“Nobody looks back in radio,” Garrison Keillor says at one point in the new film named for his 32-year-old NPR radio show, Prairie Home Companion. “That’s the beauty of it.”

Based on a script by Nick Cave, The Proposition is perhaps less violent and harrowing than any given song from a Cave album like Murder Ballads. But, as Cave fans will recognize, that’s an awfully high bar for comparison, and this Australian frontier story is more brutal than many viewers may be able to bear. If you find HBO’s Deadwood prissy, this is the movie for you.

Here’s a strange thing: France has a great tradition of film critics who turn into filmmakers, but that’s never been the case in America. In France in the 1950s, seduced by the Hollywood movies of Hitchcock and Hawks, a number of whippersnapper critics from the magazine Cahiers du Cinema, like Truffaut and Godard, gave birth to the French New Wave. That tradition in France has stayed alive to the present day.

Brick is an R-rated film about teenagers, drug dealers and murder which contains, to the best of my recollection, not a single instance of profanity.

The hands-down, no-contest canniest casting coup in recent bigtime commercial film production has to be slotting Mia Farrow as the nanny from Hell (no mere metaphor, this) in Fox’s remake of the 1976, scavenged-from-the-Bible horror hit, The Omen. From the moment Farrow simpers and minces her way into a job caring for Katherine and Robert Thorn’s five-year-old son Damien (Julia Stiles, Liev Schreiber and Seamus Davey-Fitzpatrick, respectively) you just know her Mrs. Baylock is preternatural evil on the sensible-shoed hoof.