The Kill Team (2013)

In 2010 a United States army unit in Afghanistan, starved of actual Taliban insurgents to fight, took to murdering civilians - carefully placing weapons on their victims to cover their tracks. The circumstances of this horriying series of acts is paired with the military trial of one of its participants in The Kill Team, a feature documentary directed by Dan Krauss.

The film is centred on Adam Winfield, an idealistic young private who witnessed the growing atrocities, vacillated over how to alert his superiors and ultimately found himself joining in. It's his story, and that of his understandably shattered parents, that forms the core of this provocative and often harrowing film.

It's one of those films that I found exceptionally good, and rivetting viewing, yet left me emotionally ruined by its conclusion. There's no levity to this film. There's no happy ending. There's only the dead and the incarcerated.

Tsuritama: "Panicked Fishing"

There are a lot of ways in which a new anime can attract my attention, chief ones clearly being a good story and high quality animation. They can also grab me simply by being bug-eyed wierd.

Tsuritama certainly qualifies. It appears to follow three teenage boys: one a grumpy fishing champion, one a new boy in town with a severe anxiety disorder, and the other one a blonde, purple-eyed kid with a goldfish bowl on his head who insists that he's an alien. They appear to be under surveillance by a strange secret agent holding a duck. Of course being weird only gets you so far, and the jury is still out on whether there's enough beyond the strange premise to actually make Tsuritama a worthwhile experience.

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: "Vortex"

Odo attempts to crack a stolen goods case, but for his trouble he gets a murdered Miradorn, a vengeful surviving brother, and an alien prisoner from the Gamma Quadrant - who seems to hold the secret to Odo's past.

It's not a surprise that, halfway through the first season, the series has already turned towards a second episode based on Constable Odo. Of the Deep Space Nine regular cast he's one of the most interesting, and his elusive origins - not even he knows from where he came - are ripe for exploration. "Vortex" offers little more than a tease in that regard, but it's a damned good tease, and one that the series picks up and runs with brilliantly by the beginning of Season 3.

Rene Auberjonois certainly rises to the challenge in this episode, delivering a version of Odo that's surly, confrontational, confused and conflicted, suspicion and - in the episode's beautiful final moments - actively happy. We see him smile.

Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films (2014)

Cannon Films were a mainstay of Hollywood in the 1980s, producing a seemingly endless string of low-grade, comparatively shoddy sequels and D-movies. The story of the company, its films and the two producers - Menaheim Golan and Yoram Globus - at its core now form the basis of a new Australian documentary, Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films. Its director Mark Hartley has already established a strong reputation for filmmaking documentaries, including Not Quite Hollywood (about Australian exploitation cinema) and Machete Maidens Unleashed (about Filipino exploitation cinema).

I had always intended on checking Hartley's documentaries out, so when MIFF announced the world premiere of Electric Boogaloo I jumped at the chance to do so. It certainly doesn't lack for interview subjects, with Hartley and his crew speaking to a wide range of actors, writers and directors including Boaz Davidson, Alex Winter, Richard Chamberlain, Tobe Hooper, Sybil Danning and many, many others.

Pulp: A Film about Life, Death and Supermarkets (2014)

In 2011 the brilliantly entertaining British pop group Pulp reunited for one final tour, climaxing in a sold-out concert in the band's home town of Sheffield in December the following year. This final concert forms the centre of a documentary, Pulp: A Film about Life, Death and Supermarkets. Directed by New Zealand filmmaker Florian Habicht, it is a blend of concert film and two intertwined documentaries - one about the band itself, and another about the northern city from which they came.

I'm quite a fan of Pulp, and indeed saw them perform during the Australian leg of the film's tour. To me they were the best of the various Britpop bands of the 1990s - although of course Pulp predated that particular craze and continued for quite a few years after it. That said, I'm still not altogether sure what I think of this film. I went in expecting a concert film with some interviews peppered through it, and instead got something that felt a lot less balanced. There's some concert footage, but arguably nowhere near enough, and while the members of the band do get a look in it's Sheffield itself that gets the lion's share of the movie.

Bodacious Space Pirates: "Battle in the Storm"

I didn't like my last episode of Bodacious Space Pirates, because I wanted spaceships and explosions and they gave me slow-moving plot developments and characters running in circles. I'm pleased to report that this episode does feature both spaceships and explosions, so naturally I found it much more entertaining. It's by no means a knock-out episode, but there was enough here to keep me entertained and to keep the plot moving along - two things the last episode definitely lacked.

The Bentenmaru is off into a space storm, getting buffeted like nobody's business in the search for the phantom ghost ship. When it is intercepted by the Serenity fleet, Marika orders the charge into battle - even though Serenity's own Princess Gruier is onboard the Bentenmaru.

Merantau (2009)

Welsh director Gareth Evans has pretty much established himself as one of the top ten names in contemporary action cinema, thanks in the main to his exceptional Indonesian film The Raid (reviewed here) and its sequel. This wasn't his first foray into Indonesian action flicks, however: that was his 2009 film Merentau.

When I started watching Merantau a few years back, I made the prediction that it would be a breezy and entertaining action film about a slightly idealistic and noble young martial artist who leaves his small rural life for the big city – where he would immediately rescue an attractive young woman from violent drug dealers. It turns out there are no drug dealers in Merantau. Instead they are human traffickers. Asides from that I was straight on the money.

With movies such as Merantau (and Thai stablemates Ong Bak and Born to Fight before it), it almost seems inappropriate to review them on a level playing field with other movies. They don’t have large budgets. They are not exceptionally well written. The actors are generally selected first and foremost because they are skilled martial artists, and any performance skills are simply an added bonus. They are effectively movies in the style of World Wrestling Entertainment: showcases of human athleticism, filled with heroes you want to cheer and villains you’re encouraged to boo. When done properly, these sorts of action films are marvellous entertainment. When done badly, they’re tedious in the extreme. Thankfully, Merantau is one of the good ones.

The Pull List: 30 July 2014

With the loss of the Star Wars license Dark Horse has a massive hole to fill in both its publication schedule and its revenue stream. About a third of the individual units shipped by Dark Horse each month are based on Star Wars, so the loss of the franchise to Marvel is going to hurt the company very badly. There are clearly plans in place to compensate, however, including a reboot of their once highly successful Alien/Predator line (now including Prometheus as well), tie-ins to sci-fi videogames properties like Halo and Mass Effect and, I think most interestingly, all new original space opera comics like Deep Gravity.

Deep Gravity is a four-issue miniseries from the creative team of Corrino Bechko and Gabriel Hardman, who have spent the last 18 months creating Star Wars: Legacy. They have done pretty decent work on that book, and so I was keen to see how they'd go unshackled by the demands of film continuity and corporate governance.

It's a promising first issue, but as a first issue it's almost entirely set-up. Humans have colonised a distant planet named Poseidon. It takes three years to get there, and once there the average human can only safely survive for another three years before the higher gravity and background radiation take them out. An engineer named Steven Paxon has taken the journey there, not because he wants to see another world or make a truckload of money, but because his ex-girlfriend left him to go there and he wants to ask her why they broke up.

This is the first big problem with Deep Gravity - it asks me to follow a protagonist who has engaged in the most ridiculously excessive stalking behaviour possible. Thankfully his ex, Michelle, seems a lot more level-headed and likeable than he is, although I'm genuinely surprised she didn't head straight for the local authorities and file charges.

Once Paxon helps load a ship full of alien wildlife, and has spoken with Michelle, he gets ready to leave Poseidon again. That's correct: he travelled three years to have a conversation with his ex, and now he's travelling three years back to Earth. Ridiculous. Obviously things go wrong on the ship, and here's where the remaining issues seem likely to play out, but I really did feel that a promising first issue got totally derailed by this stalking thing. It's a pity, because the comic is otherwise a lot of fun. (3/5)

Under the cut: reviews of Aquaman Annual, Batman Eternal, Black Science, Detective Comics Annual, The Fuse, Low, The Massive, Star Wars: Rebel Heist and The Wake.