Latest video: The Australian Queen

By Ewan McDonald

HMMM, here's a neat twist. As Australia prepares to vote on becoming a republic, the Poms cast a pair from across the ditch to play two of English history's greatest figures. Oh well, if a Yank who grew up in the bush can play William Wallace ...

Elizabeth, the week's big rental release, is a gorgeous epic about the life and times of Elizabeth I. It offers a bit of a history lesson in itself: showing how rewriting the recent past and putting a buffed-up PR spin on ropey personalities was an art-form in royal London long before Diana Spencer arrived on the scene.

When the movie came out there was much talk that its stars, Cate Blanchett and Geoffrey Rush, would take the Oscars in a minuet. Mind you, much of that talk was datelined "Sydney - " or "Melbourne - ."

So, what's it all about, Lizzy?

It's set in 1554 when, under Catholic Queen Mary, England was racked by financial and religious instability. After Mary's death, her half-sister Elizabeth (Blanchett) is crowned Queen. Elizabeth is thrilled, particularly because her sweetheart, Robert Dudley (Joseph Fiennes), can return from exile.

Chief adviser Sir William Cecil (Richard Attenborough) urges the young Queen to forget personal matters and address the country's problems. Cecil says she must marry - either a French duke or Mary's widower, King Philip of Spain - to secure her throne.

Crisis breaks when the French warrior queen, Mary of Guise, masses troops on the Scottish border. Elizabeth bows to the pro-war lobby despite protests from her Master of Spies, Sir Francis Walsingham (Geoffrey Rush). It leads to a humiliating rout.

Ignoring Cecil, Elizabeth rejects France's and Spain's marriage proposals. Both countries try to murder her but Elizabeth escapes.

As conspiracies mount, Walsingham tells Elizabeth to hit back. Putting her trust only in him, she wipes out all opposition. Her throne is secure - and when Elizabeth next appears in public, she has transformed herself into the figure she has taken in the history books, the Virgin Queen.

* Here's a group of movies which barely troubled the cashiers as they raced through the multiplexes a few months ago, but could fill a winter evening at home.

Marion Crane (Anne Heche) is fed up with having to sneak away during lunch breaks to meet her lover, Sam Loomis (Viggo Mortensen), who cannot get married because most of his money goes to alimony.

One Friday, Marion's boss asks her to take $400,000 cash to the bank. She impulsively leaves town with the money, determined to start a new life with Sam in California.

As night falls and torrential rain obscures the road, Marion decides to spend the night at the desolate Bates Motel.

Bad call. The motel is run by Norman Bates (Vince Vaughn), a peculiar young chap dominated by his invalid mother and whose hobby is doing nasty things with the cutlery. Which means that Marion shouldn't take a shower after dinner ...

Yes, you've heard the story before: it's director Gus Van Sant's "recreation" of Alfred Hitchcock's 1960 classic thriller, Psycho.

American high school student Todd Bowden (Brad Renfro) has uncovered a deadly secret. Far from suspicion, Nazi war criminal Kurt Dussander (Sir Ian McKellen) has been quietly living in Todd's home town.

Fascinated with the atrocities Dussander committed during the war, Todd begins to blackmail him. In exchange for the teenager's silence, Dussander must reveal his past. The relationship quickly spirals out of control.

Says McKellen, "Dussander encourages what seems to be already in the boy a bit of itching for the nasty side of human nature, and he becomes the Apt Pupil."

Henry Fool, by director Hal Hartley, is a study of art, trust, loyalty, politics and pop culture. You may be already be thinking that's a lot for one movie to cover.

Simon Grim (Thomas Jay Ryan) is a garbage-man who's the target of abuse from his neighbourhood, his heavily medicated mother and his sister, Fay (Parker Posey). Life is truly grim until a mysterious stranger named Henry Fool (James Urbaniak) arrives. Henry encourages Simon to write down his thoughts with astonishing results.

And in The Governess, Minnie Driver plays a spirited 19th-century Jewish woman who masquerades as a Gentile governess to secure a job on a remote Scottish island. Soon she's assistant to the repressed master of the house (The Full Monty's Tom Wilkinson); later she's flinging herself so heavily into an affair with him that he backs off and betrays her.

* Finally, a band of movies that ... well, it's your $7 and your evening.

Students at Pendleton College - just named the safest in America - have an Urban Legend of their own. Thirty years ago, a psychology professor allegedly killed six students and then himself. The incident is remembered each year with a costume-party.

When a series of strange deaths occurs on campus, student Natalie (Alicia Witt) realises they are murders based on urban legends. She sets out to uncover the killer and get to the bottom of the college myth.

A piano prodigy, his mother and a famous saxophonist have to learn that life doesn't always deal a fair hand, and the trick is finding a way to play that hand to your advantage in The Tic Code, starring Gregory Hines, Polly Draper and Christopher George Marquette.

Vince Vaughn also turns up in Clay Pigeons, as a gas station attendant in Mercer, Montana, whose life goes wrong when he sleeps with his best friend's wife. Before he can regroup his life has been invaded by a seductress, an FBI agent and a slick cowboy serial-killer. Goodish cast includes Janeane Garofalo and Joaquin Phoenix.

In The Fall, everything changes for American writer Adam Ellis (Craig Sheffer) when he helps a beautiful stranger on the run from a madman. Adam is seduced into killing her assailant, the employee of a wealthy entrepreneur, but things are not what they seem. Ah well, if they were it'd be a court case, not a movie.

S.C.A.R. is about "Selected Crimes Armed Response," a ruthless police unit dedicated to sweeping psychos and scumbags off the streets. Trigger-happy cop John Trace (Stephen Baldwin) has to leave the force or join the mortuary-friendly squad. Trace realises this is too heavy, even for him, and soon the whole ball of sanctioned slaughter begins to unravel.

Like I said, you've been given fair warning ...