AUSTRALIAN animation steps up once again this week with the premiere of Memoir of a Snail, a fully stop-motion feature from filmmaker Adam Elliot and featuring a murderers row of Aussie voice talent.

Elliot’s films have always been a fascinating juxtaposition between the seemingly whimsical medium of stop-motion puppetry and the deeply moving explorations of lonely characters.

In this film, young Grace deals with her mother’s death by collecting snails but her life becomes much harder when she is separated from her twin brother.

Not a film for children, to be sure, but bound to be full of mournful beauty.

Proving that cinematic ideas tend to be released in twos, Knox Goes Away is another story of an ageing hard-man whose life is complicated by the onset of dementia (similar to Russell Crowe’s “Sleeping Dogs” from earlier this year).

Michael Keaton pulls double duty as star and director in this tale of a hitman who attempts to ensure his estranged family’s ongoing safety and security before his mental state declines too far.

With supporting turns from James Marsden and Al Pacino, this film has been generally well received by audiences but, in particular, highlights the late career renaissance of Keaton, who turns in a brilliantly nuanced performance.

The tentpole horror release this week is Smile 2, a sequel to the 2022 film about a young woman beset by a malevolent entity whose evil influence is marked by the creepy smile on its victims faces.

The writer/director of the original, Parker Finn, returns to carry on exploring the mythology of this world, this time focusing the story on a rising Pop Star (Naomi Scott) who begins to experience increasingly disturbing encounters.

Following the rule of all horror franchises, this is more of the same of the first one – if that’s your thing.

If you’ve been starved for a fix of religion on film then your prayers are answered this week with The Hopeful being released to select screens.

The film is a 90 minute edit of a 2016 TV mini-series that explores the origins of the Seventh Day Adventist denomination of churches.

Director Kyle Portbury is quoted as saying he wanted to tell a story “that deals with failure and the result of failure being change”.

This is clearly a message movie, looking to appeal to a very specific audience.

Looking for almost the opposite end of that audience spectrum is Operation Undead from Thai filmmaker Kongkiat Komesiri.

A genre-bending zombie movie set during WWII, this is an ultra-violent, blood soaked exploration of Thailand’s conflicted relationship with their involvement in that war.

When a Japanese force lands on Thailand’s shores, it unleashes a terrifying biological weapon that turns young Thai soldiers againist one another with uncontrollable hunger.

Where the film makes an effort to elevate into something more meaningful is in how it examines the way war dehumanises humanity by introducing a novel conceit that these zombies do, in fact, have a tortured conscience.

By Lindsay HALL