Hippies, vampires and the spirit of David Lynch loom large

Writer-director Peter Strickland cites a viewing of David Lynch's nightmarish Eraserhead ("this strange, beautiful piece of atmosphere"), followed by years of triple bills at the King's Cross Scala ("New York underground, sleazy European art porn, creepy Italian horror"), as his cinematic inspiration. It's easy to imagine the creator of Katalin Varga (2009, Artificial Eye, 15) gorging himself on such exotica. From the brooding, amorphous guilt of Lynch's industrial noisescapes to the emotive violence of so much "exploitation" fare, Strickland clearly appreciates the strange mysteries of cinema's most dark and troubling dreams.

His eye-opening first feature is a gothic-inflected Romanian tragedy in which the vampiric spectre of Transylvania's prince of darkness is replaced by an altogether more human monster. Hilda Péter is mesmerising as the innocent outcast, banished from her village when her husband discovers that he is not the father of her son. With horse, cart and nine-year-old in tow, Katalin sets off across the haunting vistas of the Carpathians, hellbent on revenge, the landscape almost singing to her as she goes – an eerie murder ballad. But when she finds the beast who brutally scarred her years ago, will she be able to plunge a stake into his heart? Does revenge or redemption cast the longer shadow? Brooding, sensual and brilliantly unsettling, Strickland's film moves seamlessly between horror and wonderment, a visually enrapturing modern myth with its head in the darkening clouds and its feet firmly planted in the soil of a spine-tingling soundtrack.

While it may be hard to imagine a "good Megan Fox movie", Jennifer's Body (2009, 20th Century Fox, 15) comes close to being just that. Admittedly, Fox herself is the least of this satirical high-school slasher's virtues, its main strength being a spunkily genre-literate script from Juno screenwriter Diablo Cody. Likable Amanda Seyfried takes centre stage as "Needy", the allegedly dowdy teen (clearly Cody's cipher) whose best/worst friend turns out to be a man-eater, in every sense.

Like all the best teen-terror romps (from Carrie to Ginger Snaps), the supernatural elements are based upon down-to-earth adolescent anxieties. There's real recognisable bite in the spectre of Jennifer's dawning vampirism ("she's evil… and I don't just mean high school evil"), and the best moments combine sarky humour and creeping horror with post-Mean Girls aplomb. Sadly, it doesn't quite sustain the initial promise as prom night looms and subtextual meat gives way to more formulaic softcore scares. Yet there's plenty here to entertain young-at-heart horror fans (both male and female), who will appreciate Cody's evident love of the genre and hopefully respond with appropriate good cheer.

The cover for the mirthless dirge-fest The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard (2009, Pathé, 15) cites a review which proclaims that this is "as funny as any Will Ferrell or Judd Apatow film". Talk about damning with faint praise. What scant laughs are on offer here are in fact duly stolen by co-producer Ferrell, who drops in for a supportive cameo involving skydiving, Abe Lincoln and dildos (readers are invited to insert their own cheap knob gag here). Elsewhere it's a chuckle-free zone as Jeremy Piven and co attempt to do for cowboy car salesmanship what Blades of Glory did for figure skating: make it seem funny, ballsy, quirky, comic but ultimately (and not entirely ironically) uplifting. Sadly, it is none of these things, at least not on the evidence of The Goods.

It's hard to know what exactly attracted Ang Lee to the hippy-dippy comedy of Taking Woodstock (2009, Universal, 15), a tale of peace, love and understanding which is somewhat hobbled by being quite so benign. Everyone involved seems absolutely lovely – from the quaint Catskills townsfolk whose rural idyll is overrun by vagrant longhairs, to the cops, the TV squares, the bread-head promoters, the security guards (Liev Schreiber in scene-stealing drag) and, of course, the sauntering druggy peaceniks themselves, who are peculiarly polite and well-behaved throughout. OK, so Imelda Staunton's marauding mum starts out screechy and shrieky, but even she mellows under the tide of niceness and a large plate of hash brownies. In knowing counterpoint to Mike Wadleigh's Woodstock, we never actually get to see the festival itself, Lee's focus being on the crowd which seems to exist in a bubble of Brigadoon-like bliss. Only a heavy-handed closing reference to the impending catastrophe of Altamont (which gave birth to the Maysles's terrifying Gimme Shelter) strikes a note of doom – otherwise it's nostalgic sunshine and light all the way.

With Julien Temple's wonderfully gritty Oil City Confidential playing in cinemas and duly raising the bar of the contemporary "rock doc", it's tempting to be snotty and scornful about Michael Jackson's This is It (2009, Sony, PG), a hagiographic montage of rehearsal footage from Jacko's unfulfilled final tour. Yet despite never being intended for public viewing, the resultant patchwork is a peculiarly charming and occasionally poignant affair. Jackson was clearly pacing himself and rarely hits his moonwalking stride, gesturing towards dance steps rather than throwing himself into them, and occasionally talking rather than actually singing the songs. Yet anyone who felt a morbid tingle at the posthumous release of Elvis's "Twelfth of Never" rehearsal tapes will be similarly intrigued by the apparent intimacy of these "non-performances". Of course the real showman here is Kenny Ortega, heroic helmsman of the High School Musical series and the guiding hand behind this ambitious enterprise which somehow weaves a silk purse out of a potential sow's arse. Go Kenny!

• DVD and video reviews

New TV series Rosario Tijeras, which features sexy assassins and drug baron heroes, sparks moral outcry

Outlandish tales of shady drug bosses and glamorous women assassins are the staple of Colombian primetime television. But the latest "narco-soaps" about the country's drug gangs have sparked a debate about just how much of that dark reality should be broadcast into living rooms night after night.

The latest narco-show to air is Rosario Tijeras, a TV adaptation of a novel by the same name about a sexy hitwoman at the service of the drug mafia. The show's initial slogan, "It's harder to love than to kill", sparked such protests in the city of Medellin, where the story is set, that advertising posters were taken down.

The main Medellin newspaper El Colombiano said that the show was a "gulp of absurdity, vulgarity, bad manners and a big dose of narco-culture." Medellin, Colombia's second-largest city is best known for the cartel of the same name led in the 1980s and 90s by Pablo Escobar.

Murder, betrayal, fast money and beautiful, buxom women may be vulgar but, according to fans of the show, it makes for riveting television and Rosario has been among the country's top-rated programmes since it began last month.

Rosario is the latest of the narco-soaps to raise a fracas. Over the past two years Colombians have seen The Cartel, about the powerful Norte del Valle Cartel and The Capo, which paints a wily drug boss as a sensitive anti-hero. There was also the smash hit Without Tits there is no Paradise that portrayed the lives of the women who surround the drug lords, as did Mafia Dolls which ended last week.

The main complaint is that such series glamorise the life of criminals and incite young people to emulate that lifestyle. The argument over the narco-soaps has even reached neighbouring Panama, whose president Ricardo Martinelli, complained about the Colombian shows that air on local television there. "They exalt drug trafficking, theft, muggings," he said, adding that the shows do "damage to our country" and corrupt "moral values".

Others think that the central messages of such shows can be positive. In an editorial today, El Espectador newspaper said rather than being "apologists" for the narco lifestyle, the soaps may be seen as cautionary tales. The smalltown girl who thought heaven could only be reached with large breasts ended up dying a lonely alcoholic, drug bosses wind up in tiny jail cells in a foreign country, and Rosario dies the way she lived: by the gun.

German Yances, a media expert at Bogotá's Javeriana University, said that some Colombians "don't like to see their problems reflected on fictional television because the daily drama of the country is on every night on the news. But the high ratings suggest many viewers either see their lives reflected in or are fascinated by the shows, said Yances. Despite the ratings, a powerful group of companies in Medellin has reportedly decided it would not advertise on the show and at least one cable operator is considering blocking it.

"If we don't like the programmes then we should debate that, but we should not try to censor them," added Yances. "What is painful is the reality they reflect and that's what we should think about," he said.

Angela Camacho, an optometrist's assistant in Bogotá, has no connection to the narco culture but she doesn't miss an episode of the narco-novelas: "I watched The Cartel and then Mafia Dolls and now Rosario Tijeras. It is violent some times and they exaggerate but I like it."

• Colombia
• Television
• Drugs
• Soap opera
• Crime
• Drugs trade

Clint Eastwood: a Retrospective is a new and exhaustive biography of the American actor and director written by Richard Schickel. To commemorate its publication, cast an eye through an exclusive series of stills from the book, looking back over a time of guns and romance, heroism and guns. Here are some of the great American movies of the past four decades. Some of them contain guns ...

If you're feeling glib, you might call it the 'Bourne Baghdad': the third collaboration between Matt Damon and British director Paul Greengrass is a tense action-thriller set in the early days of the 2003 US invasion of Iraq as various elements scramble to find phantom weapons of mass destruction.

Jennifer Aniston and Gerard Butler revealed how much they loved working together on new rom com The Bounty Hunter at the film's London premiere last night.

Other hot tickets for the 17th South By Southwest film festival include MacGruber, Get Low and Cyrus

Rarely has an opening night movie sounded more like a mission statement. The South By Southwest film festival kicks off in Austin tonight with the world premiere of Kick-Ass, the tale of a teenage superhero, an enigmatic vigilante and his pint-sized killer daughter. Based on the comic book by Mark Millar and John Romita Jr, Kick-Ass is directed by Matthew Vaughn (also responsible for Layercake) and stars Aaron Johnson (last seen in Nowhere Boy), Nicolas Cage and Chloe Moretz.

Organisers are doubtless hoping that the film's boisterous antics will set the tone for the event as a whole. Ahead of the curtain-raiser, the mood was cautiously optimistic with registrations – an early guide to overall attendance – up a reported 25% on 2009. This year's festival showcases 134 features, including 64 world premieres. There are also 125 shorts on offer.

Potential hot tickets include the Saturday Night Live-inspired action comedy MacGruber and American: The Bill Hicks Story, a documentary about the late US comic. Robert Duvall and Bill Murray star in the funeral comedy Get Low, while the Duplass brothers return with the mumblecore outing Cyrus. Quentin Tarantino, Ed Norton, James Franco and Robert Rodriguez are among the guests expected to attend.

The 17th edition of the South By Southwest film festival runs 12-20 March.

• Festivals
• Nicolas Cage
• Action and adventure

Where is the full-scale filmic assault on the evils of global finance? Will Oliver Stone's Wall Street sequel be it?

As well as its import for female directors and general reassurance that the forces of right do occasionally prevail, perhaps the most enduring legacy of The Hurt Locker's Oscars landslide will be its reminder that Hollywood can actually deal with that quaint location known as the real world. Which makes it all the more glaring when other areas of it have been so conspicuous by their absence from the screen.

Call it what you like – the almost-Depression, the new economic order, the age of Lidl – but for all that we're not quite yet eating each other in unlit basements, these remain profoundly jittery times for those of us locked into the chaos created by western banks. And yet thus far, with the exception of Michael Moore's documentary(ish) Capitalism: A Love Story, both the banks themselves and the bedlam they unleashed remain oddly and persistently off-camera. It's a strange omission, even allowing for the fact that plenty of projects that might have dealt with the subject in some way will, in something of a proving of the point, have been denied a place on the production line on account of the film industry's own frantic tightening of purse strings.

But we will, of course, shortly have Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps – the open-goal sequel to Oliver Stone's 1987 romp, now being ushered into the waiting room of pre-publicity, the trailer out in the world and the film the subject of a Vanity Fair cover story. As a takedown of global capitalism, it may not approach (or aspire to) the high dudgeon of Moore, the gist of the thing being Michael Douglas's master insider trader Gordon Gekko finally getting himself released from jail in the autumn of 2008 and, failing to singlehandedly avert the oncoming train crash, aiming instead to repair his relationship with his estranged daughter. Essentially, what we have here is The Wrestler in Armani – with the script, as pointed out by the Independent Eye, not averse to a crafty sight gag involving Gekko checking out of prison complete with vast mobile phone (you know – like in the 80s!).

Maybe playing it for laughs shouldn't surprise us here. After all, Gekko aside, Douglas in self-parodic mode has been called on to represent big money's human face more than once. Witness his scowling turn as übermensch financier Nicholas van Orton in David Fincher's inscrutable The Game – or the hambone performance as fiendish hedge fund manager Steven Taylor in garish Hitchock remake A Perfect Murder, ineptly attempting to off trophy wife Gwyneth Paltrow.

Indeed, fittingly, given as it was also the moment when the "financial innovations" that later sent us all to Cash Converters quietly began to slip into gear, it was around the same time in the sleepy late 90s that cinema last showed any productive interest in the banking system. Revisited now, Patrick Bateman's zinger in American Psycho about the real nature of his business carries with it an even more malevolent crackle, while from the same era came Boiler Room, an engagingly pulpy melodrama about life on the furthest fringes of Wall Street that, now we know what the big boys were about to get up to, surely deserves a small footnote in history. (Certainly, either of those movies feels like a more coherent response to the ongoing crisis than, say, the epically glib Up in the Air).

Of course, what complicates all this is that Hollywood is hardly a disinterested observer when it comes to the banks. While studio heads might be seen as masters of all they survey, much of their clout in recent years came on loan from many of the same institutions who were then caught up at the heart of the crisis. For Disney, there was Bear Sterns, for Paramount Deutsche Bank, and so on, with $10bn lent by Wall Street to the studios just between 2004 and 2008. As such, you can understand the onscreen reticence to bite the hand that fed. But while suited men in a burnished boardroom discussing credit derivatives may not have the raw cinematic appeal of disabling bombs on Baghdad roadsides, it might just help save Hollywood's soul if it admitted that banks were more than simply places in which to set heist movies.

• Banking

Hollywood actor to read Jim Morrison's poetry on soundtrack album for forthcoming documentary

The soundtrack album for a forthcoming Doors documentary will feature 12 of the band's classic songs, five rare clips – and 15 tracks of Johnny Depp reading poetry. The actor appears on almost half of the record's cuts, reciting verse written by Jim Morrison.

Depp provides the narration for When You're Strange, a film by Tom DiCillo. The documentary draws on hundreds of hours of footage of the Los Angeles group, from their early beginnings to Morrison's death in 1971. It recently played at the Berlin film festival, where Doors drummer John Densmore said he "got a little teary" when he saw footage of the band's late singer.

"It shows Jim in the beginning, his innocence and shyness and everything, and I love seeing that – that's the Jim I knew," Densmore told Mojo. The film also suggests that the Doors would have reunited, even after Morrison left the US to live in Paris. "[Jim] asked how [Doors album] LA Woman was doing and I said, 'Great,'" Densmore recalled. "I told him that Love Her Madly was the single and that they wanted a second single. He said, 'Well, maybe I'll come back.'"

Morrison published only two volumes of poetry before his death, but more of his books have been issued since then. Recordings of Morrison reading his own work have also appeared on various Doors anthologies.

The soundtrack to When You're Strange will be released by Rhino on 6 April.

• The Doors
• Johnny Depp
• Pop and rock

Whether you want to take a trip to the cinema or save those pennies and stay at home with a DVD, here's a selection of the best films for you to watch this weekend.