Haunting beauty of Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon

THOSE seeking action and adventure can take their pick of Life of Pi, last year's Oscar-winning Argo or Tim Burton's remake of Planet of the Apes.

The White Ribbon

THOSE seeking action and adventure can take their pick of Life of Pi (Sunday, 7pm, M Masterpiece), last year's Oscar-winning Argo (Sunday, 7pm, M Premiere) or Tim Burton's remake of Planet of the Apes (Monday, 7pm, M Action/Thriller).

But in my perverse way I'm highlighting three disturbing and occasionally horrific films that can be guaranteed to get audiences thinking.

Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon (Sunday, 9.45pm, World Movies) is a brilliant allegory about the origins of fascism, set in a village in northern Germany on the eve of World War I. A sequence of troubling events has disrupted the normal calm of rural life. The local Protestant pastor (Burghart Klaussner) beats his children mercilessly under a pretence of loving kindness.

Haneke has said the children in The White Ribbon would have grown to be mature adults during the Nazi era, and he poses the question: has their upbringing contributed to the horrors of Nazism? This gravely beautiful film may haunt you for a long time.

PJ Hogan's Mental (Friday, 5pm, M Premiere) cheerfully defies all rules of good taste, moderation and political correctness. Dolphin Heads is a stretch of Queensland suburbia where Shaz (Toni Collette) arrives one day to work as a nanny. Collette has never looked more coarse, vulgar or sinister. Hogan has plenty of irreverent fun with Mental, and audiences are likely to watch in a state of appalled fascination.

Gaspar Noe's French film Irreversible (Wednesday, 11.20pm, World Movies) contains scenes of unspeakable violence, including a brutal killing in a gay bar and a nine-minute rape sequence in a Paris subway. At the Cannes screening in 2002 the usual quota of people fainted or walked out in disgust.

Irreversible is a brilliant technical achievement but I'm not sure what we should take away from it. That violence is evil and dehumanising? We knew that already. Monica Bellucci and Vincent Cassel ensured the film's box-office success in Europe, but I doubt if it's the masterpiece that many claim.

I've written before that Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation (Sunday, 11pm, M Masterpiece) is the best American film of the 1970s, and its themes look more topical and urgent today. Harry Caul (an unforgettable Gene Hackman) is a surveillance expert, an industrial spy specialising in phone taps and electronic eavesdropping (no emails in 1974). Today he'd probably be hacking Angela Merkel's mobile. A sequel to this great thriller is overdue.

The White Ribbon (MA15+)
4 stars
Sunday, 9.45pm, World Movies

Mental (MA15+)
3.5 stars
Friday, 5pm, M Premiere

The Conversation (M)
5 stars
Sunday, 11pm, M Masterpiece