What is the appeal of witnessing our own demise on screen? The Apocalypse is a subject that fascinates filmmakers, and this week doomsday comes to Perth in These Final Hours, a film that has an almost biblical sense of comeuppance for the mining boom capital. Its director Zak Hilditch tells us why he wanted to destroy his hometown.

What happens when genres lose their potency and become empty cliches? This week a new film about exorcism, Deliver Us From Evil, highlights just how difficult it is for filmmakers trying to reinvigorate well worn material. And we meet its star, Australian actor Eric Bana.

There’s a lot of goodwill around Rolf de Heer’s new film Charlie’s Country, about an Aboriginal elder who goes bush and battles alcoholism.

Can CGI special effects be too realistic? Do blockbuster directors spend too much time designing monsters and explosions at the computer, and not enough time thinking how to make us feel?

A new film starring Brendan Gleeson as a country priest looks at the frayed relationship between the Irish and the Catholic Church. Plus Clint Eastwood’s story of Frankie Valli and The Four Seasons is unashamedly populist and full of clichés. But it's not necessarily a bad thing.

Filmed biographies, fact, fiction and myth. Yves Saint Laurent was both a fashion icon and darling of the French Left, and this year two separate biopics attempt to dramatise his story. Plus a fascinating documentary about a man with severe memory loss which poses the question, how much is a sense of self based on remembered facts, and how much is it the stories we invent about ourselves?

This week on the Final Cut The Two Faces of January, an adaptation of the Patricia Highsmith thriller set in the early 1960s about American tourists in Greece who aren’t what they seem starring Kirsten Dunst, Viggo Mortensen and Oscar Isaac. Plus, the Australian coming of age film Galore, a story of adolescent love set against the Canberra bushfires of 2003.

What would Australia look like as a third world economy? It’s a question that writer director David Michôd explores in his dystopian road movie The Rover. Plus, a review of Good Vibrations, a biopic about Northern Irish punk impresario Terri Hooley and an interview with legendary American experimental filmmaker James Benning.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre turns 40 this year. Ahead of the restored Sydney Film Festival screening, curator Richard Kuipers discusses why the slasher classic is a must see for film lovers. Plus, ex-husband and wife Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise are both back on screen, Tom’s in the sci fi action film Edge of Tomorrow and Nicole stars in Grace of Monaco – the Grace Kelly biopic the critics panned at Cannes –  is it really that bad?

This week Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon reunite for a holiday of fine dining and dodgy celebrity impressions in The Trip to Italy, plus a conversation about how the recent Jim Jarmusch and Wes Anderson films are expressions of both directors’ personal taste, from a love of electric guitars to fine pastries.  And Seth MacFarlane channels an anxious, white, suburban everyman in the satirical Western A Million Ways To Die In The West.