SNOWTOWN: Dir: Justin Kurzel. Starring: Daniel Henshall, Lucas Pittaway, Louise Harris

I hesitate to make this a pick of the week, as it is brutal and shocking and at times hard to watch, but it is certainly the best film I've seen for a while, one of the most impressive Australian films of the last few years and possibly ever.

And, once again, we're reminded that friendship with a serial killer rarely ends well, certainly not in movies and, as Snowtown proves, not in real life either.

In a depressed northern Adelaide suburb, three brothers have been abused by a neighbour who is now out on bail. Then the crusading charismatic John arrives and becomes a friend and father figure to 16-year-old Jamie. But John is John Bunting, notorious Australian murderer. This is a grim, bruising true story, unpleasant in the extreme and all the more emotionally devastating for taking place in bland suburbia.
Be warned, it is deeply disturbing stuff, containing cruelty to animals, sexual abuse and unflinchingly depicted killing. It is not pleasant viewing from any perspective. These were the 1990s 'bodies in barrels” murders; Snowtown was the small town where they stored the barrels.

This is also a film with great integrity, filmed in the real locations, made by a first-time director with only two professional actors. The rest of the non-professional cast are superb, but it is Henshall as Bunting who sticks in the memory, a frighteningly real portrait of a psychopath.

As with the Final Destination and Saw franchises, anyone following the series will know what to expect from Scream 4 (***) , or I as it is 'imaginatively” written. In the small and anything but quiet town of Woodborough, kids are still discussing the rules of horror flicks, red herrings are abounding and – yet again – all and sundry are being stabbed be a fella with a ‘Scream' mask and menacing telephone manner. Neve Campbell, Courtney Cox and David Arquette are back and the film is, surprisingly, better than it should be. Certainly better than part 3. Fans will be pleased; pointless, but fun.

I'm a sucker for a good private eye film noir so made a beeline towards The Missing Person (**) , only to be rather disappointed. For a while the film – despite its obviously low budget – works fine. Michael Shannon is a convincingly down and out and drunken PI, hired to trail an unknown man with a small boy. But he has (hence the drinking) a troubled past and when this starts to link with the case the film begins to unravel, caught out by the basic difficulty of reconciling a noir genre exercise with what turns out to be a meditation on post 9/11 loss.

When did John Landis lose his mojo? The man who made An American Werewolf in London – still as good a melding of comedy and horror as I know – should have been perfect for Burke and Hare (**), a black comedy about the titular Scottish grave robbers. Throw in Simon Pegg and Andy Serkis as the robbers in questions and you'd be expecting a laugh riot. What you get is a mess. The horror seems to have gone missing while the comedy aspect seems relegated to frequent (and unfunny) slapstick. There is good support on hand – Tom Wilkinson, Christopher Lee, Isla Fisher – but it doesn't help.

Insidious (***) is initially pretty creepy. Which is a good thing in a horror film. It centres on Josh and Renai (Patrick Wilson, Rose Byrne) who move into a new house with their three small children. In no time one of their sons is in a coma and strange supernatural things are happening in the house. Since helming the original Saw director James Wan has made a number of imaginative horror outings and does valiantly try a new spin on things here, summoning considerable suspense before failing to avert an increasing spiral of silliness after a team of ghostbusters enter the scene.