The Screen Show

This week, The Internship: Google gets its own film in a comedy about the digital divide starring Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn as 40-something interns. It sounds like a great opportunity to poke fun at a corporate workplace voted by Fortune magazine as the world’s best, but is it more of an advertisement? Plus, Estonian filmmaker Ilmar Raag talks about directing Jeanne Moreau as a suicidal—but still charming—misanthrope in A Woman In Paris, and Sydney Film Festival guest Haifa Al Mansour talks about why people who haven't seen her film still criticise it.

As the 2013 Sydney Film Festival begins, first thoughts on the opening night film Mystery Road from Australian writer director Ivan Sen, and a review of the stunning documentary The Act of Killing about ageing death squad henchmen in Indonesia. Plus I pop the bonnet on Fast and Furious 6, which has taken pole position at the US box office, and survey two very different depictions of Marie Antoinette: one in a new French film called Farewell My Queen, the second in Sofia Coppola’s much maligned 2006 movie. Guest critic Nadia Buick asks were the booing crowds at Cannes wrong?

The Sydney Film Festival kicks off next week and its artistic director Nashen Moodley joins us to talk about one of the highlights: a confronting Austrian trilogy about sex tourism, religious fanaticism and paedophilia called Paradise. It’s the perfect festival experience: confronting, stylistically bold and a big conversation starter. Plus in regular release, there’s Sinister, a new horror starring Ethan Hawke and Happiness Never Comes Alone, a French romantic comedy starring Sophie Marceau.

Baz Lurhmann’s adaptation of F Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby is the number one film in the world at the moment, making more money than Star Trek and Iron Man 3. Baz Lurhmann speaks about his admiration for the book, which he claims is a universal fable. Also today, the heads up on The Hangover 3 and The Reluctant Fundamentalist.

Actor Tim Roth speaks about his latest film, the English drama Broken and tells me why he hasn’t directed a movie since his powerful 1999 debut The War Zone. The main review this week is the film voted the second best movie of 2012 by critics in a poll for the UK magazine Sight and Sound. It’s from Portugal, it’s called Tabù, and in my book it’s better than the film that came in at number one – The Master.  Its writer director Miguel Gomes also drops in for a chat.

Two very good American films this week, neither called Star Trek. The outrageous Spring Breakers follows four teenage girls on a debauched schoolies week in Florida. Director Harmony Korine talks about what inspires him to make his provocative, highly stylized films. And, a modern day melodrama about crime, justice and ambition: The Place Beyond the Pines.

A week out from the release of Star Trek: Into Darkness, director JJ Abrams discusses the American fascination with 'the enemy within' and his approach to emotion and comedy in his re-invigoration of the decades-old franchise. Plus, the bittersweet nostalgia of time travel in Camille Rewinds, a French film about a middle-aged woman who wakes up to find she’s 16 again.

If you’ve never been convinced those big screen adaptations of Marvel Comics are actually for adults too, Iron Man 3 might finally change your mind. It’s a terrorism parable that doesn’t take itself too seriously, and Robert Downey Jr is at his dry and sardonic best playing the billionaire-inventor-philanthropist Tony Stark (aka Iron Man). Plus, rediscovering Stephen Frears’ classic about immigrants and Thatcherism, My Beautiful Laundrette, and a French film about a simple cook who won the president’s heart, Haute Cuisine.

Following on from the Boston bombings, one of the most bombastically right-wing visions of terrorism in recent times explodes on screens this week. Olympus Has Fallen depicts the takedown of the White House and the capture of a US president by North Korean terrorists. Some will see it as tongue-in-cheek schlock, others as a very serious, paranoid brand of American patriotism—but with actors like Morgan Freeman, Aaron Eckhart and Gerard Butler, it will be hard to ignore. Plus the director of The Other Son, a new French film about the Israeli Palestinian conflict, talks about how she re-imagined the tensions as a personal story of two babies swapped at birth, brought up on different sides of the wall. And in the wake of Margaret Thatcher’s funeral comes No, a film dealing with one of her great friends, Augusto Pinochet, about the ad man who helped convince Chileans to vote 'no' in the referendum that saw the general removed from power.

This week, it's the Tom Cruise Appreciation Society. His new sci-fi film Oblivion is a fascinating piece of drone fiction, channelling our deep fears about the remote-control killing machines in our own world. Plus guest critic Huw Walmsley-Evans will be dusting off Eyes Wide Shut, Stanley Kubrick’s unjustly maligned final film. Also out this week, Kon-Tiki, a film about a group of Scandinavian scientists who crossed the Pacific in a raft in 1947 to prove that the pre-Colombian Indians had done it centuries before. Its producer Jeremy Thomas pops in for a chat.