In Memoriam David Stratton

David Stratton, who was President of the FIPRESCI Jury at Cannes twice and Venice once, died on Thursday, 14 August, at a hospital near his home in the Blue Mountains outside Sydney, Australia. He was eighty-five.

I can say without hesitation that David was the most influential and important film critic in Australia. Besides running the Sydney Film Festival from 1966 to 1983, writing film reviews for The Australian newspaper for over thirty years, and authoring six books, David achieved what few critics can even dream of: he became a household name, and a revered one, through his two television shows The Movie Show (1986-2004, SBS Television) and At The Movies (2004-2014, ABC Television), both of which he delightfully hosted with Margaret Pomeranz. Their weekly reviews of basically all the new cinema releases in Australia were the most important to distributors and audiences, who revelled in their contrasting personalities and frequently differing opinions.

David was a supreme influence on me. For a start, he exemplified the personal qualities I respected in a critic: he was erudite, supremely well-spoken, intelligent, witty, analytical and professional. Most importantly, his knowledge ran truly deep. His daily goal, outside the films he was required to review, was to watch at least one new (to him) film a day, and he kept written records of all the films he saw since he was a boy. When he called it quits on his television show in 2014, despite it still being wildly popular, it was so he could spend less time watching mediocre films and more time watching significant ones. He embraced all the world’s cinema, while also being a champion for Australian filmmaking. His favourite film of all time was Singin’ In The Rain.

Whenever I met him he was friendly, funny, enthusiastic and encouraging. I have embraced his idea of making sure to (try to) watch a film every day that I haven’t seen before; I have followed in some of his passions (French cinema) and pursuits (in May I too was President of the FIPRESCI Jury at Cannes; I have, like he has, been President of the Film Critics Circle of Australia); I am even taking up lecturing in cinema on cruise ships next year at his suggestion, a specialised area of our profession that he found rewarding.

There is no one else who has had such an impact on our profession in Australia as David Stratton. He has left a wonderful legacy; he lived a wonderful life; and he will be widely and greatly missed by not just critics and cinephiles but even the most casual of Australian movie-goers. He was, as Australians like to say of our best and brightest, a ‘legend’.

CJ Johnson

CJ was President of the FIPRESCI Jury at Cannes in 2025. He was President of the Film Critics Circle of Australia from 2020 to 2024. He appears on three flagship programs on ABC Radio Australia.

©FIPRESCI 2025