PARENTS **

Bob Balaban's satire on 1950's America is a riot of colour and pitch-perfect period settings that looks like it came straight from the closet of a certain Douglas Sirk and one that makes "Mad Men" look positively dull in comparison. It's also a pretty decent horror-comedy as young Michael, (Bryan Madorsky), comes to the realisation that his seemingly perfect parents are cannibals and even he might be on the menu. "Parents" was just too strange and off-the-wall for commercial success but is now thought of as something of a cult movie. The parents in question are superbly played by Randy Quaid and Mary Beth Hurt and Sandy Dennis is very good as the school's chain-smoking psychologist. Not the forgotten gem I once thought it was but still dark enough to earn its place.

THE WOUNDED ANGEL ****

In Kazakhstan life is hard and childhood, as we know it, is virtually non-existent. Children and adults alike do what they can to get by. Emir Baigazin's remarkable. virtually plotless film is divided into a number of chapters, each one examining boys struggling with the pain of the everyday and a life, if a life it is, far removed from what we in the West are used to.

I don't know if any of the 'actors' are professionals but the performances Baigazin draws from his mostly young cast are extraordinary. There is no music score and little dialogue, (which is just as well as the subtitles on the print I saw were poor). It is, of course, deeply depressing, as grim a picture of childhood as the cinema has given us yet filmed with a startling purity. This is only Baigazin's second film but, if given the distribution it cries out for, it should establish him as a major player in world cinema.

APOSTLE **

Torture porn from Gareth Evans, the man who gave us "The Raid" and its sequel. "Apostle" certainly scores top marks both for weirdness and extreme nastiness and with its island setting and strange religious cult it should remind you of "The Wicker Man" but that's really where the similarities end. This is a much darker chiller as Dan Stevens heads off to rescue his sister who has been kidnapped by cult leader Michael Sheen only to find that things are even worse than he imagined. Apart from the excessive gore Evans over-eggs the pudding in terms of plot so it isn't always that easy to follow and it isn't helped by Stevens' grim performance. On the other hand, Sheen has a field day as one of the bad guys and it certainly looks great. At 130 minutes it's a tad on the long side but it's certainly not lacking in imagination and I can see cult status beckoning.

BERNIE **

Truth, they say, is stranger than fiction and if "Bernie" is to be believed then that old adage certainly holds true. Richard Linklater's highly original comedy is based on the real-life case of Bernie Tiede, an apparently thoroughly lovable, deeply religious man who one day shot dead his friend and benefactor Marjorie Nugent, dismembered her corpse and kept it in a freezer for nine months before he was finally caught. The dichotomy was that everyone was on Bernie's side, (he was sweetness personified), while everyone hated the victim who was meanness personified.

Linklater tells Bernie's tale as a kind of faux-documentary with the good people of Carthage, Texas talking directly to the camera, (the townspeople play themselves), and films it as if it were some kind of cartoon come to life. It's a style that suits the material perfectly and he gets first-rate performances from Jack Black (Bernie), Shirley MacLaine (Mrs Nugent) and Matthew McConaughey (the prosecutor). It's very funny though I'm sure there was a conspicuous lack of humour in the real-life scenario and the film remains, rightly or wrongly, very much a tribute to Bernie Tiede. You can't help feeling it's a tribute he deserved.

CAT BALLOU **

This spoof western won Lee Marvin the Oscar for Best Actor but considering the opposition included Riichard Burton in "The Spy who came in from the Cold", Laurence Olivier in "Othello", Rod Steiger in "The Pawnbroker" and Oscar Werner in "Ship of Fools" perhaps giving Marvin the Oscar was overly generous. The film itself is highly enjoyable, a good follow-on from the Bob Hope spoofs and a nice precursor of "Blazing Saddles". It's got a good script from Walter Newman and Frank Pierson, lively direction from Elliot Silverstein and best of all, a first-rate cast that includes Jane Fonda, excellent in the title role of "Cat Ballou", Michael Callan, Dwayne Hickman, Tom Nardini, John Marley and as the balladeers Nat King Cole and Stubby Kaye. It could be funnier I admit but it is also a very hard film to dislike.

CAREFUL, HE MIGHT HEAR YOU ***

One of the greatest and least sentimental films about childhood and one of the best, yet most undervalued, of Australian pictures, Carl Schultz's "Careful, He Might Hear You", taken from Sumner Locke Elliott's best-selling book, is about a young boy, known simply as PS, (terrifically played by 8 year old Nicholas Gledhill), caught in the middle of an acrimonious custody battle between his two aunts after his mother's death and his abandonment by his father. It's a very simple, straightforward film with excellent performances from Wendy Hughes and Robyn Nevin as the two women in question, John Hargreaves as the returning father and Peter Whitford as his uncle.

Schultz films it so that we see everything through PS's eyes and it's often very moving though Ray Cook's over-emphatic score sometimes drags it down while the period setting is beautifully captured in John Stoddart's designs and John Seales' superb widescreen cinematography. A sizeable international hit in its day it was named one of the top ten films of the year by the National Board of Review.

DIE, DIE MY DARLING nil

Had this been better, (or worse, depending on your point of view), it might have been a camp classic particularly with Tallulah Bankhead going further over the top than any of her contemporaries as the barking mad matriarch holding her dead son's girlfriend, (a very dumb Stefanie Powers), captive. "Die, Die My Darling" or "Fanatic", depending on which side of the Atlantic you're on, is dafter than most and is totally lacking in suspense but Bankhead, sans make-up, seems to enjoy torturing Miss Powers who deserves all she gets for being so stupid in the first place. It's certainly fun seeing Tallulah playing a religious nut though I kept wondering why she agreed to make this tripe since she was never a 'movie' name to begin with. Presumably she needed the money. Watch out, too, for Donald Sutherland playing a kind of village idiot. No doubt he's crossed it off his CV.

THE INTRUDER ****

In 1962 Roger Corman made "The Intruder". It wasn't just the most controversial film he ever made but one of the most controversial films ever made in the US. The subject was racism and he made it quite early on in the growth of the Civil Rights Movement. Even today it still packs a considerable punch. The Intruder of the title is William Shatner, a handsome, smiling stranger in a white suit who arrives in a small Southern Town preaching racism and hate, (it's not just African-Americans but Communists and Jews who are grist to his mill), and it's a much more terrifying film than any of his Poe adaptations.

Shatner gives a great performance in a great film but who might have guessed it. Corman was King of the Z-Movies and for many Shatner would never be more than Captain Kirk, a role he was still to play. Needless to say, the film virtually disappeared without trace and it's seldom revived but it showed Corman really was a film-maker to be taken seriously. It may still be only a B-Movie but it's one of the greatest B-Movies ever made.

AMERICAN WOMAN ****

The "American Woman" of the title is Sienna Miller and she's absolutely terrific here, so good in fact that she should have been a serious Oscar contender last year. She plays a single mother whose teenage daughter goes missing, leaving her to pick up the pieces and take care of her grandson. This slice of blue-collar Americana was directed by Ridley Scott's son. Jake and the film, like Milller's performance, is very fine indeed. This is the kind of intelligent, grown-up American film that was once commonplace but which we see so seldom nowadays as Marvel movies flood our multiplexes.

If Miller dominates the picture she is very ably supported by Amy Madigan as her mother and Christina Hendricks as her sister, by Will Sasso as her kindly brother-in-law and by Aaron Paul and Pat Healy as two of the men in her life, one sweet, the other sour while Brad Ingelsby's excellent screenplay captures the small-town milieu perfectly and despite it's grim subject, (domestic abuse is also to the fore), the film itself is never grim. Rather it's often funny, frequently very moving and something of a tonic and I can warmly recommend it.

THE WILD GOOSE LAKE ***

Gang warfare in Wuhan in this highly stylized Chinese gangster movie. There isn't a great deal that's new about Yi'nan Diao's "The Wild Goose Lake". Walter Hill, Jean-Pierre Melville or more recently Michael Mann could have made this but Diao's use of flashbacks to propel the story and his superb use of locations certainly give this an edge. Despite the fatalistic tone it's hardly what you would call existential despite moving at a fairly leisurely pace. The plot isn't always easy to follow and sometimes it's hard to know who belongs to whose gang or who's a cop and who isn't.

As a cop killer on the run, Ge Hu is as cool as they come; in another lifetime Delon or Belmondo might have played this part and Lun-Mei Kwei is excellent as the film's femme fatale. In the end there is more atmosphere than action and the film's look finally overwhelms its content but it's great that in this day and age this kind of gangster film is being made and that China has taken such a fundamentally American genre and twisted it to its own ends.

SO PRETTY *

You won't see too many films like Jessie Jeffrey Dunn Rovinelli's "So Pretty" which, you're probably saying to yourself, is a good thing. It's a seemingly plotless look at the lives of a group of gay and transgender people living in a communal situation, one of whom is Rovinelli herself, (Rovenelli not only directed the picture and acts in it but is also the producer, the writer and the editor). Nothing actually happens; most of the time they just eat, make love or read from a script which probably reflects the film we're watching and is apparently based on a book by Ronald M. Schernikau. I haven't read it but I don't think if I had I would be any of the wiser. Usually I find this kind of experimental film-making a real turn off but these people are so attractive and such pleasant company I actually found the film quite engaging. A one-off to be sure but not one to be dismissed either.

IN THE SHADOW OF THE MOON **

Jim Mickle's "In the Shadow of the Moon" is a cross between a sci-fi film and a serial killer thriller and if the sci-fi elements far outweigh the serial killer parts it hardly matters because this enjoyable, reasonably intelligent and rather daft movie never stops to draw breath and gives its leading actor, Boyd Holbrook, a part he can finally get his teeth into. He's a cop investigating a series of murders in Philadelphia in 1988 that end with the apparent death of the killer. Skip forward nine years and the exact same kind of killings start all over again.

Of course, with this kind of movie you have to suspend disbelief from the start and if you are prepared to give yourself over to it, it's actually a lot of fun. In a good supporting cast Michael C. Hall is a stand out as a senior detective who seems slower on the uptake than he ought to be. Excellent cinematography, too, from David Lanzenberg and a good score from Jeff Grace make this something of a guilty pleasure.

THE TRIP no stars

No list of 'so-bad-they're-almost-good-but-not-quite-they're-still-bad' movies would be complete without the inclusion of Roger Corman's 1967 psychedelic 'classic' "The Trip". This was Corman's attempt to cash in on the counter-culture of sex, drugs and what, I guess, passed for rock 'n roll at the time and among those trippin', man, were Peter Fonda, Bruce Dern, Dennis Hopper and Susan Strasberg. It looked great in a pop-art kind of way but there's no script to speak of, (Jack Nicholson 'wrote' it, presumably on the back of a small envelope), and the acting is non-existent. Needless to say the Brits were having none of it and it was banned in the UK, no doubt to preserve us from its corrupting influence. It didn't work; we still turned on, tuned in and dropped out and we certainly didn't need howlers like this to help us on our way.