Snowtown

SNOWTOWN: The most painfully realistic serial-killer film yet

The most painfully realistic serial-killer film yet

Snowtown gets as close as a film can to making you feel serial-killing’s human cost. It’s hard to thank Australian director Justin Kurzel for his extraordinary debut, so grim is the story it tells. But he and writer Shaun Grant have done a selfless, unsensationalist job of memorialising the 12 people murdered by a gang led by John Bunting in an Adelaide suburb, Snowtown, between 1992 and 1999. Kurzel, who grew up nearby, filmed in the area, and cast many non-professional locals. This authenticity is a sort of homage to the victims.

theartsdesk Q&A: Musician Cosmo Jarvis

Devonian polymath chats about gay pirates, guerrilla film-making and the struggle for recognition

Cosmo Jarvis (b 1989) was born in New Jersey but grew up in Devon. He has produced two albums, Humasyouhitch/Sonofabitch (2009) and Is The World Strange or Am I Strange? (2011), that combine incisive lyricism, goofy humour, rap, rock, terrace-chant choruses, studio orchestration and an unlikely fusion of musical styles, sometimes more jovially eccentric than hip. His highest-profile song is "Gay Pirates", a musical hoedown about love on the high seas that garnered Stephen Fry as a vocal fan.

DVD: Witchfinder General

Best-looking presentation yet of a landmark British film

Witchfinder General, along with The Wicker Man, has latterly been claimed as a pinnacle of a peculiarly British style of film. “Weird Britain” is a default description. It’ll do fine for these unsettling, intense horror films which draw from the British landscape and its history. This sparkling restoration of Witchfinder General can only enhance its status.

Unreported World: Vlad's Army, Channel 4

Did this dark little film about Putin's youth movement glimpse the future of modern Russia?

The next time you find yourself mumbling unkind words about the apathetic youth of today, or else deriding the muddle-headed protests of twonkish Charlie Gilmour types, stop and think about the Nashi. A right-wing Russian youth organisation bankrolled by Vladimir Putin’s shady regime and various big business interests, they practically make you want to raise a statue to any teenager who chooses to spend their daylight hours idling beneath a duvet or playing Robin Hood in the City.

Straw Dogs

Pale remake of Peckinpah's Seventies provocation

As this remake’s director Rod Lurie, a former film journalist, well knows, competing with Sam Peckinpah is a loser’s game. His films are no more replicable than a Fred Astaire musical, inseparable from their demonic creator. Straw Dogs was his lone, 1971 excursion to Britain, with Dustin Hoffman as a mousey American mathematician who accompanies new wife Susan George’s return to her rustic Cornish home, which in Peckinpah’s hands is as hostile as the badlands his western heroes rode through.

CD: David Lynch - Crazy Clown Time

It was never going to be moon, June, spoon and lovey dovey. And it isn't

“Molly had a red shirt/ Susie, she ripped her shirt off completely/ Danny poured the beer all over Sally/ We all ran around the back yard/ It was crazy clown time/ It was real fun”. The voice is strangled, high. A treated guitar phases in and out, puncturing moaning sounds. A simple beat thuds. David Lynch’s fun might not be yours or mine, but his new album packs a punch. Crazy Clown Time is nightmarish. Seductive, too.

DVD: In the Realm of the Senses, Empire of Passion

Double dose of disturbing from Nagisa Ôshima

There’s no doubt that In the Realm of the Senses shocked and still shocks, but after watching this first-ever uncut UK release, it’s hard to figure out what shocks most: the sex, the equation of sex, obsession and death, that all this takes place in a sealed environment ruled by ritual, or whether it’s the revelation that Japanese society could produce a film so opposite to its perceived or received persona. It could also be the fact that it's based on a true story.

Tyrannosaur

TYRANNOSAUR: Paddy Considine’s fearless directorial debut puts life under an unsparing lens

Paddy Considine’s fearless directorial debut puts life under an unsparing lens

If you can judge a man by his friends then the volatile Joseph would be something of a contradiction. His best mate is looking death in the eye, riddled with sickness and regret (and by all accounts left that way by the lifestyle they both shared). Then there’s the wheeler-dealer prone to racist tirades. On the redemptive side is the charming, if porcelain-fragile friendship that he strikes up with dedicated Christian Hannah. It’s this friendship - and that which he also forms with a young, isolated boy on his estate – on which the film pivots.

Time Shift: Dear Censor, BBC Four

Blood and guts, sex and blasphemy - not if the censor had anything to say

I hadn't thought this one through very well. As someone who was put off horror films by a window crashing onto a hand in one of the Amityville movies at least two decades ago, watching Time Shift: Dear Censor last night, which promised to show some of cinema's most notorious scenes, was probably unwise. Happily, standards of gore, violence and sex have dropped so fast in the past 20 years that what was censorable in 1991 is PG now.

The Green Wave

THE GREEN WAVE: Part-animated documentary tells of Iran's brutally suppressed electoral revolution in 2009

Part-animated documentary tells of Iran's brutally suppressed electoral revolution in 2009

Four years ago a film called Persepolis told the story of a young woman’s experience of revolution in Iran. There has been a modest abundance of Iranian films making their way west over the years, but this distinguished itself from the others by being a frank and unflinching account of recent historical events, told in the form of animation. So the concept of The Green Wave should not take anyone by surprise.