The Screen Show

This week music scholar David Kram explains the allure of Wagner on the big screen and French Swiss director Ursula Meier discusses her film Sister, about a young thief who targets holiday makers at a ski resort. Also, what do Lenny Kravitz, Oprah Winfrey and Forrest Whitaker have in common? They’re all in the new civil rights drama The Butler, inspired by the true story of a black man who worked in The White House.

This week Tom Hanks stars in Captain Phillips, a thriller about an American freighter hijacked by Somali pirates that goes to some lengths to try and humanise the bad guys. But it is it really any different from a regular ‘whites in peril’ fantasy? Plus, in the lead up to a new retrospective at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, a discussion on the formally bold and highly personal films of Shirley Clarke, an underground director who turned her lens on America’s avant-garde artists and marginalised black poor.

Vigilantism and torture are at the centre of  Prisoners, a dark new thriller starring Hugh Jackman and Jake Gyllenhaal. It’s about the hunt for a pair of young girls abducted in broad daylight, and opens up myriad troubling questions about what happens when good people do terrible things in the quest for justice. Is this the ultimate post 9/11 fantasy about the ends that justify the means? Also, Ivan Sen's outback thriller Mystery Road and the time traveling rom com About Time. Plus, the makers of a documentary about the South Melbourne priest, activist and broadcaster Father Bob Maguire discuss the challenges of finding the personal truth beyond the public persona of this persuasive media performer.

A new film about the 'people’s princess' starring Naomi Watts trundles out the clichés of Diana the humanitarian, Diana the media manipulator and Diana the paparazzi victim. There’s the added twist of a romance with a Pakistani heart surgeon, too. A super woman needs a super storyteller, so does she get one?  Plus, director Mark Hartley speaks about re-making that classic of Australian exploitation cinema, Patrick, a film about a coma patient who unleashes sexual and homicidal urges through his telekinetic powers.

Alfonso Cuarón’s science fiction flick Gravity stars Sandra Bullock and George Clooney as two astronauts stranded in space after their shuttle is destroyed. It's a terrifying spectacle, but does it live up to the best sci fi metaphors of the human condition? And the documentary about Indonesian death squad veterans The Act of Killing is possibly the most powerful thing you will see this year. Its director Joshua Oppenheimer describes how he got his subjects to act out their crimes for the camera.

This week Canadian filmmaker and actress Sarah Polley explains how she turned the camera on herself and her family and uncovered an astonishing personal secret in the documentary Stories We Tell. Plus Lovelace: the biopic about the porn star Linda Lovelace.

The adaptation of Tim Winton’s collection of intertwined short stories The Turning is three hours long and boasts seventeen different directors. Why would anyone attempt such a project? Producer and director Robert Connolly and actor Hugo Weaving explain. Plus, the outrageous new Pedro Almodóvar film I’m So Excited is a sex comedy set on an ill-fated flight that has many asking whether the Spanish writer-director has gone off the rails.

Few films or TV shows have captured the Australian migrant experience with as much depth as a new documentary by this week's guest Sophia Turkiewicz. Once My Mother tracks her Polish mother’s harrowing refugee journey from war-ravaged Europe to post-war suburban Adelaide. Also, Cate Blanchett stars as a fallen Manhattan socialite in Woody Allen’s allegory about the Global Financial Crisis, Blue Jasmine, and Armageddon screenwriter Shane Salerno makes a doco about America's most mysterious novelist, Salinger. Go figure.

War and uneasy peace at the cinema. White House Down is a Hollywood blockbuster from disaster maestro Roland Emmerich that depicts America under attack, yet again, and an African-American President with a pacifist agenda who learns how to fire a rocket launcher. It’s satire and flag-waving patriotism – can you have both? The Gatekeepers,  a new documentary on the Israeli Secret Service, explores the moral dilemmas and contradictions in fifty years of Middle East espionage. Finally, philosopher Mary Zournazi discusses the 1953 classic about family and the alienation of the elderly Tokyo Story, by Japanese director Yasujirō Ozu.

What do you get when Lindsay Lohan and porn star James Deen act in a movie about the film industry scripted by Bret Easton Ellis and directed by Paul Schrader? A cinematic honey pot of  lust, betrayal, fear and rivalry; an LA portrait where 21st century malaise seeps into every sun-drenched pixel. Artistic co-director of the Sydney Underground Film Festival Stefan Popescu discusses just why it’s the must-see title of his line-up. Plus, the verdict on Ashton Kutcher as Steve Jobs in the first biopic to hit theatres since the death of the Apple co-founder.