The cinema trailer for A Monster Calls ★★★★ looks faintly ludicrous, with its scenes of a giant tree stomping around the landscape, but don't be deceived. In conjunction with screenwriter Patrick Ness, who also wrote the original novel, director J A Bayona has conjured a bittersweet and often painfully moving account of bereavement and growing up, in which the grim burden of terminal illness is alleviated by the healing power of art and fantasy.

Having been to Hollywood hell and back, Mel Gibson is perfectly placed to play the battered big daddy par excellence. Here he is, in the person of John Link, ex-jailbird on parole, recovering alcoholic and former outlaw biker, now eking out a living as a tattooist on a trailer park in the California desert. Weatherbeaten and bearded like an escapee from a jungle PoW camp, Link looks like a man a coin-toss away from extinction.

In his downbeat isolation, Link enjoys a little light relief by bantering bad-temperedly with his trailer-neighbour and AA sponsor Kirby (William H Macy, pictured below, right on the money) in between etching designs of surprising elegance on the limbs of his unwashed and unshaven clientele. His copy of Picasso's Don Quixote sketch might even fetch a few bucks. But Link's new, sober life will never bring him the contraband thrills of his old one.

Thus it's a kind of relief when he's suddenly contacted by his estranged 16-year-old daughter Lydia (Erin Moriarty). He hasn't seen her for years, but nothing good has happened in between, and now she's on the run from the ferocious enforcers from a Mexican drug cartel. Lydia, it seems, killed her boyfriend Jonah (Diego Luna) when he and his gang dragged her along to a brutal home invasion. Jonah (pictured below with Gibson) was the upstart son of the cartel boss known as El Padrino, and now Lydia must die.

Link is delighted to see Lydia again, though he manages to hide his rekindled paternal feelings behind a facade of macho self-sufficiency, but he's a little taken aback to find her loaded up with supplies – bottles of bourbon and gin, an assortment of drugs and a gun. The apple didn't fall far from the tree, but Link is determined to use all his hard-earned smarts to save Lydia from following his own road to perdition – if there's still time.

His race to beat the bad guys is part road movie, part outlaw caper and a little bit Mad Max (a scene where Mel swings his motorbike into the centre of the highway to wield a righteous shotgun at his pursuers peels away the years with panache), and the narrative is handled with sinewy directness by director Jean-François Richet. The sequence where a squad of Mexicano killers besieges Mel's trailer with torrents of gunfire may well be a knowing flashback to the director's Assault on Precinct 13. Richet is perfectly in tune with screenwriter Peter Craig (adapting his own novel), who has a knack for speedy boiled-down dialogue, like Mel's capsule description of his daughter: "This kid's a carnival, man. She's every loser's lucky day."

En route, there's space for some zesty character-sketches. Miguel Sandoval is sly and knowing as Link's jailbird-insider confidante Arturo, while Michael Parks (a Tarantino regular) plays Preacher, one of Link's old running mates and a Vietnam veteran who trades in military memorabilia (his sign says "In uncertain times, Nazi collectibles are a foolproof investment"). Sadly, uncertain times also prove to have soured their former bonds of friendship, though Link and Preacher are able to lament together the way that all the rebels have been corporatised, sanitised, compromised and lobotomised by the system.

The fiery denouement takes place amid soaring desert landscapes under a blazing sun. Refreshingly, Link is not a man in search of redemption, more like an inveterate renegade who never got the point of going straight in the first place. This punchy, pacy slice of desert-noir is a real treat.

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Can Louis Theroux bring anything new to the Scientology party? If you’ve seen Going Clear, Alex Gibney’s detailed documentary based on Lawrence Wright’s book, or watched Tom Cruise acting weird on YouTube, you already know that the Church’s great secrets are not so secret any more. We’ve heard about the aliens and the galaxies, the E-meters and the Operating Thetans, the elite Sea Org and the hellish conditions in the Hole.

Australian Ballet's cinema broadcast on Tuesday night appears to have been a little under-publicised – at least in my local multiplex, which was deafeningly empty with just five spectators.

Much was anticipated from Tate Taylor's film version of Paula Hawkins's bestselling novel, but there really are times when the best plan is to stay home with a good book. Despite a high-octane girl-power cast and the lustrous screenwriting reputation of Erin Cressida Wilson, this thing clanks along like the 3am milk train to Exeter sidings.

The Emigrants and The New Land have to be seen. In each, the story is gripping, the acting marvellous and the depiction of the period setting evocative and flawless. Any of these aspects would be reason enough to see a film, but the clincher is director Jan Troell’s adeptness at showing how the smallest details impact on destiny. Taking a moment’s rest from a menial task on a farm can lead to consequences which colour a whole life. But this is not where it stops. Troell weaves such moments seamlessly into a grand, sweeping arc for which the only word is epic.

“I’m so tired of hearing that McQueen is the best show we’ve ever done. It’s become a bit of an albatross,” complains Andrew Bolton, curator of the New York Metropolitan museum’s costume institute (he’s from Blackburn, Lancashire, and loved the New Romantics as a teenager). Bolton’s huge hit, Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty, took fashion as art to a new level in 2011. “It would be nice if China was able to knock it off its pedestal.”

We haven’t been here before. Tehran in 1980, bombed by its Iraqi invaders and jumpy with revolutionary fervour, is a place preoccupied with ordinary fear. Showing the normal if pressurised life he remembers from childhood in this demonised country is debutant writer-director Babak Anvari’s first coup. Letting this slide slowly into Persian myth and cinematic dread opens a new door in horror. The more arch A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night introduced the genre to the Iranian diaspora.

Tim Burton’s fans always want him to hit the sweet spot again, to give them another Beetlejuice or Edward Scissorhands. Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children is not quite there, but it’s not for lack of trying. The weakness lies in Jane Goldman’s script, adapted from the eponymous YA novel. There is way too much exposition – characters explain the plot to each other, not just at the outset, but throughout the movie.

Given the fractious state of American politics, perhaps it's a suitable moment for a movie taking a look back at the American Civil War. However, despite heaving at the seams with good intentions and noble sentiments, Gary Ross's Free State of Jones ultimately can't justify its debilitating 140-minute running time.