Awful crimes are being committed in an Australian outback town: young girls murdered, and dumped in culverts. But what makes it worse for Aboriginal detective Jay Swan (Aaron Pedersen), newly returned to his small hometown from the city, is the barely coded and bare-faced racism he encounters, from his cop colleagues most of all; the sense that these girls, because they’re Aboriginal too, don’t matter.

Alexander Payne has never been one for flashy features and in his latest he tones things all the way down to monochrome, as if his intentions are more bittersweet than ever. It's a fittingly subdued aesthetic for a tale of a man on his last legs, reluctantly forced to confront his past.

There is no end to The Fifth Estate. Instead, like those outtakes at the end of cartoons and comedies, there are cut-ups from an interview with Julian Assange holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy. “A WikiLeaks movie?” he says wryly. “Which one?” Well quite. Assange is box office, and it’s the argument of both The Fifth Estate and the documentary We Steal Secrets that deep down this is what he always wanted: to be a screen hero.

As good as many films are, few have the “wow” factor that leaves you elated, high as a kite. Gravity is one of those. Alfonso Cuarón’s space drama is a cinematic tour-de-force, after which it takes quite a while to come back to Earth.

In a deranged world where Charlie Sheen is President of the United States, Hollywood gets a much-deserved and highly amusing roasting. Robert Rodriguez’s sequel to Machete goes straight for the jugular by mocking Hollywood's golden child, that "galaxy far, far away" film franchise - which doggedly refuses to sling its hook. Rodriguez not only flips his middle finger at reboots and outworn action clichés, he also takes jabs at US foreign policy and the controversy surrounding the Mexican border fence.

In keeping with the absurd humour of the previous film, POTUS demands that Machete (played once again by Danny Trejo) head to Mexico to solve the drug cartel problem in exchange for American citizenship. This impossible mission plays out like a Bond film but has more in common with the Austin Powers franchise. Violence and comedy go hand in hand here, with one joke after another massacring the logic of the Hollywood machine and its minimal and reductive roles for anyone outside a certain demographic. In his fight for justice and a green card, Machete comes up against evil mastermind Voz, played by the-no-longer-ubiquitous-for reasons-everyone-knows Mel Gibson, who inhabits a secret lair loaded with movie history weaponry – which sets up some of the funniest moments in the film.

Female roles are thankfully varied: Michelle Rodriguez (who, while we’re on the subject of a lack of decent roles for women in Hollywood, would be brilliant as Wonder Woman in the Justice League film when that happens) reappears in the role of Luz, who has moved from her taco truck to a warehouse as head of an underground resistance, now using technology to fight their battle. Sofia Vergara (pictured above centre) pops up as a gun-toting whorehouse madam, Amber Heard as a spy with a Miss San Antonio guise, Lady Gaga as a bad-ass bounty hunter and Vanessa Hudgens (still shedding her Disney tag) as the daughter of the head of the drug cartel.

The furiously fast-paced postmodern humour subverts the sexualisation of women in film by using and pushing it to its limits in a very cheeky way. In no way is the genre of grindhouse off limits either, with the outdated attitudes to women in many of those films taking a beating - the women get to cock their breastplated guns and deliver comical take-downs as recompense.

Considering the character of Machete first sprang to life in a manufactured trailer in Planet Terror (Rodriguez’s entry in the double feature Grindhouse, made with Quentin Tarantino), his longevity is surprising. And this stoned-faced, almost silent character isn’t quite over the hill yet - here we see him mocking Twitter (“Machete don’t tweet” he quips). Perhaps he aims at too many targets, but Rodriguez knows how important it is to laugh at himself and the inconsistencies of an industry that isn’t always representative of its viewers.

Overleaf: watch the trailer for Machete Kills

One of the joys of autumn is the seasonal return to films about - and intended for - grown-ups, and movies don't come much more crisply and buoyantly adult than Le Week-End, at once the latest and best from the director/writer team of Roger Michell and Hanif Kureishi. The abundant wisdom of the pair's third screen collaboration within 10 years surely reflects the growing awareness that comes with age of the derailments, large and small, that lie scattered along life's way.

But whereas one might expect a gathering dourness from this excavation of marital fissures as they are laid bare during a Birmingham couple's anniversary weekend in France, the film benefits from a glancing whimsy that is itself definably Gallic: it's as if the very presence of Paris has put a spring in everyone's step (a condition to which Woody Allen of late would clearly relate), leaving its blissful trio of stars to do the rest. And, zut alors, do they ever.  

Jim Broadbent and Lindsay Duncan (pictured right with the film's third lead, Jeff Goldblum) are expertly matched as a couple who have barely settled into their Eurostar seats before the cracks in their conjugal union are beginning to show. Nick (Broadbent) is financially fretful, sexually unfulfilled, and browbeaten. He is also deeply smitten with Meg (Duncan), his coolly analytical spouse who jokes about being "tri-polar" and accuses her husband of 30 years of chewing his food like an "old horse at a trough". Will these few days away mark time for the pair at whatever cost to a family back home who are intermittently referenced via phone calls and the like? 

Maybe but just as possibly not, given the intermingling of opposites that for some while, one senses, has kept this marriage on track. "You can't not love and hate the same person," Nick decides, some time before he twice praises Meg as "hot" only to add the words "but cold" immediately after. The film is startlingly alert to the Janus-faced qualities of desire and desperation, and its neatly structured narrative gets a fillip from the introduction of a spry, wry Jeff Goldblum in prime form as Morgan, an old Cambridge pal of Nick's who has effected his own escape to Paris with a much younger, and pregnant, wife.

Is Morgan living any man's midlife dream? Once again, the film is too smart to answer decisively beyond building to a dinner party (with Goldblum, pictured left) that culminates in a monologue from Nick that looks set to become an acting class staple - though good luck to anyone attempting to better the haunted sense of self that Broadbent brings to every second of a superlative performance. His grasping cry of "don't do that" ranks in power with the "please don't" that accompanies the climax of Tom Stoppard's The Real Thing, as befits a film steeped in a full-blooded awareness of the theatre that is in no way stagey (the central pair are seen visiting Beckett's grave, while Broadbent's work puts one in mind on occasion of a celluloid Vanya.)  

Duncan is every bit as remarkable as the comparatively self-contained Meg, a tougher role in that this spoken embodiment of "melting ice" threatens to lob sympathy firmly in Nick's court: to that extent, one can tell that this is a movie made by men. On the other hand, it's difficult not to share Meg's exasperation at Nick's multiple deceptions, and Duncan's silken severity seems just the right complement to Broadbent's open-faced bewilderment mixed with alarm. Some might assume there to be no exit for this couple, to cite a Frenchman who goes unacknowledged here. But as an hommage-laden final scene suggests, lacerations can perhaps give way to levity as well. Here's betting that Nick and Meg trade in their return train ticket for many an aperitif at the Café de Flore.

Overleaf: Watch the trailer for Le Week-End