Who would have thought the beery blokey jukebox musical The Choir of Man at Melbourne’s Playhouse would be such an unmitigated delight? Then again wasn’t it a bit of a surprise at the Barry Humphries memorial that in the midst of the muscial eloquence of Richard Tognetti and Satu Vanska, and tributes from Rob Brydon to Rupert Murdoch, the most eloquent words (which were read by Arts Minister Tony Burke) should come from King Charles? Burke is apparently reading Ruth Wilson’s blank verse Iliad, the greatest of all war epics, but a lot of people will have been taking it easy in terms of artistic endeavour.

Of course, there are the films and the catch-up games the streamers allow. For about half the price of cinema tickets, you can now see Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon in whatever sized chunks of this three-and-a-half-hour epic you can tolerate. It is monumental. It has the great Robert De Niro as the superintending villain, very urbane and soft, and a very nervy Leonardo Di Caprio as his murderous pawn, and it is shot with a self-conscious magnificence, and has a score by the late great Robbie Robertson as well as an assortment of native American actors of varying credibility who speak or sing in the accents of the Osage people.

The trouble though is with the true story Scorsese documents. The Osage people on their reservation discovered they had liquid gold in the form of oil which made them the richest people in America and the whites proceeded to kill them off for their money. How this was done is not for a second grasped by the great filmmaker who succeeds in making a true and terrible story into something inherently improbable so that the upshot is a worthy but incoherent film, massively overblown, and not at all convincing for all its documentary qualities. This is a very minor film by Scorsese for all its grandeur and good intentions.

Oppenheimer by Christopher Nolan is a much better bet as entertainment and also a finer piece of cinema though it has problems of its own. Cillian Murphy is a fine actor but for much of this study of the brilliant physicist who made the atomic bomb, he looks oddly uncertain. We know from the documentary footage that Oppenheimer was a man of absolute self-possession and extraordinary intelligence. Nolan has him saying as he did, late in the piece, ‘I am become death, the destroyer of worlds,’ but Murphy says it early on and uncertainly to his girlfriend of the time, a dark-haired and buxom Florence Pugh whereas Oppenheimer could read the Bhagavad Gita in Sanskrit as easily as he could read Proust in French. Murphy is better when he is actually running Los Alamos and perhaps best when he is being smeared as a lefty by the McCarthyists – a part of the film is shot in very atmospheric black and white.

It should be pointed out that the film has an intelligent, complex script that plays on chronologies, and a superb supporting cast. Robert Downey Jr is utterly plausible as the man who nominates Oppenheimer to run things and Matt Damon, moustached and middle-aged as General Groves, shows what a wizard of a character actor he can be, and Emily Blunt has a tigerish brilliance as Oppenheimer’s wife defying all.

Oppenheimer is one of those films with a supporting cast of stars in disguise and the method works very well as far as it goes though the fact that Cillian Murphy looks so much like an uncertain seeker after truth belies the fact that he was born to do the job he did and he did it so brilliantly not because he was an Einstein but because he was a breathtakingly bold administrator, okay a physicist of a high rank but a practical fixer of consummate general intelligence. It’s hard to imagine Murphy’s Oppenheimer saying he had invited T.S. Eliot to the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton – this is where he was Einstein’s successor – ‘and all he wrote was The Cocktail Party’. The real-life Oppenheimer was a connoisseur of a world of things. He was nothing like a nervous nellie as the world knows all too keenly.

But Oppenheimer is full of fine things like the scene where Truman tells him the dropping of the atomic bomb was all his work, he wants nothing to do with this weakling of a physicist.

The story goes that when Barbie and Oppenheimer were released at the same time, (some months before Flowers of the Killer Moon), a great swathe of the hardy film-going young saw both films on the same day. Greta Gerwig’s film about how Margot Robbie’s Barbie and Ryan Gosling’s Ken cast off their traditional doll identities and the stereotypes they reflect is the best of these three films with brilliant originality and a quite unpredictable storyline full of wry digs about the patriarchy and Proust and everything in between. Margot Robbie is radiant as Barbie and all the jokes about no genitalia and the complex imaginative comedy of getting real are done with a swerving hectic grace that is often laugh-aloud funny but is full of wit and wisecracks that are a testament to the tricksy world of reality and illusion to which Greta Gerwig pays such complex homage. You don’t expect Hollywood to be capable of making a film so worldly and so original at the same time.

It helps in a film that is about metamorphosis that there are utterly convincing performances of believable human characters such as America Ferrera (the one-time Ugly Betty), and Ariana Greenblatt as a totally likeable and also recognisable young teen. Barbie is a constantly surprising film that has a breathtaking quality, a sort of structural musicality as well as an earthiness and intrinsic realism that gives it – just a bit – an affinity with the dreamy side of Shakespearean comedy.

It’s madcap and mature and fresh all at once and the sense of what fools these mortals be makes this one of the more sparkling and surprising of all the films that are lurching towards the Oscars and the other prizes. It has a luscious quality as well as a bewitching self-consistency that belies the ponderous improbabilities of Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon and the uncertainty of Oppenheimer.