Predestination: Ethan Hawke in Australian time-travelling thriller

Ethan Hawke discovers a temporal paradox in Predestination, based on Robert A. Heinlein’s All You Zombies.

Sarah Snook in Predestination.

Robert A. Heinlein was a groundbreaking science fiction author, early friend of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard and legendary curmudgeon.

Of his sizeable bibliography, only a few stories and books have been made into films (Starship Troopers chief among them). The most recent, and maybe the best to date, is last year’s Australian thriller Predestination (Wednesday, 8.35pm, Masterpiece).

The film was written and directed by German-born, Brisbane-based identical twins Michael and Peter Spierig, and is based on Heinlein’s 1959 short story All You Zombies. Ethan Hawke plays a time-travelling agent who discovers a startling temporal paradox with the help of a mysterious writer (Sarah Snook). To explain more would be to give away a mind-bending story, well told.

Those in search of an obscure and eccentric gem of a picture can do no better this week than director Gregory La Cava’s 1933 politically themed and fantasy-tinged comedy-drama Gabriel Over the White House (Wednesday, 10.30pm, TCM). Walter Huston, director John’s father, is a crooked, do-nothing president transformed into a Roosevelt-style activist after emerging from a coma. With it’s fascistic and totalitarian overtones, the movie, co-produced by publisher William Randolph Hearst (the thinly veiled subject of Citizen Kane), remains controversial to this day and is a vivid example of Hollywood filmmaking before the censorial Motion Picture Production Code.

One of Avatar director James Cameron’s less appreciated efforts, the 1994 spy epic True Lies (Thursday, 8.30pm, Action), stars Arnold Schwarzenegger as an undercover agent and a terrific Jamie Lee Curtis as his clueless wife, who becomes as ruthless a killing machine as he. The still jaw-dropping action sequences marked the first work from Digital Domain, a visionary special effects company co-founded by Cameron.

A former very active sperm donor and current avowed larrikin discovers he has hundreds of children in their 20s who want to meet him in Quebecois writer-director Ken Scott’s frequently hilarious 2011 Canadian comedy Starbuck (Monday, 1.15am, World Movies). Actor Patrick Huard is very funny as the perpetually perplexed protagonist, who must also deal with an underworld debt and a souring relationship on his way to accepting his rather large family. (Avoid Scott’s 2013 American remake Delivery Man, with Vince Vaughn.)

There are few smarter films in recent years than director Jason Reitman’s 2009 Up in the Air (Friday, 10.25pm, Romance), which was nominated for six Oscars. George Clooney plays a corporate shark who specialises in firing people — a “downsizer,” in the parlance — who gets his emotional comeuppance via another fellow traveller, played by Vera Farmiga. This is easily one of Clooney’s best performances to date.

Predestination (MA15+)

4 stars

Wednesday, 8.35pm, Masterpiece (402)

Gabriel Over the White House

(PG) 4 stars

Wednesday, 10.30pm, TCM (428)

Up in the Air (M)

4 stars

Friday, 10.25pm, Romance (408)