Candy (15)

A plotless indie film about a pair of junkies drifting towards oblivion isn't the most enticing prospect for a Saturday night at the movies, but Candy isn't as depressing or as exploitative as I'd feared. Perhaps all the Australian sunshine helps, and it doesn't hurt that its stars, Heath Ledger and Abbie Cornish, are better-looking than your average addicts. Anyway, the film is a clear-eyed, strangely heartening Australian study of a wannabe poet and a wannabe painter who love each other almost as passionately as they love heroin. There's a surprising amount of humour to the matter-of-fact way they accept their situation - "I'm a junkie hooker and he's hopeless," shrugs Cornish - and while Candy makes no bones about the awful consequences of their habit, it never descends into melodrama.