HARVEST MOON 3D: THE LOST VALLEY, NINTENDO 3DS

The latest Harvest Moon title is one of the bleakest, almost wilfully discarding the fun bits of earlier games and leaving us with all the busy work, which, being a farming simulator, can be pretty monotonous. Earlier episodes (such as 2012's A New Beginning) managed to balance mildly addictive work-and-reward tasks with fun stuff your little farmer could do on his or her day off, like fixing up your house, exploring the town and meeting other folk. Lost Valley, however, is positively dystopian in comparison, set in a godforsaken eternal winter. Like a Nebraskan sharecropper, it's your job to coax a few blighted crops from the frozen earth, summon the Harvest Goddess and, eventually, restore the regular seasons. Who  was Nintendo aiming this at? The Amish? AH

DVD

THAT MAN FROM RIO, Cohen Unrated

Openly inspired by the Tintin comics, Philippe de Broca​'s high-spirited 1964 adventure-comedy now looks like a template for the Indiana Jones series, though less frantic and a notch more adult. French New Wave icon Jean-Paul Belmondo stars as a young air force pilot –  the kind of lovable oaf played nowadays by Chris Pratt – who plans to spend his leave in Paris with his fiancee (Francoise Dorleac​ in an ice-blue summer dress, a vision of perfect chic). But before long he's embroiled in an intrigue centred on three ancient statuettes from the Amazon jungle – and when thugs kidnap his girl, he takes off for Rio on her trail. While the breezy, slapstick tone feels very modern, the action sequences are grounded in old-fashioned physical realism: the Brazilian locations are authentic, and Belmondo does many of his own stunts, earning himself a place in the screen pantheon of acrobatic heroes alongside Douglas Fairbanks and Jackie Chan. De Broca's handling of colour – with dabs of bright red standing out against a blue-grey background – adds immeasurably to the sense of sophisticated play. JW

FREE-TO-AIR

LITTLE LUNCH, JULY 20, ABC3, 4.25pm

Obviously, given its timeslot, this is technically a children's show, but this sharply realised adaptation of author Danny Katz's kids' books is well worth a binge-watch on iview (it screens every afternoon) if you can't settle down to some after-school viewing. Focusing on a group of six grade 5 kids, the format is the tried-and-tested (in adult programming) mockumentary format, following each day's dramas, scandals and playground accidents that go down during recess, or "little lunch", This is the first children's production from husband-and-wife team Wayne Hope and Robyn Butler (The Librarians and Upper Middle Bogan) and thanks to the tight writing and a talented bunch of 10-year-old actors (among them Rob Sitch's son), Little Lunch is as fun as any adult-oriented mockumentary, and arguably better than most reality programs. KN

DVD

SONG ONE, eOne (M) 86 minutes

The shot of Anne Hathaway looking dreamily into the eyes of singer Johnny Flynn on the cover of this DVD pretty well telegraphs what we are in for in this slow-moving romantic drama. Of course, Hathaway still has pull power. Otherwise, this $6-million film made on the streets of Brooklyn and previewed at the Sundance Festival a year ago would have never seen the light of day. Well, maybe it would: debut director and writer Kate Barker-Froyland's father is an executive at Sony Classics. So, back to the movie: anthropology grad student Franny (Hathaway) is immersed in research in Morocco when she is called back home by her mum (Mary Steenburgen) because Franny's younger brother Henry (Ben Rosenfeld), a busker, has been struck by a car. Franny picks up the pieces of her brother's life while he's in a coma. Along the way she finds her brother's ticket to a show featuring James Forester (Johnny Flynn, a folk artist in real life). Franny introduces herself to Forester after the show and tells him of her brother's plight. And thus, two lost souls begin a tentative relationship, neither one prepared for rejection, neither one anxious to jump into the unknown. The movie is full of melancholy folk music, courtesy of Jenny Lewis and Jonathan Rice. If you're looking for romance and drama on the sad and serious side, with a matching soundtrack, this will fit the bill. JK

DVD

SUPER 8, Paramount (M)

J.J. Abrams is a master of commercial formula, but his private feelings are closely guarded: even this 2011 personal project is couched as a pastiche of the cosy yet uncanny suburban fantasies associated with the early Steven Spielberg, such as The Goonies and E.T. In a small Ohio town in 1979, a gang of boys are attempting to shoot their own zombie movie when they stumble on some bizarre military secrets; meanwhile, they're faced with another mysterious phenomenon in the form of their leading lady, played by the uncannily self-possessed Elle Fanning, then barely into her teens. Abrams uses Spielberg's style as the basis for his own brand of heartlessly assured showmanship: starkly lit night scenes, crafty sound bridges, a trick of warping space so that the distance between characters appears to expand and contract. But his chilly expertise is the mask for something else, which might be called poetic intuition: a sense that cinema has the power to reveal hidden truths, and that, as in Gus van Sant's Paranoid Park, the thrill of growing up is inseparable from the knowledge of death. JW