THE DARK KNIGHT RISES
Dir: Christopher Nolan - Starring: Christian Bale, Tom Hardy, Anne Hathaway, Gary Oldman.

It has been suggested that expectations were set too high for this Batman trilogy finale, but the same was true for The Dark Knight, and that film met them. Truth be told, amongst its thrilling set-pieces The Dark Knight Rises suffers from third-movie bloating (cf Spider-man 3), taking itself too seriously while struggling with a bloated and occasionally incoherent screenplay.
After a brilliant Bondian opening, the story spends a solemn eternity setting up its characters, each – particularly Michael Caine's Alfred – given to moralistic monologuing. The second half brings excitement but also confusion as the many plot strands vie for attention.
For all that, it's immaculately made, a stunning, sprawling achievement and essential viewing for fans of the saga. The big action scenes are astonishing and there is a slew of intelligent subtexts swirling around to provide depth. The new devices are cool, Catwoman works, and the ending is perfect. Perhaps, ultimately, the real difficulty is that the man who should be the central focus gets a little squeezed out of his own movie: too many big issues and not enough bat.

Assured Aussie writer/director Rolf de Heer likes to wander from genre to genre, whether it be the early excesses of Bad Boy Bubby or the playful indigenous storytelling of Ten Canoes. With The King is Dead! he creates what he calls a suburban western, a tale of feuding neighbours that would be right at home with the westies of Outrageous Fortune. Central are newbies Max and Therese, garlic-loving chef Otto to one side and bogans from hell on the other. Loud music, drug dealing and violent parties soon shatter any domestic bliss. Then things get much worse...
It's an unassuming little story, well-told and entertainingly quirky, constantly raising the question: what would you do?

High School sounds like any dumb school-set stoner comedy: school principal wages war on marijuana with compulsory drug testing; school genius (who happens to have smoked weed for the first time) teams up with the school stoner to foil the regime by getting the whole school stoned. How then did it get a cast including (Oscar winner) Adrien Brody, Colin Hanks and Michael Chiklis? Amazingly, it's by reworking the formula in a way that is modern, funny and smart and – in its student protagonists – by presenting surprisingly three-dimensional characters. Brody is a brilliant psycho, Chiklis a hilariously deluded principal, and the whole thing is a bunch of fun.

'Extreme tourism” in Europe probably suffered a drop in business after Chernobyl Diaries, where six young vacationers head to the now-abandoned workers' village of said nuclear site, along with dodgy guide Uri. Uri's van is just as dodgy and in no time they're stranded in the eerily isolated ghost town. But they're not alone... The result is an efficient horror film and an exercise in suspense, but the absence of any real character engagement – or plot development for that matter – makes for a movie stronger on atmosphere than substance. And, like the same writer's Paranormal Activity, there is a distinct lack of resolution.

Wild Hunt is a strange little film set in the largely unknown world of live-action role-playing games. These seem to involve a bunch of people running round in a forest in 'tribes” and fighting mock battles. Each to their own, I guess. Problems start when a non-player crashes the game in search of his girlfriend. What begins as a series of semi-comic interactions turns progressively darker as the hunt gets under way, and it's clear that some people are taking things way too seriously. Unfortunately, a good idea is partly derailed by under-developed characters and the generally low-budget ambience. It's interesting, though.