Sun-drenched film noir

MANY who've seen Ivan Sen's fine new small-town police thriller Mystery Road have compared the film loosely to Roman Polanski's Chinatown.

Chinatown

MANY who've seen Ivan Sen's fine new small-town police thriller Mystery Road, set to open in October following triumphant screenings at the Sydney, Melbourne and, soon, Toronto film festivals, have compared the film loosely to director Roman Polanski's enduring 1974 period drama Chinatown (Sunday, 12.28am, ABC1).

Both are sun-drenched films noirs, both feature commanding protagonists who spend much of the film doing wrong things for the right reasons, and both feature climactic showdowns in places laden with metaphor. Robert Towne's superb script is among the best in the genre, and private investigator Jake Gittes is near the top of Jack Nicholson's roles and performances.

Emad Burnat is a Palestinian farmer and father under constant siege as Israelis encroach on land in his central West Bank village of Bil'in. The nonfiction film he directed with Israeli documentarian and peace activist Guy Davidi, Five Broken Cameras (Monday, 10.22pm, ABC2), collects footage from the five machines smashed by violence as he filmed protests and confrontations between the villagers and the Israeli Defence Force.

An Oscar nominee for best documentary feature earlier this year, the film is at once sentimental and harrowing, revealing a world in which a child's first words include wall, cartridge and army.

Actor Sean Penn's career as a film director encompasses four intense features to date. His most recent, the 2007 outdoor survival drama Into the Wild (Saturday, 9.30pm, SBS One) stars Emile Hirsch as the real-life Christopher McCandless who, in the early 1990s after graduating from college, burned his credit cards, donated his savings to charity, changed his name to Alexander Supertramp and made a stand braving the elements from an abandoned bus in the Alaskan wilderness.

It is a tragic story rendered noble by Penn's obvious sympathy towards this idealistic yet mysterious outsider. Hal Holbrook's small but crucial role is luminous, as is the score by Pearl Jam's Eddie Vedder.

Director Guillermo del Toro's recent big-budget fanboy favourite Pacific Rim introduced many non-connoisseurs to kaiju, Japanese for "strange creature" and the name of a genre that includes such well-loved movie monsters as Godzilla, Mothra and the giant flame-breathing turtle known as Gamera, who first roared to life in the 1965 film of the same name.

Heavily re-edited and dubbed in the US, the 1966 result Gammera the Invincible (Monday, 10.30am, TVS) leaves relatively intact the story of how an atomic bomb on a Soviet plane downed by the Americans frees the reptile from his Arctic slumber. Then, in the words of the TVS website: "Enraged at being roused from such a sound sleep, he takes it out on Tokyo." Deadly serious to Japanese audiences and the aforementioned fanboys, for the rest of us it's goofy fun.

BEST ON SHOW

Chinatown (M)
4.5 stars
Sunday, 12.28am, ABC1

Five Broken Cameras (M)
4 stars
Monday, 10.22pm, ABC2

Into the Wild (M)
4 stars
Saturday, 9.30pm, SBS One