This week’s movie releases

Derek Cianfrance follows up his innovative and intimate Blue Valentine — a story of a relationship told in reverse — with the more epic The Place Beyond the Pines. Once again it stars Ryan Gosling, here starring as a carnival motorcycle stunt rider who turns bank robber to support his newborn son with estranged lover Eva Mendes. His life of crime causes him to cross paths with cop Bradley Cooper, himself with a young family and struggling professionally, with the repercussions of their run-in reverberating into the succeeding generation.

The crossbow arrows fly in You’re Next, a humorous take on home-invasion horror directed by Adam Wingard. The setup is familiar: a family and their guests assemble in a remote country mansion for a celebration only for a gang of masked marauders to burst in and spoil the party. One invitee is not about to go out without a fight, however: young Erin (Sharni Vinson), the girlfriend of one of the family’s sons with survivalist training, organizes a makeshift defense and bloody fight back.

Number three in David Twohy’s sci-fi series that began with Pitch Black (2000) and The Chronicles of Riddick (2004), Riddick finds Vin Diesel’s eponymous hero fighting for his life against lethal aliens after being left for dead on a hostile planet. His only hope for escape is to signal for the bounty hunters he has been trying to dodge to come pick him up. Karl Urban reprises his role from part two while Spain’s Jordi Mollà also lends support.

Playing patience

Co-written by Luis Buñuel script collaborator Jean-Claude Carrière and starring France-based Iranian actress Golshifteh Farahani, who caused outrage in her homeland by posing nude for a French magazine, The Patience Stone is an Afghan drama centered on an old Persian legend. Farahani plays a woman in a war-torn country who unburdens all her deepest secrets, desires and frustrations on her husband of 10 years after he is left in a vegetative state by a bullet in the neck. He has become the patience stone, a magical entity that absorbs the sorrows of those who confide in it and, once saturated, explodes and destroys the world. Atiq Rahimi, author of the bestselling source novel, directs.

Dani de la Orden’s romantic comedy Barcelona nit d’estiu tells six of the 567 love stories that it purports took place on the night of August 18, 2013 when the comet Rose crossed the skies of the Catalan capital. Joan Dausà, Sara Espigul, Jan Cornet and Pau Roca feature.

Last up, Storm Surfers 3D is a documentary about two friends competing to ride the biggest waves Australia has to offer.