Comedian turned director Bobcat Goldthwait made quite an impression on Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF) audiences with his 2009 feature World’s Greatest Dad. This year he made the venture down under to plug his latest big screen offering God Bless America, which screened to packed audiences and altogether nervous laughter.

Visions of the apocalypse aren’t new in the world of cinema and particularly in recent times these stories seem to have given screenwriters new verve. Perhaps the climate predictions are giving us doubts of survival beyond the next few decades.

It’s rare for a film to come along which is so unique, and downright bizarre, that it completely defies any attempt at categorisation, and reminds you that the possibility for innovation in cinema is nowhere close to being exhausted.

Cultural Australian icon Paul Kelly’s life has been brought to the screen in the form of a documentary by Ian Darling.

I’m always tentative when walking into the screening of an Australian film; for every Face to Face (2011) there’s a You and Your Stupid Mate (2005), which means that I’m always pleasantly surprised when the film is actually good, and when it’s really good, I tell everyone to go and see it.

Based on an article “On Seeking a Sex Surrogate”, The Sessions details the struggles and triumphs of Mark O’Brien, a poet from Boston who was paralysed from the neck down since early childhood complications from polio.

Projection issues aside, Rodney Ascher’s Room 237 is a film about a film. And what better place to see than at the Melbourne International Film Festival? A sold out session in the already crowded Greater Union cinema in Russell Street sat back and let Stanley Kubrick’s images from The Shining flow over them.

Like both the apocalyptic collision and the crippling depressive state that it preposes, Melancholia hits hard.

Two women are connected through the dark and dangerous streets of Sydney

Frivolity or necessity? Fashion often falls to these two categorisations upon criticism and public discourse.