Expect the unexpected. Writer-director Joon-ho Bong is known for subverting expectation. He has a natural tendency to flirt between amusing farce and the dark side of human dysfunction. His 2009 mystery, about a doting mother desperately trying to find the culprit behind a murder her son is wrongly imprisoned for, is no different. Witness the film’s opening expanse on a sun-kissed grass field, Hye-ja Kim’s Mother walking towards camera to Byeong-woo Lee’s acoustic melodies, where she begins to haphazardly dance as if in rhythm with the sounds of the wind. Joon-ho Bong is telling us that not all is as it seems.

Little Miss Sunshine is an apt title for such a rapturous ray of sunlit glee. The title card plays over a morose-looking Steve Carell, his face a picture of misery. The juxtaposition of optimistic words over his pessimistic outlook is filmmaker’s Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris’ little clue that the light in their story is discovered in the intricacies of human dysfunction and alienation. It is possible to have a wholly satisfying tale of hopefulness and happy-endings without any semblance of saccharine sentimentality. Little Miss Sunshine is proof positive that in the realities of life’s little challenges, failure is not a cause for misery but a step on the road to living.

“The Amityville Horror” was a film born out of public fascination. That fascination was fuelled by post-Exorcist hysteria, that demanded haunted house flicks anchored by American history and the collapse of the American dream., with all the trappings of religious folklore and the dark side of the Catholic church. No longer would garlic and silver bullets keep the demons away. Now the evil was one’s home itself, and audience’s were loving it.

“Animal House” promotes promiscuous sex, anti-establishment behaviour, criminal activity, underage drinking and alcohol abuse, violence and general anarchy, little or no respect for the education system, and hand jobs wearing surgical gloves. Do I love this movie? Yes Sir! John Landis finally found his calling after fortunately breaking into (almost literally) the film business by equal parts blind luck, personal desire, and others misfortune. With the help of writers such as Harold Ramis and Chris Miller, and the production assistance of Ivan Reitman and Matty Simmons, Landis was able to delve into various experiences of college life to create an outrageous expose on the lives of America’s youth. “Animal House” quickly became a hit amongst young audiences who found the rampant anarchy was an entertaining and funny front to the many truths inherent in college life.

An early scene involving an elderly couple, where Granny has to tell her hard of hearing husband the answer to a simple question three times, makes me think of Christopher Guest and his mock-doc satire. A following scene sees Grandpa declare that Mexican’s ‘are not all bums and tramps’ and some are indeed ‘reliable’, makes you wonder whether you’re watching real life, the outward racism forcing you to question whether to laugh or be appalled. However, the film does tell a true story and it is this element that makes it most interesting. What we see is a world that most people don’t know exist, or simply don’t care to know. Should we laugh at a 14 year old kid who spends most of his life reading the dictionary under his parents watchful guidance, or be appalled at the parental pressure and the obscure, wayward social skills that appear as a consequence.

I looked at the running time before beginning to watch Martin Scorsese’s 2006 crime-drama and thought it might be too long. My girlfriend certainly thought so – she was asleep after half an hour and woke up with about forty minutes left. As I tried to bring her up to speed with what had happened, I found myself breathlessly retelling events without a pit-stop for oxygen or chance for her to really take it all in. When I finally said, ‘so that’s it, I’ll just pause it and go for a wee,’ I realised I was on the edge of my seat (an exceptionally comfortable sofa) and had been for the past hour and a half. As I relieved myself of half a bottle of wine I knew, as I reminisced about the film, I was experiencing Scorsese’s most polished and entertaining film since Goodfellas.

I’ve heard Fernando Meirelles and Katia Lund’s 2004 Oscar-nominated film to be likened to Tarantino’s “Pulp Fiction”. Yet, I’d hazard a guess this is more a marketing ploy to pigeonhole the film into a more saleable product. It is like saying Antonia Bird’s drama “Priest” is like “The Exorcist”. They both feature members of the church questioning their own faith after all, but the two films couldn’t be more dissimilar. Granted, “ City of God” and “Pulp Fiction” share the depiction of crime and a time-switching, non-linear narrative, but there is little ironic humour to find in Meirelles and Lund’s uncompromising film. “City Of God” isn’t interested in stylised characters that overplay the merits of the metric system or theatrical violence and pop-culture references, it cuts far closer to the bone than that.

Said to be an un-filmable novel (and probably rightly so), approaching the movie adaptation of “The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy” you’d be forgiven for wondering just how the hell director Michael Winterbottom pulled it off. Well, he didn’t, exactly. It isn’t that the film doesn’t look at both the ‘life’ and the ‘opinions’ of Laurence Sterne’s titular character, it’s more that it rolls it all up into a bite-size bundle of non-linear narration, film-within-a-film-within-a-film invention, and wry satirical asides which celebrate the originality, humour and post-modern techniques of the original literature.