5 things to watch this weekend – 27 to 29 January

Where’s it on? Cinemas nationwide

Arriving in UK cinemas in the week it picked up seven Academy Award nominations, Steven Spielberg’s autobiographical epic is the origin story of his own cinephilia set in the mid-century Arizona and California of his childhood. Paul Dano plays the inventor father, with Michelle Williams as his more instinctive pianist mum. As he takes to mounting his own DIY cinematic epics, young Spielberg alter ego Sammy Fabelman’s galloping creativity draws on both parental influences – even as a fissure begins to grow between the couple. Richly animating the life story that we’ve all learned in fragments from Spielberg’s recurring themes, The Fabelmans is the love letter to cinema that leaves other recent pretenders back at the sorting office.

Where’s it on? Cinemas nationwide

Laura Poitras is the esteemed documentary maker who brought us the Edward Snowden doc Citizenfour (2014). Her enthralling new film, nominated for the Oscar for best feature documentary, is a portrait of photographer Nan Goldin that ties together Goldin’s rise as a key chronicler of the downtown New York scene of the 1970s and 80s with her later renown as a campaigner against the Sackler family and their pharmaceutical company’s role in the opioid crisis. All the Beauty and the Bloodshed shows how Goldin leveraged her influence with art galleries such as the Tate and the Guggenheim to protest their links with the billionaire family. At the same time, it delves into the pain in Goldin’s own past, including her problems with addiction and the suicide of her sister.

Where’s it on? Cinemas nationwide

Amid deep snow in the mountains in Bulgaria, a series of strange visitors arrive at a remote bolthole looking for one Petar Motorov. But when his sleigh returns from town, it has no driver. Its only passenger is a dead wolf, frozen solid. As this wintry tale unravels, others also venture out from the settlement: the sleigh comes back again and again, and there are more frozen wolves. Fusing Beckettian absurdism with slow, black-and-white atmospherics reminiscent of Béla Tarr and Andrei Tarkovsky, January is the fruit of an unusual collaboration between a Bulgarian documentary maker (Andrey Paounov) and British director Alex Barrett (here serving as co-writer). This is a fireside parable of lingering mystery.

Where’s it on? Disney+ 

Picking up an Oscar nomination for best live action short this week, this 38-minute curio is the gift of an unlikely link up between Disney and the brilliant Italian magic-realist director Alice Rohrwacher (The Wonders, Happy as Lazzarro). Produced by Alfonso Cuarón, it’s a whimsical Christmas story set in a Catholic girls’ boarding school in Italy during the Second World War, where – as the hours count down towards Christmas Day – the baking of a cake sets a context for a spot of mischievous insurrection. Rohrwacher’s miniature is no throwaway: it’s an artfully shot film that’s full of her characteristic warmth, puckish humour and eye for human behaviour. 

Where’s it on? BFI Player

Ahead of a season celebrating the current vitality in Australian cinema, here’s a chance to see one of the copper-bottomed classics of the original 1970s new wave. Based on a novel by Schindler’s Ark author Thomas Keneally, it’s the brutal, provocative story of the half Aboriginal Jimmie Blacksmith, whose doomed efforts to fit into the white culture of the churchman who raised him have tragic, violent consequences. Keneally’s story was based on the life of the outlaw Jimmy Governor and is brought to the screen here by director Fred Schepisi, a fascinating filmmaker who went on to make the likes of The Russia House (1990) and Last Orders (2001). It’s an outback drama of considerable force and fire.