Games
MORTAL KOMBAT X, PS4, XBOX ONE
So the franchise born on an arcade machine in 1992 turns 10 - and what's changed? To fans the new game will seem quite different to its predecessors, with new characters, improved graphics, tweaked fighting skills and what not. But the fundamental gameplay is the same as it ever was: two heavily-armed, often hilariously mismatched characters face off on the same screen and bash the living daylights out of each other. Back in those simpler, gentler times, the original game was criticised for its extreme violence, and the new iteration is being billed as the "most brutal" ever, but, honestly, we can't see what the fuss is about. Maybe we're just jaded. Maybe we've seen too much for anything to truly shock us. But Mortal Kombat X is about as violent as Itchy and Scratchy - you're more likely to laugh than recoil. The new title has a career mode of a kind and there's the requisite online leagues and match-ups, but for us the highlight is the same-screen two-player mode: you can actually sit on the couch with a friend and play the game together. And have a laugh. Remember what that used to be like? Before developers were obsessed with putting everything online? For that reason alone we can't recommend it highly enough. AH
Free-to-air
WHY ANZAC WITH SAM NEILL, APRIL 21, 8.30pm
It's a big week for Gallipoli-related documentaries but this one, written and presented by actor Sam Neill, takes a different, personal approach to the anniversary. Neill comes from a line of soldiers going back some 200 years, and he explores the Gallipoli story through the experiences of three of his relatives who died in World War I. More than his own backstory, he wants to uncover why New Zealand and Australia became bound by bloodshed; why, he asks, has Gallipoli become symbolic and remembered more than any other event in the two nations' shared history? The film also traces the involvement – often overlooked – of both Maori and Aboriginal soldiers in the Great War, and how, over the past century, public sentiment toward the Anzac legend has ebbed and flowed. The Anzac story is one, Neill believes, that has both united and divided us. KN
DVD
THE SUN SHINES BRIGHT, Olive, Unrated
John Ford is known as one of Hollywood's "classical" directors, but his films are rarely if ever as straightforward as they seem. The ambiguities run deep in this 1953 idyll with sorrowful undertones – one of Ford's own favourites among his works, and a quasi-remake of his Will Rogers vehicle Judge Priest from 20 years earlier. As played by the short, cherubic character actor Charles Winninger, the ageing Confederate veteran Judge Priest looks like the most harmless man alive. In fact, he's nothing less than the conscience of the Kentucky town of Fairfield, an outwardly peaceful backwater which reveals itself as radically divided and wounded in the course of a complex plot that includes a rape and a narrowly averted lynching. A wily pragmatist beneath his folksy exterior, the judge is committed to maintaining a semblance of moral order, by force if necessary. At the same time, he remains intensely conscious of his own limitations, as a lonely alcoholic reliant on the care of his black servant Jeff (Stepin Fetchit) – who, in turn, is anything but the halfwit he chooses to appear. JW
Series
THE MISSING (MA15+), eOne, 8 x 59minutes
Tony and Emily Hughes, played brilliantly by James Nesbitt and Frances O'Connor, are on holiday in France with their five-old-son Oliver when the boy is taken during a crowded and confused moment when he is out with his dad. The story picks up eight years later when the dad goes back to the French village to resume the search for answers, and the storyline then jumps (rather smoothly) between past and present in the mission to find out what really happened to the boy. Missing child stories tug at our heartstrings and in this case, we are privy to how it has ripped apart this beautiful couple. Frances O'Connor's character has remarried an English detective involved in the case. Leading French detective Julien Baptiste (played by Tcheky Karyo) comes out of retirement to attempt once more to solve the case, and works hand in hand with Tony Hughes, following a difficult trail. It's comparable to The Tunnel miniseries, with less emphasis on the difference between French and English mannerisms. The suspects are not obvious, but you will not be able to stop guessing who did it. Both the show and O'Connor were nominated for Golden Globes. JK
DVD
L'ENFANCE-NUE, Eureka Unrated
The title means "naked childhood", and part of the point of Maurice Pialat's extraordinary first feature, made in 1968 with a cast of amateurs, is to get us to think anew about what it means to be a young and vulnerable member of the human race. There's nothing obviously adorable or pathetic about ten-year-old Francois (Michel Terrazon), a veteran of the French foster system. He's a quiet, self-contained little boy, with sudden impulses of both generosity and cruelty – as much a mystery to us as to the decent old couple (Marie-Louise and Rene Thierry) who take him in. While there's little or no plot in the usual sense, "simple" would be the wrong word to apply to a film which packs a maximum of significant detail into every scene – most of them set in cramped, cluttered rooms, with wallpaper and fabrics in ugly, clashing patterns. At first glance, this aesthetic might be mistaken for naively literal realism; look again, and it's easy to see why Pialat, who started out as a painter, went on to make a film about Van Gogh. JW
