The treatment throughout is documentary-style, similar in tone to Paul Greengrass's 9/11 film United 93, in that we're never quite sure whether what we're watching is heavily fictionalised or an outright re-creation of the "true crime" variety. This is underlined by the fact that many of the cast were not professional actors but people from the surrounding neighbourhood chosen for their presumed authenticity. Consequently the overall effect is very disturbing, like a fly-on-the-wall reality TV show. We see groups of friends and neighbours sitting around kitchen tables, railing against sexual crime and the apparent inability of the authorities to do anything about it, their suggestibility being exploited and whipped up by the superficially responsible and straightforward Bunting.

There is little gore in Snowtown, but when they come, the few scenes of violence and death are appalling. But what makes one depressed ultimately is the utter grimness and degradation which fills every part of this story: the hopelessness, the total absence of any form of structure to these lives, the poverty of resources — mental as much as economic — among these people which leaves them incapable of seeing what is happening in their midst. I did not appreciate the extent to which Australia — bright, shiny and prosperous — had its own underclass, a milieu which in all essentials resembles our own, revealed to us during the Shannon Matthews fake kidnap case in Dewsbury, West Yorkshire. Not that Snowtown is crudely putting a case for nurture over nature; it remains matter-of-fact, almost dispassionate throughout, an approach which, strangely, makes it even more gruelling to watch.

A more familiar kind of darkness — the moral type which stalks the corridors of power — can be found in The Ides of March, which you might still be able to catch at the cinema (if not, watch the DVD). George Clooney directs himself as a Democrat presidential candidate in a drama which wavers little from the firmly established tradition of US political films like The Candidate and All The President's Men. We tend to know exactly what we're going to get with such movies — here, Clooney's press man (Ryan Gosling) finds himself crossed, double-crossed and then crossed again — and there are the usual dilemmas and compromises to be wrestled with. This is nonetheless thoroughly superior and polished entertainment.

Despite its cynicism about the process, the film manages that peculiarly American balancing act whereby a belief in the fundamentals of the system, or at least the principles on which it is based, emerges unscathed. A similar British effort would reveal everything to be rotten to the core but not worth getting worked up about. Clooney's campaign poster in the film is obviously modelled on Obama's Warhol-esque "Change" image, which highlights just how quickly disappointment with The One has overtaken the real world.