The Michael Jackson biopic and other new movies everyone will be talking about this week

M (95 minutes)

Films and video games have been feeding off one another for years, but rarely are the results as cerebral as Japanese director Genki Kawamura’s Exit 8.

Introduced by the insistent rhythms of Ravel’s Bolero, it opens on a subway train. We follow the main character, a young commuter, as he gets off at the next station and spends the rest of the film in an underground tunnel, trying to return to the world above.

Allegories, metaphors and references to the mythology of the underworld abound. You can build your own interpretation from the symbols, some of them human, that this character, known only as the Lost Man, meets along the way. The first clue is a wall poster of the M.C. Escher drawing, Mobius II (Red Ants), showing a swarm of ants stranded on a looping strip shaped like a figure 8.

M (123 minutes )

If commercial TV still ruled the airwaves like it did in the 1980s, The Michael Jackson Story would be the mini-series event of the year, screening in prime time over two amazing nights.

Instead, Michael, made with the support of Jackson’s estate and starring his nephew, Jamaal Jackson, follows the King of Pop only through to the late 1980s. That’s the easy way out of a tricky problem, although reports indicate that director Antoine Fuqua originally shot a 3½-hour epic covering the full story or some version of it, molestation allegations included.

This truncated version is bland and cautious, but never exactly dull. How could it be, given the fascination of its subject – the biggest solo pop star who ever lived, whose rise to fame is almost a fairytale in itself?

MA 15+ (97 minutes)

In some screen fights the antagonists inflict so much physical damage on one another that they seem doomed to spend what little life they have left in a vegetative state. Yet they pop up in the next scene with nothing more telling than a Band-Aid under one eye.

Beast is not one of those films. During its production, its star Daniel MacPherson sustained the injuries to prove it. Set in Port Kembla on the NSW south coast, it’s about the ferocious business of mixed martial arts. McPherson’s Patton James does not step into a boxing ring. His workplace is an octagonal cage where the fighters augment their boxing skills with kicking, wrestling and grappling moves co-opted from judo, jiu-jitsu and the ever-growing global potpourri of competitive combat sports.

And in the middle of it all is the gladiator himself – Russell Crowe, cast as Patton’s trainer, looking rather older and heavier than he did 21 years ago in his own boxing movie, Cinderella Man. Directed by Ron Howard, it was a biopic about James J. Braddock, an Irish-American boxer who became a light heavyweight champion during the Great Depression. When his boxing career began he was struggling to earn a living as a dockworker, which gives him a lot in common with Patton. He’s working on a fishing trawler where his meagre pay depends on the size of the catch, along with the volatile temper of his vindictive skipper.