While We're Young (2014)

Husband and wife forty-somethings find themselves caught between two worlds — that of their procreating couple-friends, and the hipster orbit of a couple of twenty-somethings whose grooviness reinvigorates them — in this really very funny comedy with witty things to say about Gen Xers getting old and having to "hurry up because they've changed the rules, honey."

★★★★★

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J. Edgar (2011)

Like the film's montage depicting J Edgar Hoover crime-busting, bursting in on organised crime gangs and making arrests, director Clint Eastwood jumps in and machineguns through the details of the life and controversial career of the founder and long-term director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, creating an interesting but hollow highlight reel that slows only occasionally to exaggerate theories of what motivated the man: a Norman Bates-style homelife, apparently, and - an aspect of the man's life not all historians agree upon - his homosexuality.

★★★☆☆

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Silence (2016)

In the 1600s, Portugese Jesuit priests head to Japan where Christians are being persecuted and one of their own, true-life historical figure Cristovao Ferreira is missing-in-missionary-action, in Martin Scorsese's epic and looong treatment of Shusaku Endo's 1966 novel about the effect Christianity and Japan have on each other.

★★★★☆

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Tracks (2013)

This movie based on the book, Tracks by Robyn "The Camel Lady" Davidson, details her 1977 journey across 2000km of Australian desert from Alice Springs to the Indian Ocean with just her dog and three camels, and it brings the outback to staggeringly beautiful life and along the way tantalises with bits and pieces of information about her, helping with the mystery of why anyone so young would strike so determinedly upon such a singular, dangerous and lonely plan.

★★★★☆

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Midnight Special (2016)

Some sort of commune, the government and a mum and dad vie to get their hands on a young boy whose eyes and hands glow and who seems to have an otherworldly ability to cause destruction, in this morose scifi road chase movie stuck in low gear, that goes nowhere slowly with only glum monotone passengers.

★☆☆☆☆

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