The Screen Show

It seems there’s no stopping the US comedian Melissa McCarthy, a woman starring in three new films releasing this year (including Identity Thief, out this week) and the successful ongoing TV series Mike and Molly. Guest critic Ted Scheinman discusses why he thinks she’s the new face of American slapstick, up there with the greats. Plus, British director Danny Boyle pours all the darkness that didn’t make it into his Olympics opening ceremony into his latest film: a complex, twist-laden thriller called Trance. And Sleepwalk With Me, in which comedian Mike Birbiglia plays himself: a chronic sleepwalker, an absent boyfriend and a struggling stand-up comic. The line between self-indulgent narcissism and downbeat hipster comedy becomes very thin indeed...

This week romance, scandals and special relationships. Jacques Audiard sprinkles magic dust through a gritty story about a street fighter who falls in love with a whale trainer in a wheel chair. Bill Murray plays Franklin D. Roosevelt in a film about two special relationships:  the one between the US and the UK and the one between FDR and a cousin named 'Daisy'. Plus a discussion about the lies and scandals in the films of Iranian director Asghar Farhadi, the subject of a new retrospective at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image in Melbourne.

As Pope Francis settles in to his new job leading the world’s Catholics, a new documentary from Academy Award-winning filmmaker Alex Gibney looks at the child sex abuse scandal via the story of a Wisconsin priest who worked with deaf children, in Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God. Plus Russian-American filmmaker Julia Loktev discusses her enigmatic, jarring love story about backpackers in the Georgian mountains, starring Gael Garcia Bernal, and the verdict on Takashi Miike's remake of the 1962 Japanese Samurai classic Harakiri.

Rebelle (aka War Witch) tells the story of child soldiers in Africa, and a girl who sees dead people. It treads similar ground to the ill-fated Kony 2012 campaign, but does it unpack the complex issues more successfully? Or does cinema work best when it avoids the role of journalism, or activism? Plus French director Oliver Assyas discusses his latest, After May, a personal film about growing up in the fading glow of the idealism of post-1968 France. And The Incredible Burt Wonderstone, a showbiz comedy about middle aged magicians starring Jim Carrey, Steve Buscemi and Steve Carrell.

This week, doing the right thing. Two films about good people living in terrible times will have you asking yourself how you’d measure up. Barbara is set in the paranoid East Germany of the Cold War and tells the story of a dissident doctor. In The Fog is set in the Nazi occupied western regions of the USSR, about a trio of doomed men roaming the wilderness. That film's director, Sergei Loznitsa, will discuss why he wanted to make a movie about a conflict without a clearly defined front line. Plus Oz The Great and Powerful. Somewhere beyond conventional notions of time or space—in a place called Hollywood—one-time cult director Sam Raimi has made one of the most expensive films ever. Should he have bothered?

The new murder mystery from Steven Soderbergh, Side Effects, is an elliptical critique of modern psychiatry and pharmaceuticals, but it’s also a metaphor for the financial crisis in the US. Attempting to weave all of this into a genre movie framework with a femme fatale played by Rooney Mara, Soderbergh shows he’s as ambitious a filmmaker as ever. Plus, ‘A Night of Horror’ festival director Dean Bertram pops in to discuss the great Hammer Horror films of the '60s, repackaged in a new box set this month.

It’s hard to know where myth ends and reality begins with a polarising figure like Roman Polanski, a filmmaker whose reputation has been coloured by great scandal and personal tragedy. Producer and longtime friend Andrew Braunsberg reckons he knows the essence of the man, and he speaks to us ahead of the release of the documentary he's made, Roman Polanski: A Film Memoir. Meanwhile there's love with a twist in cinemas this week, as Austrian auteur Michael Haneke juggles austerity and emotional delicacy in his story about an elderly couple grappling with debilitating illness in Amour, and the writer of Borat tries his hand at directing a rom com in I Give it a Year.

This week, the latest adaptation of Anna Karenina staring Keira Knightley is bold and unconventional – but does it work? Ray Winstone chats about his new action film The Sweeney, a reboot of the iconic 70s cop show that peers beyond the glass and steel facade of post-Olympics London to find a grimy underbelly. Plus a blast from the past: an impassioned defence of the 2007 Wong Kar Wai flop starring pop singer Norah Jones, My Blueberry Nights. (Note: the podcast contains an extended interview with Ray Winstone).

Few documentary filmmakers have captured the public imagination like D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus, who have turned their lenses on public figures as diverse as Bill Clinton, Bob Dylan and Depeche Mode. Hear the husband and wife duo reflect on their work ahead of their upcoming Australian speaking tour. Plus, the verdict on Spielberg’s Lincoln, the most nominated film at this year’s Oscars. (Note: the podcast contains bonus audio).

Kathryn Bigelow has been criticised for her depiction of torture in Zero Dark Thirty, her film about the hunt for Osama Bin Laden. But are her detractors missing the point? Plus, the changing face of China on screen in a discussion of two films showing at GOMA’s Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art.