Amongst the felicities, the casting of Jessica Biel as the Woman with a Past. It’s difficult to adapt a ‘stagy’ stage play, one that exploits the big entrance, the expressive group, the d?nouement with the hero centre stage. Keep too much of that stuff, and the film goes dead; do too much, in an effort to avoid stasis, and you’re out on your own with an unrelated mise-en-sc?ne. (Opera films offer hideous examples of both kinds of failure.)

Coward’s play is full of big scenes and strong confrontations, often with Biel’s character front and centre. Biel holds it together with the complete self-possession of a former model and the presence of a first-rate romantic actress. Not romantic as in romcom; romantic as in ‘extreme and doomed commitments’. She and Kristen Scott Thomas are knockouts.

When I was young, the Coward cult was inescapable. At actors’ parties there was much intense talk about ‘style’, which meant posing about with a campy drawl and world-weary inflections like The Master. (The Brecht cult that came along soon afterwards was similar in its aping of a foreign model but much less amusing.) Nowadays, actors don’t have to work hard to find a way around all that, so we have a chance to appreciate again just what a good playwright he was. Get along to your local ‘art’house.

Virtually every Australian film-maker chases a government subsidy, and to that end they write elaborate submissions. It would be interesting to compare how they describe their projects with the genres into which Garry places them. I have a hunch that many of the submissions would get the word ‘art’ in there somewhere, trading on the received view that art is good for you, like milk, and should be subsidised, like dairy farms. Then there’d be the ones that claim to be forging Australian Identity, which is something you get from watching movies.

• faint aversion to pending violent action
• faint desire for pending violent action
• resultant scrunched up, induced anxiety
• foreknowledge that psychotic killer will kill woman -
• slightly stronger aversion to seeing that
• no other interest whatsoever in who kills who or how or who gets the money.

So I went forth into the daylight and bought a book for my son.

I browsed some reviews that night: Good and evil are tackled with a rigorous fix on the complexity involved. This is P. Travers in Rolling Stone who thinks that we would all have taken the money (and left the wounded man to die of thirst). I conclude that his fix on the people who share the planet with him is something less than rigorous.

There’s plenty more profundity-mongering around, but luckily you don’t have to go past Google’s first ten hits to find a drily unimpressed Stephanie Zacharek in Salon

Against this backdrop of ruthless killings and overall creepiness, Sheriff Bell ponders the meaning of existence and other stuff, which would be pretty boring if not for the occasional distraction of human life being snuffed out by cattle-slaughter devices.

For those who like camera angles, there are lots of camera angles.