EVOLVE, PS4, Xbox One, PC

One of the first "major" titles to trickle into shops for 2015, Evolve has stolen a march on more-hyped upcoming titles like Battlefield: Hardline, Tom Clancy's The Division and Project Cars – and deserves its moment in the sun. It's a terrific, simple idea: five players compete online in the same arena, four of them playing as a team of monster hunters and another taking the role of the monster itself. As the game begins, the balance is in the hunters' favour: the monster starts out weak and vulnerable and is outnumbered. But if it can survive long enough by hiding, it can fatten itself up by feeding on its surroundings and evolve (as per the title) into a second-stage beastie that is much harder to kill, then, eventually, into a third-stage, fully mature creature that can easily make mincemeat of its human foes. It's a game of delicate balance, then – the humans must work as an effective team to track and kill the monster early on; the monster must avoid detection for as long as possible before turning on its tormentors. It's been compared to Pac-Man, and it's a lot like Pokemon, too, which is, after all, a game of evolution itself.

PAY TV

SELLING HOUSES AUSTRALIA

Lifestyle Channel

Wednesdays, 8.30pm

The presenters of this real estate series, now in its eighth season, represent three very different approaches to the art of sprucing up properties for sale. British property guru Andrew Winter lends the authoritative, sneering voice of many a British reality series. What begins as a good-natured tearing down of vendors' disillusions frequently descends into undisguised disgust. His fellow British ex-pat, Charlie Albone is everything you'd want in a landscape gardener. Creative and ever practical, he combats Winter's negativity with clever solutions. And then there's lovely interior designer Shaynna Blaze, voted favourite female personality at the ASTRA television awards two years running. She exudes a genuine quality rarely for the genre, is sensitive to the clueless vendors, and possessed of a gift of the zhoosh. Tonight they make over a dilapidated beach house on McLeahy Island, off Brisbane. BM

CLASSIC

STORM BOY 

Reel (G)

One of the most poetic of Australian children's films, this 1976 adaptation of Colin Thiele's novel combines the boy-and-animal formula with a touch of Huckleberry Finn. The young hero (Greg Rowe) lives in a shack on the South Australian coast with his eccentric, distant father (Peter Cummins), spending his days exploring the beach and the nearby bush reserve. Alone much of the time, he finds an emotional outlet by caring for three orphaned pelicans, helped by a local Aboriginal man, Fingerbone Bill – unforgettably played by a youthfully badass-looking David Gulpilil, wearing a hand-me-down red sweater and wielding a shotgun. The dream of freedom presented here has great romantic appeal even if all the main characters are outcasts, the pelicans included; the film is a song of innocence in which an adult awareness of the world's cruelty is always there as counterpoint. The French-born journeyman Henri Safran directed, unevenly but with a strong sense of place; one of the writers was another European expatriate, Sonia Borg, who would tackle Indigenous themes more centrally in the TV mini-series Women Of The Sun. JW

FREE-TO-AIR

WITNESSES

SBS One

Wednesdays, 9.30pm

A new six-part police drama from France, Witnesses is a dark investigative procedural, more in the vein of recent Scandinavian noir series like The Killing than usual French TV fare. The story centres on a detective, Sandra Winckler (Marie Dompnier) investigating a wave of creepy murders in a small town in the north of France. Dead bodies have been dug up from their graves and left in display homes that have been readied for sale, each in the same manner – the bodies of a man, a woman and a teenager, all unrelated, but placed in the homes to resemble "families". At each crime scene is one clue: a photo of former crime squad heavy-hitter Paul Maisonneuve (Thierry Lhermitte, a huge star of French film and TV; most recently he played Doc Martin in the French version of the British series). Maisonneuve comes out of retirement to help with the gruesome case and teams up with Winckler, who forces the ex-cop to delve into his mysterious past and his long list of criminal enemies. Stylishly filmed and creepy as hell, Witnesses is gripping from the outset. KN

DVD

FURY 

Sony Universal (MA15+)

Writer and director David Ayer assembled a great cast to go with a tight script in this, one of the best war movies of the modern age. Set near the end of World War II, we are led through bloody carnage by a tank crew led by Sergeant Don "Wardaddy" Collier (Brad Pitt). His small team, consisting of Gordo Garcia (Michael Pena), Coon-Ass Travis (Jon Bernthal), Bible Swan (Shia LaBeouf) and newcomer Norman Ellison (Logan Lerman), is tight, tough and warped. The action is intense, the death toll high and bullets and bombs blaze night and day. The short time between the action carries the same intensity, as the battle-weary soldiers walk an ever-diminishing line between civility and madness. A meal of eggs and bacon in the apartment of a German mother and her beautiful teenage daughter and the five-man tank crew pushes the envelope of contempt and mateship to the brink. This is a war movie: the language is tough, the hatred of Germans is palpable, the atrocities appear commonplace. You will question the character of these men: were they bad men before they were soldiers, or were they good men who've turned bad for a good cause? Or is their behaviour completely justified from start to finish? We've come to expect top performances from these actors, but it feels like a breakout role for Lerman, the innocent member of the squad who is pulled into the hell that is war. JK