Early in Jean-Marc Vallee’s Café De Flore, Antoine (Kevin Parent), a handsome French Canadian DJ in his late 30s, tells his therapist, “I like to cut the sound. It gives more punch to what’s coming”.

Australian actor Kieran Darcy-Smith (a grungy presence in The Square and Animal Kingdom, and also memorably munched by a marauding shark in last year’s The Reef) turns co-writer and director with this dark, ironically-titled, chronologically askew character/psychodrama which features four very fine lead performances, although, rather unfortunately, many viewers out there surely won’t be seeing them that way, as the flawed people these actors are portraying all too frequently prove irritatingly real – and often really irritating.

I generally have low expectations of movies based on the hip writing of new journalists and beatniks. While Hunter S. Thompson was no beatnik, he was a new journalism hero whose drug-induced journalism fantasies pioneered the genre’s offshoot, gonzo.

Looking like Robert Smith, legendary frontman for The Cure, crossed with a bemused vulture, Sean Penn subtly dominates co-writer/director Paolo Sorrentino’s decidedly oddball, but often warmly funny and strangely touching English-language début, an Italian/French/Irish co-production that might sound like three different films from clashing genres stitched together, but never feels silly or in any way strained.

With Life in Movement about to open in cinemas nation-wide, co-directors Bryan Mason and Sophie Hyde talk about their inspiring documentary on the short career and life of dancer Tanja Liedtke.