Moving pictures, goalposts

Local boy Marton Csokas has turned up again in his crusade for global domination. In the time-honoured tradition of foreign actors playing crims, fiends or mental cases, in The Asylum he's a patient in a mental institution who was once a sculptor. But the New Yorker, for one, thinks that he “appears to be suffering less from homicidal insanity than from a stubborn strain of randy plaintiveness. You could imprison him for that, I guess, but then half the males on Earth would have to be locked up, too.”

Anthony Lane thinks, rightly, that Csokas is a soulful performer, but like many of the current crop of dudes who can act, “Csokas doesn't have the voice to match his brooding looks - where the vocal coaches of old have gone is anybody's guess - and, instead of a vicious rasp or a molten croon, one hears nothing worse than flat wheedling as he talks to Stella about her husband and child: 'Give them up or don't come back.' He might as well be telling her to quit smoking.”

Prices are being slashed in Sydney for some movies, given the huge slide in box office there – and in so many other places. No sign of anything similar here yet. And showing another side of the same trend, the US has joined the trend to go for nice grub, wine and fancy surroundings, and make it less of a movie and more of an “experience”.

America is finally facing up to 9/11, the event that made the rest of the world realise, among other things, that they do their dates back to front. Three films are the works.

And finally, the always readable and iconoclastic John Patterson in The Guardian makes a claim that The Brady Bunch Movie and Superman: The Movie are some of the films that laid the foundations of modern movie making.