Yorgos Lanthimos (The Favourite) is an acquired taste, to say the least. Even if he’s presenting a relatively mundane story, there’s a sense of unease hanging around proceedings. Poor Things, however,is not a mundane film. It is a nightmarish and outré work delivered under the dark cover of having a name cast. Whether audiences are suspecting or not is up to them, but they really should have learned their lesson by now: Lanthimos has made a hypnotising tour de force that demands you get with its rhythms or die. 

Choose life.

What they don’t tell you about ageing is that you get tired of cynical corporate synergy movie tie-in exercises. In a brighter, more innocent world, someone might see Argylle, the novel released one month ahead of a movie of the same name that is not based on the novel but is instead based on a “fictionalised” version of the author of the novel, who probably doesn’t exist, and say “Wow! The thin gruel of this spy novel is great grist for the mill of a metanarrative from one of the more irritating auteurs of the 21st century!”
The wide-eyed ingenue who might have thought that died years ago, and in his place is someone just shy of forty who can almost see through the thin veneer – and yet is still not smart enough to opt out entirely.

The One Man Army has been a respected, and well trod, genre for many years. In recent times there’s been an influx of flair and personality into what can tend to be somber and bloody affairs. The Beekeeper looks like it might just be another run and gun, but there are times when it rises above itself to become heightened cinema. Adam Clay might not have personality, but The Beekeeper does.

From the mid-noughts to the mid-tens, Jennette McCurdy played the breakout character in a Nickelodeon sitcom, which got her a degree of fame and fortune (allegedly garnished due to a bureaucratic failure). Then she kind of faded away. Her memoir, I’m Glad My Mom Died, has generated a lot of buzz, which seems unusual to an outsider to the Nickelodeon ecosystem. iCarly was watched by millions, but as McCurdy herself says, it was the dead-end fame of child acting, an ecosystem that can be near impossible to escape.

Internationally, at least, it could be said that McCurdy is now more famous for this book than she ever was for iCarly or Sam & Cat. The 65 weeks on the New York Times hardcover best seller list certainly isn’t hurting her, but it’s also proof that her success isn’t entirely down to her notoriety: a combination of good publicity and a compelling story have allowed her to escape the walled garden of childhood fame for literary stardom and a potential new career.

Hixploitation! Scott Von Doviak is a genre man par excellence. What he did for multigenerational heist mysteries in Charlesgate Confidential he does for murderous road movies in Lowdown Road. This is the sort of book designed to be read in a day, if not a single sitting. It’s Hard Case Crime, so you know you’re there to, at the very least, bask in the cover.

Workplace romance, enemies to lovers, locked in overnight … it seems that the romance novels that litter the pop fiction landscape these days are designed to hit certain keywords for maximum SEO. With Love, From Cold World is a refreshingly uncynical entry in the genre, with a warning at the beginning that it features “Christmas content”. It lines up its targets and knocks them down, but one wonders if one of the enemies has to be so unthinkingly cruel for so much of the lead up. Nothing inside can quite match up to the cover and title, both of which are inviting, but this is a fine enough example of a genre that grows ever more inclusive.

It’s not an exaggeration to say that the mainstreaming of new horror cinema in the last twenty years is at least partially driven by Australians, with James Wan (Malignant) and Leigh Whannell (The Invisible Man) throwing everything on the bathroom floor in 2004 and building from there.

Wan’s fascinating career continues with a story credit on M3GAN, an Antipodean collaboration with New Zealand born director Gerard Johnstone (TV’s The New Legends of Monkey) and American writer Akela Cooper (TV’s Star Trek: Strange New Worlds). For the low, low, price of $12 million, you can get a dancing robo girl with a lust for blood – but not too much blood, because you can clearly see the seams where her punches were pulled.