The Dressmaker

In a grubby Australian Outback village in 1951, an outcast (Kate Winslet) returns to live with her half-mad mother (Judy Davis); she’s now a stunningly stylish clothes horse, and her fashion sense begins transforming the dowdy frumps of the town—but they haven’t forgotten the scandal that drove her away, and they still revile her as “the murderer.” Director Jocelyn Moorhouse and co-writer P.J. Hogan adapt Rosalie Ham’s novel, a quirky blend of murder mystery, revenge tragedy, black comedy and stinging social satire (with unacknowledged traces of Friedrich Dürenmatt’s The Visit). Moorhouse overdoes the quirk factor a tad, and there’s a bummer of a development in the last act, but a clever plot and good performances (including Liam Hemsworth and Hugo Weaving) keep us engrossed in all the eccentricity. J.L.