One Man Band
Mark Andrews / Andrew Jimenez 2005 US (1st time; big screen)
Two multi-instrument musicians compete for the single coin in a toddler's hands; their greed gets the better of them.
Witty Pixar short, which runs just about short enough for the charm to come off; any longer, and it might just grate.

Cars
John Lasseter 2006 US (1st time; big screen)
Lightning McQueen, a racing car, wants to make it big, but first has a lesson or two to learn from an old abandoned town on what used to be a busy route 66.
Decidedly American affair, oddly nostalgic and neglecting character for sentiment; Pixar has always brought such gusto to facial expressions in its characters, but this freedom doesn't translate well to automobiles. It isn't as succinct as their other efforts, but stands as a visual triumph in its own right, far away from the studio's previous worlds of superheroes, the ocean and a bedroom full of toys.

Wolf Creek
Greg McLean 2004 Australia (2nd time; TV)
Three backpackers, an Australian male and two English tourists, get stranded in the Outback, and take the offered help of a seemingly genuine local.
Effective, confident piece of filmmaking; it looks marvellous, presenting beautiful images of the Australian landscape as if from a postcard, which are contradicted by the brutal violence. The opening hour is a subtle lesson on how to absorb and ultimately wrong-foot the audience; the second hour is a tremendously sustained gore-fest reminiscent of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

Professione: reporter (The Passenger)
Michelangelo Antonioni 1975 France/Italy/US/Spain (1st time; big screen)
A reporter in Africa assumes the identity of a gun-runner who dies of a heart attack in the hotel room next to him.
Thoroughly unpredictable, meandering film without any kind of foreseeable character or narrative arc, presented as a kind of extended travelogue which goes on far too long and burns at too slow a pace; Nicholson's performance is tame and his character is simply uninteresting. The cinematography is fantastic early on, and there are some brilliant cinematic touches throughout, the best of which comes at the very end of the film, where a camera seemingly moves, at a snail's pace, through a barred window, slowly turns around, and is somehow outside the hotel room in which it started its movement.