ONES TO WATCH

Last week we flagged the potential mega-hits of 2016 but these are the three games we're really looking forward to. 
1. The Last Guardian. Designed by Fumito Ueda, best-known for the beautiful, atmospheric and entirely original titles ico and Shadow of the Colossus from 2001 and 2005. This time the protagonist is a young boy whose companion is a giant, eagle-like creature; together, they puzzle-solve to escape a ruined castle. Think of it as the video game equivalent of a new Studio Ghibli film, only rarer (it's been in development since 2007). 
2. No Man's Sky. We'll be hearing a lot more about "procedurally generated content" this year; basically it means instead of people building open worlds one rock at a time by hand, computers are now powerful enough to generate them on demand. No Man's Sky is a sci-fi explorer that promises a vast number of planets to explore, each filled with almost infinite detail. 
3. Firewatch. You're on your own in a watch tower in an American forest looking out for fires, your only connection to the outside world a walkie talkie. Then weird stuff happens. It looks thematically similar to last year's hits Everybody's Gone to the Rapture and Alien Isolation, both of which proved you could have a compelling experience with virtually no action at all. AH

Summer Phoenix in Esther Kahn.

DVD

ESTHER KAHNWELLSPRING, UNRATED

Of all the films made about the theatre, this ferocious 2000 period piece by French writer-director Arnaud Desplechin (Kings and Queen) is one of the most singular and perverse. The source material is a 1905 short story by the Welsh poet and critic Arthur Symons, about a working-class Jewish girl who succeeds on the London stage through sheer strength of personality; Desplechin follows this text to the letter, yet transforms it utterly with his casting of Summer Phoenix, then in her early 20s and as weird and unyielding a presence as her brother Joaquin​ (she has made only a handful of films since). As played by Phoenix, the heroine Esther barely seems capable of pretending to be anyone but herself: sulky and uneasy at all times, she retains an improbable Cockney accent and doesn't speak so much as painfully blurt things out. Yet both character and star are mesmerising to the point where we're forced to rethink what good and bad acting might be – while Desplechin's jazzy style, with its unwieldy rhythms and discontinuities, bypasses conventional notions of plausibility in a similar way. JW

FREE-TO-AIR

THE MIDDLE GO! Monday-Thursday, 7pm

Life is a lot harder than it's made out to be. Feeling the pressure is working-class middle-aged wife and mother of three, Frankie Heck (Patricia Heaton). Living in midwestern Indiana, Frankie works as an underperforming sales person at a car yard and husband Mike, (Neil Flynn) pays his dues as a manager of a quarry. They have three children who couldn't be more different from one another. Eldest son Axl (Charlie McDermott) lacks motivation in academia but is popular and excels in sports, youngest Brick (Atticus Shaffer​) is extremely intelligent but a strange, introverted and antisocial compulsive reader with odd behavioural traits. As for middle child Sue (Eden Sher), think of the most enthusiastic person you know, and ramp them up by 10 – and then you have Sue. As enthusiastic and spirited as the young teen is, she is extraordinarily unsuccessful and beyond socially awkward. Heaton played the unappreciated mother in Everybody Loves Raymond. Back again as the family matriarch, she's the glue that holds this family together. Whether their bond is forced by Frankie or Mike or bribed by their daily fast-food dinners, the awkward family always stick together, because they know at the end of the day, they only have each other. AB

Killer of Sheep is set in Watts, Los Angeles, in the late '70s.

DVD

KILLER OF SHEEP MILESTONE, M

Shot over a year's worth of weekends in the African-American neighbourhood of Watts in Los Angeles, this 1977 first feature by the great Charles Burnett is "poor cinema" in the grandest sense. Behind the grainy black-and-white images there is a palpable force of will, a need to make every camera set-up count – echoing the determination of the deceptively mild-mannered hero Stan (Henry G. Sanders), whose job at a slaughterhouse hardly brings in enough for him and his family to get by. The plot consists of a series of vignettes that end in deliberate anti-climax: a crime intrigue peters out, a trip to the races is called off due to a flat tyre, and an attempt to buy a second-hand engine leads to disaster in the manner of a Laurel and Hardy short. But despite the downbeat subject-matter, Burnett's tone is lyrical, even magical. Low camera angles suggest a child's awed perspective, even in scenes with no children present – and the soundtrack adds an operatic dimension to the most mundane events, drawing on an entire history of black pop music, most memorably Dinah Washington's This Bitter Earth. JW

DOCUMENTARY

THE 1989 WORLD TOUR LIVE APPLE MUSIC, STREAMING SERVICE

She's at it again! Since finishing her 1989 World Tour, Taylor Swift has released her concert DVD– The 1989 World Tour LIVE. Filming took place at the Sydney show on November 28, 2015, in front of 76,000 fans. Directed by Jonas Akerlund, (also responsible for the Beyonce and Jay Z On the Run concert DVD) the two-hour video captures the concert and special backstage behind-the-scenes footage from the tour. The seven-month tour with 85 shows took in America, Europe, Asia and Australia. Taylor shocked fans with more than 50 surprise guests performing with her in North America, Canada and Europe. From supermodels to comedians to sport stars to actors to musicians, the guests changed nightly and the concert DVD captures some of the footage by the 38 guest artists including Selena Gomez, John Legend and Justin Timberlake. The DVD isn't for sale but can be watched via the new online music-streaming service, Apple Music. There is a three-month free trial before a monthly fee of $11.99 for individuals or $17.99 for families. AB