Watch Running With Scissors, Little Miss Sunshine, Juno, The Chumscrubber and a million other leading up to the most recent quirky family drama, Jesus Henry Christ.

You’ll see the fingerprints of marketing and distribution executives no less clearly than those of Marvel or DC Comics all over the forthcoming superhero behemoths The Amazing Spider-Man and The Dark Knight Rises. The only thing missing is the theme park ride and collectible Pez dispenser.

In other words, tread warily to independent movies. More than half come from the ‘indie’ labels owned by big studios and follow a desperately hopeful, well-worn path towards the kind of awards credibility than can sell them. Just like all movies, if you watch enough of them many start to look the same. Formula can be found anywhere there’s a movie screen. It isn’t the sole domain of the studios.

Speaking of blockbusters, it wasn’t so long ago when the news that a movie made a billion dollars was met with considerable excitement. Now it’s almost routine, with The Avengers the latest title to crack the magic number in only weeks.

What’s changed in the last ten years? First of all there are a lot more people watching movies. Despite the hemorrhaging of profits from the industry at the hands of DVDs and Playstations, the world’s population is rising rapidly, and newly affluent markets in emerging economies are getting more screens. Even James Cameron has talked in the last few weeks about co-producing the rest of the Avatar films in China. You can read about it here. Secondly, it’s kind of easy to get more money when you charge a third to a quarter again for a ticket price if it’s in 3D. No wonder it’s still the hottest ticket since the switch to colour.

And with yet another billion dollar blockbuster, it seems the crisis the studios faced throughout the 2010s has been averted… for now.

Lastly, I was also pleasantly surprised by Iron Sky, the gleefully reverent grindhouse homage movie geeks have been waiting keenly for.

They make such a great creative team with their oddball styles it was a dream come true… for awhile. Edward Scissorhands was thrilling and fresh. What seems like a dozen collaborations later, Dark Shadows is just the latest in a long line of otherworldly characters in Burton-esque environments of twisted trees in scary forests, gargoyles and haunted mansions.

Depp is 18th century industrialist Barnabus Collins, whose family has established a fishing town on the US east coast and made him a fortune. But when a local witch (Green) who’s in love with him casts a spell, his beloved fiance throws herself off a cliff and he’s transformed into a vampire, locked underground in a coffin for two centuries.

Fast forward to 1972 and Collinsport is still a fishing town, but Angelique – the witch behind the curse – has taken over in the form of the lissome, take-no-prisoners CEO of Angel Bay Seafood.

When Barnabus is released from his tomb amidst a construction project he seeks out the dysfunctional descendants of his family promising family matriach (Pfeiffer) they’ll restore the name to former glory.

There’s a young boy searching for a father figure, the new governess who looks exactly like Barnabus’ doomed fiance from centuries before, the live-in psychiatrist with the addictive personality (Bonham Carter, only feeling like she’s there because she’s in all her husband’s films) and myriad other subplots and strands.

For awhile Dark Shadows does an okay job of keeping them all aloft, but it all falls in a heaps in the third act as they’re rushed to completion, forgotten altogether or wrapped up stupidly in ideas that seem to have occurred to screenwriter Seth Graham Smith (Pride and Prejudice and Zombies) five minutes before filming. What starts out richly detailed ends up an unfocused mess.

The one thing that saves Dark Shadows from being an all-out travesty is the comedy. Fish out of water comedy is certainly nothing new, but Depp and his co-stars plumb the gags about an 18th century nobleman adapting to the early 70s to the full. Standouts are his reaction to Alice Cooper (‘that is the ugliest woman I’ve ever seen’) and the stoning gag, but none of them can save the plot from falling in a heap.

But Michelle Williams is still shaping up to be the best actress working today. If you don’t appreciate anything else about the film you’ll marvel at the way she absolutely channels the 60s starlet, capturing the essence of innocence and sexuality Monroe was famous for as well as the wiggle, the smile and everything else. I can’t remember what – if any – award nominations she got for the role but she was as good playing Marilyn as her ex husband once was playing the Joker.

The lead character is actually young production assistant Colin (Redmayne), who escapes a rich family to make it in the movies and happens to fall into a job at the job of uber-thesp Olivier’s (Brannagh) film company.

London is abuzz with the impending arrival of Marilyn Monroe, who’ll star opposite Olivier in a highly anticipated production, but things go off the rails thanks to her infamous skittishness, nerves and self esteem issues just as fast as Colin finds himself in her confidence and perhaps her amorous attentions. As everyone, especially Olivier, loses patience with her decaying reliability, Colin finds himself her only friend, even ahead of her husband Arthur Miller.

It’s a fairly light movie about star power and how we’re all drawn to it like moths to a flame. At the thought of sharing Marilyn’s bed and winning her heart Colin hardly looks back on the relationship with the pretty wardrobe assistant (Watson) he dropped in the process, and he ignores the warnings of all Marylin’s handlers, managers and entourage that she’ll only break his heart.

Breezy, funny, pretty and very well acted, it’s not a deep psychological study into Monroe’s fracturing mind as much as an erstwhile love story so its easy to digest, and you won’t see a better portrayal of Marilyn for a long time yet.

From the UK TV series, it’s a profane odyssey of four school friends who go to Europe with the promise of cheap booze, sex and girls but who end up in a hellhole and fall for the various tourist traps designed to lure them in while learning something about themselves and maybe finding something more important than sex – love – in the process.

The stereotypes are locked in and left to bounce off each other as the boys zero in on members of the opposite sex and the film is rambling road to pairing them all up through chance and derivative plotting.

There are admittedly plenty of laughs thanks to the crassness but it’s nothing you haven’t seen a zillion times before.

It seems Emile Hirsch at least realised as much after he started filming, giving among his worst performances ever (and he can act – just watch Sean Penn’s Into The Wild). I felt the most sorry for Olivia Thirlby and Max Minghella, who gave it their all in a movie that could have been a big starring role for them both if it hadn’t been such rubbish.

Holidaying in Moscow, four young Americans are of course among the only ones who survive an alien invasion where the creatures are balls of light that fall from the sky and walk around attacking people, making them disappear in huge clouds of dust.

It soon becomes apparent that they interfere with electrical systems, which gives the photogenic survivors a way to tell where they are, but the rest of the movie is a chase sequence with a few set pieces – none of them very memorable – while try to get out of the devastated city and figure out if the rest of the world’s the same before they get picked off.

There’s a sequence right at the end, a throwaway moment where humanity has discovered how to fight back against the invaders, where Hirsch looks stoically at a table and says ‘this is where it begins’, referring to the counterattack.

Unfortunately Independence Day had the budget and scope to show us the counterattack, where The Darkest Hour only shows a group of pretty twentysomething running around a foreign city, and you can almost see the mixed emotion on Hirsch’s face as he says it – relief because it’s over but embarrassment because people will actually see what he’s been doing for 90 minutes of their lives.

Complete miscasting, nary a scare in sight and with not nearly enough to do, The Darkest Hour is a very empty spectacle that isn’t even spectacular. It actually has the hallmarks of a movie that was cut off at the knees by a reduced budget or an enforced edit at the 11th hour.

It’s not exactly a case of nothing you haven’t seen before as four lads from England come to Australia where one of them is marrying the girl of his dreams, the daughter of a rich and connected political family.

The wedding takes place in an opulent Blue Mountains setting and when everything goes wrong it becomes an ever-growing comedy of errors involving a prize sheep, a fearsome and creepy drug dealer with father issues and a host of other comic fodder.

There are shades of The Hangover and a million other stoner/frathouse comedies but it has a lot of heart and soul and it’s very hard not to enjoy. Also great to see Olivia Newton John on a movie screen after all these years, having a great time as the repressed society wife who cuts loose.

This is a classic example of what he’s been doing more or less well in the last ten years. The high concept premise introduces a program where Nazi officials travelled the world during the war to find ancient runestones that could be used to raise people from the dead to form unkillable soldiers. The story starts with one in particular (Fassbender), who travels to a hillbilly farm in rural America and starts his terrible experiments.

70 years later a young medic, haunted by his brother’s disappearance, is going nowhere taking care of his Alzheimers afflicted father. But when his brother suddenly shows up one night, unshaven and terrified, he explains little apart from the need to return to a farmhouse where he’s apparently been hostage for years.

It turns out the Nazi scientist is still there, haunting the farm like some demigod, the farming family – not having aged a day thanks to the witchcraft involved – plying him with regular blood sacrifices. The brother has been one such intended victim but has escaped and now wants revenge.

The pair bust into the farmhouse, intending to kill the inhabitants, but soon discover not only that they’re very hard to kill but that there’s a much worse fate waiting for them.

With zombies still at the top of the pop culture horror tree and thanks to the success of The Walking Dead and films with a million different viewpoints on the classic zombie mythology, it’s very hard to stand out or offer anything distinctive. Even though this is slickly produced and directed it doesn’t really do anything special, but Schumacher’s still very much a director to keep watching.

The high concept hook is that clean freak insurance assessor Rueben (Stiller) approaches everything in life as a risk assessment, and when he catches his wife cheating on him on their honeymoon (with a film-stealing Hank Azaria) he’s cast adrift, his perfect plan for the organised life he’d always prepared for in tatters.

So when the scattered and zany Polly (Aniston) comes into his life, he’s even more stressed to find that despite being complete opposites, they’re falling in love.

There’s not a lot more to offer apart from some accomplished leads making good with some well scripted jokes. The ferret who can’t see too well is the sort of slapstick you expect from much a lower quality movie but Hoffman, Aniston and Stiller have what it takes to give it a bit more life. At least it’s still better than The Heartbreak Kid.

Why the indecision? Three words. ‘Kids movies’ and ‘musical’. What, I asked myself countless times as I nearly gave in, was I thinking? And I indeed winced silently to myself and bore it admirably whenever they burst into song. As far as kids’ movies go with their cloying, sledgehammer-subtle morals-of-the-story and pro-American outlook, it was the least bad of many.

There are a lot of parables at play here, one being the story of American itself and its belief that it lives in an unshakable safe haven of security, the rest of the world a hotbed of dangers, cutthroats and killers intend on raping and pillaging it. Rapunzel’s (Moore) mother might be successive US political regimes, fear-mongering about the outside world in order to stay powerful and rich – in her case, eternally youthful – on the backs of a scared, submissive populace.

Or the writers might just have extrapolated the Rapunzel legend and wondered why she spent her entire life locked up a tower. It’s one of those fairy stories where you’re more familiar with the premise than the actual story.

In this version, Rapunzel’s hair isn’t only long, it’s magic, and she’s the kidnapped daughter of the kindly king and queen, the evil stepmother keeping her imprisoned because the magic hair keeps her young. But when a handsome thief with the law hot on his trail comes across the tower to hide out, he slowly convinces Rapunzel that the world outside the gates isn’t so bad and as expected, love slowly blooms as she discovers her true identity.

In simpler terms it’s a story about growing up, leaving the next, discovering your parents aren’t right about everything and that there’s going to come a time when you’ll have to start taking care of yourself but that the world is a bigger, more exciting place than you’d ever imagined.

All the Disney elements are here, from funny animals to gorgeously rendered images in several scenes that will take your breath away – in this case, the annual flying of the lanterns from the castle.

To those familiar with creature movie lore, the name Skull Island was familiar as the home of the greatest movie monster ever, King Kong. It was Jackson’s first professional homage to the film he fell in love with as a kid, years before he got to give us his vision of the official Skull Island in 2005′s King Kong.

You might think the most interesting thing about Iron Sky is the new paradigm of Internet-assisted crowdfunding – the model that gave the Finnish and Australian producers the finance.

In fact, it’s the slow but certain takeover of the movie business by the professional film fan, movie geeks who live, breathe and sleep films and kick the doors of Hollywood in by force to spread their message of movie-love. Iron Sky was made by people who quite obviously revel in the quagmire of movie references, memes and digital pop culture that informs upon, regurgitates and endlessly recycles itself.

When presidential campaign manager Vivian Wagner (Australia’s Peta Sergeant) is preparing to abuse long–suffering staff for poster designs she has to present to the President the following morning, she reaches up for her glasses with a shaking hand and tells everyone who isn’t a department head to leave the room before screaming abuse.

Haven’t you seen it somewhere before? Of course, it’s a scene from Oliver Hirschbiegel’s Downfall (2004), given endlessly vibrant new life as the basis for the dozens of Hitler parodies all over the web where The Fuhrer rails about everything from Apple rejecting his iPad app to Cannes film festival tickets.

Director Timo Vuorensola has lived it, loved it and wants to share his love of it with you, and Iron Sky is a love letter to parody, grindhouse, genre mash-ups and every other cultural meme that’s insinuated itself onto movies screens over the last decade.

A short teaser for Iron Sky turned up online almost four years ago (it’s been in production all this time because of the funding model) and had movie geeks frothing with excitement at the pitch. At the end of World War II many Nazis fled Earth and set up a base on the far side of the moon, and in the year 2018 they’re set to re-invade and win what they lost all those years ago. It was such a cool idea the plot hardly mattered.

Of course, as a host of other ideas-in-search-of-films have shown (Lesbian Vampire Killers, anyone?), it takes more than a cool idea to entertain for 90 minutes. And while Iron Sky does wobble here and there, it’s a very entertaining film, doing what it sets out to do with barely a misstep.

When the US President (she’s never strictly identified as the gun-toting Republican Sarah Palin, but it’s obvious) sends a mission to the moon to help her re-election chances, the astronauts come across the shocking site of a huge Helium 3 mining base run by the Fourth Reich as they prepare to invade Earth again.

The clueless, African American crew member Washington (Christopher Kirby) is taken prisoner, where an Einstein-esque scientist starts injecting him with a chemical to turn him white, correcting his skin abnormality. At the same time, nasty Fuhrer-in-waiting Adler (Gotz Otto) intends to fast track himself to the leadership, dispatching current Fuhrer (playing to type, Udo Kier has portrayed countless Nazis and vampires) with pretty teacher Renate (Julia Dietze) at his side and taking over the Earth himself.

Meanwhile on Earth, take-no-prisoners presidential campaign manager Wagner will use any means necessary to shepherd her client to a second term, including recruiting Nazis to the cause.

The dialogue gets flabby at times, and Kirby as James Washington in particular is a little over-eager, but there are a lot of sustained laughs.

Quite aside from the setting being space, you’ll actually be reminded of Duncan Jones’ Moon from a few years back, another film that showed how possible it is to use CGI to elicit surprisingly large scope and effects on a very low budget. The outer space sequences are kinetic and fill the screen as good as any big budget sci-fi actioner.

With funding from Screen Queensland and shot in part on our shores (you might recognise Peta Sergeant from more than one Australian TV series) there are plenty of Aussie in jokes. When the other nations of the world unveil the battle craft they’ve all agreed not to build (after the US has revealed the USS George W Bush), the Australian craft is the ‘Dundee 01‘.

There’s no shortage of digs at current geopolitics, and as time goes subsequent viewing will help you appreciate how rich and subtle the satire is for such an outright comedy.

The people – in this case everyone from donors to the director – have spoken, and Iron Sky is the future of filmmaking in more ways than one.