Pinter who wrote this screenplay. The cinematography, by another long-term collaborator Gerry Fisher, is noted for its lush portrayal of the English countryside. The musical score was composed by the well-known musician Michel Legrand. The film won the Palme d’Or at the 1971 Cannes Film Festival.


Sunday 27 July 2025

OUR LITTLE SISTER
Japan · 2015 · 126 min.
Director Hirokazu Kore-eda
Cast Haruka Ayase, Masami Nagasawa, Kaho, Suzu Hirose

Three sisters attend the funeral of their estranged father and meet their shy teenage half-sister Suzu, the daughter of the now-deceased woman who stole their father away. They quickly decide to adopt her and take her back to their seaside village. What follows is a heart-warming portrayal of grief and acceptance that explores themes of family loss and connection with quiet elegance. Kore-eda focuses on the very different characters of the four sisters and the interaction between them, portraying their everyday lives, feelings, and thoughts as the four sisters start their new life together and support each other through thick and thin.


Sunday 10 August 2025

NITRAM
Australia · 2021 · 112 min.
Director Justin Kurzel
Cast Caleb Landry Jones, Judy Davis, Anthony La Paglia, Essie Davis

This important film deliberately never mentions the name of the deeply disturbed man responsible for the Port Arthur massacre. It does not intend to be a biography of that man but to examine what's known of his life using known facts to create a psychological drama. It aims to reconstruct his journey to the point of, without depicting, the brutal finale. Caleb Landry Jones' performance in the title role earned him best actor at Cannes and the film and its extraordinary cast took out nearly all the major film awards at the 2021 Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts Awards.


Sunday 31 August 2025

BONJOUR TRISTESSE
USA · 1958 · 94 min.
Director Otto Preminger
Cast Jean Seberg, David Niven, Deborah Kerr, Mylčne Demongeot

Seventeen-year-old Cécile lives an idle, luxurious, and pleasant life with her widowed father in the French Riviera. One summer they are visited by Anne, a friend of her late mother – whom Cécile sees as an intruder into their feckless Eden; so when Anne and her father appear to be falling in love, she determines to put an end to it. Cécile was conceived by novelist Françoise Sagan who was also a teenager at the time; as is Jean Seberg, the actress playing her. But it's perhaps David Niven who breathes most life into the film as Cécile’s rakish – yet genuinely loving – father.


Sunday 14 September 2025

THEY’RE A WEIRD MOB
Australia · 1966 · 112 min.
Director Michael Powell
Cast Walter Chiari, Claire Dunne, Chips Rafferty

Italian journalist Nino arrives in Sydney, to take up a job on a magazine that turns out not to exist. Instead of going home, he sets out to carve out a new life in the strange land he finds himself in, and to make sense of the weird mob living in it. This film, about the Italian experience in Australia, based on an Australian novel, adapted by a Hungarian-British screenwriter, and directed by an Englishman, was hugely popular in Australia (if nowhere else), and more than any other single work helped bring about the 1970s renaissance of the Australian film industry.


Sunday 28 September 2025

CABARET
USA · 1972 · 124 min.
Director Bob Fosse
Cast Lisa Minnelli, Michael York, Helmut Griem, Joel Grey, Marisa Berenson

This blockbuster film version of the ground-breaking Broadway musical went on to win eight Academy Awards. A young American woman (Minnelli) is attracted to the musical life of 1930’s Berlin, while her English companion (York) finds himself increasingly disturbed by the continuing breakdown of German society. Six songs from John Kander and Fred Ebb’s Broadway score were transported to the movie and several new numbers were added. Joel Grey reprised his unforgettable live performance as the emcee of the atmospheric Kit Kat Club. The film was directed by legendary Broadway choreographer and director Bob Fosse.


Sunday 12 October 2025

MEDEA
Italy · 1969 · 118 min.
Director Pier Paolo Pasolini
Cast Maria Callas, Giuseppe Gentile, Massimo Girotti, Laurent Terzieff

Euripides’s tragedy of love and revenge, starring the magnificent Maria Callas in her only film role. Jason (of Argonaut fame) betrays the sorceress from Colchis who helped him seize the Golden Fleece and gave him children. Medea revenges herself. An adaptation by a master of cinema at the peak of his creative powers, filmed shortly before Italy descended into the violence of the 1970s, Pasolini’s Medea depicts a very archaic world that remains as recognisably human and relevant for us as it was for the Athenians. Extraordinary performances, scenery and music – an unforgettable film.


Sunday 26 October 2025

1945
Hungary · 2017 · 91 min.
Director Ferenc Török
Cast Péter Rudolf, Tamás Szabó Kimmel, Dóra Sztarenki

Two Orthodox Jews arrive in a small remote rural Hungarian village which is getting ready for the wedding of the magistrate's son. They're accompanied by two coffin-like wooden crates supposedly filled with perfumes and soaps. Is this the start of a Jewish influx, reclaiming properties? Histories resurface, rumours spread wildly, paranoia reigns, and the villagers behave accordingly. This subtle and nuanced film is atmospherically shot in black and white with the mood of the film ably enhanced by Tibor Szemzö's soundtrack. The filmmaker has sensitively examined the European war's postscript, a period of history that everyone quickly wanted to forget.


Sunday 9 November 2025

B-MOVIE DOUBLE

OUTRAGE
USA · 1950 · 75 min.
Director Ida Lupino
Cast Mala Powers, Tod Andrews, Robert Clarke

A young woman, happily engaged and newly employed, is stalked one night and raped. The police are unable to find the perpetrator. The film follows her mental and emotional struggles in trying to overcome the experience. A brave film since the Hayes Code wouldn't even allow the use of the word "rape".

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MY NAME IS JULIA ROSS
USA · 1945 · 65 min.
Director Joseph H. Lewis
Cast Nina Foch, Dame May Whitty, George Macready

Desperate to find employment, Julia Ross accepts a position as the live-in personal secretary to a wealthy widow. The job, however, is not what it seems. The film's rapid pacing, its gothic psychological atmosphere, and the quality of the cast result in a film with a Hitchcockian feel.


Sunday 30 November 2025

EATING RAOUL
USA · 1982 · 83 min.
Director Paul Bartel
Cast Paul Bartel, Mary Woronov, Robert Beltran, Ed Begley jr, Susan Saiger

Paul Bartel and Mary Woronov deliver wonderfully dry performances as Paul and Mary Bland who dream of opening a restaurant. To raise funds, they begin luring swingers to their apartment and killing them for their money. This film was so low budget that it was filmed in Bartel's own apartment but it became a hit at film festivals and then a cult classic with audiences loving this satire of the sexual revolution, swingers culture, and the pursuit of the American Dream. Eventually, it became so popular that it was picked up by 20th Century Fox for distribution.


Sunday 14 December 2025

THE MORE THE MERRIER
USA · 1943 · 104 min.
Director George Stevens
Cast Jean Arthur, Joel McCrea, Charles Coburn, Richard Gaines, Bruce Bennett

Connie Milligan (Arthur) reluctantly sublets part of her apartment to the elderly Benjamin Dingle (Coburn). Dingle then rents part of his space to a handsome young man, Joe Carter (McCrea) and then he attempts to play matchmaker for the two. This romantic comedy is worth watching for its razor-sharp script co-written by Garson Kanin from his original story, delightful pacing from the director George Stevens, and unforgettable performances from its three stars. The film was nominated for 6 Oscars® with Charles Coburn winning one. Stevens also won for Best Director at the New York Film Critics Awards.


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Please note that programme details are subject to change without notice


List of films screened by Reel McCoy Film Group and Big House Film Society,
2000 - 2022 (PDF format)


Copyright © 2025 Reel McCoy Film Group

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