The wonder of the desolate outback is on view in two very different shades this week: pallid and parched in David Michôd's The Rover, and fleshily vibrant in John Curran's marvellous Tracks (Entertainment One UK, 12), a film that got far less than its due in UK cinemas this spring. Shot with a besotted camera that gives sand the shimmer of silk, the landscape is at once an antagonist and an object of celebration in this lean, literate biopic of Robyn Davidson, the headstrong young explorer who in 1977 set out to cross the 1,700-mile west Australian desert on foot. She's played here with doughty presence and a dry twinkle of irony by the ever-interesting Mia Wasikowska, with Adam Driver (the lanky lothario of Girls) on hand as the National Geographic photographer who becomes her peevishly tolerated love interest. The film is a romantic quest narrative of full-bodied, old-fashioned intelligence.

Captain America: The Winter Soldier (Buena Vista, 12), meanwhile, strives for its own kind of robust classicism: of all the Marvel comic-based screen adventures that have flooded the screen in recent years, it's the one most hale and hearty in its heroism, and least inclined toward hip, post-modern snark; you suspect Robert Redford wouldn't have agreed to a villainous supporting role otherwise. It does its duty with as much burly efficiency as Chris Evans's time-trotting Captain himself, as he fends off the eponymous frosty assassin with a committed perma-grimace. This might be Marvel's most solid franchise. Perhaps its dullest, too.

With five features in six years, prodigious Québécois actor-writer-director Xavier Dolan hasn't established himself as an enfant terrible so much as a fabulous son. Not all the 25-year-old's films quite hit the nerve they aim to, but their presentation is never less than exquisite. The Cannes laurels for the upcoming Mommy notwithstanding, Tom at the Farm (Network, 15) is comfortably his most satisfying and sensually stimulating film to date, a crafty, creepy neo-noir in which a young gay hipster (Dolan) visits the bereaved rural family of his late lover, only to encounter a surging undertow of menacing prejudice. The boy wonder borrows from Highsmith, Hitchcock and Fassbinder with preternaturally unerring confidence.

Confidence isn't exactly the issue in Akiva Goldsman's daft supernatural romance A New York Winter's Tale (Warner, 12), which maintains its insane fabulism – flying horses, century-long amnesia, Will Smith as Lucifer in diamond earrings – with a commendably straight face. That's about all there is to commend in this lumbering, tin-eared tale of a thieving charmer (Colin Farrell) escaping his demonic guardian (Russell Crowe) to find love with a consumptive noblewoman, but its awfulness is of the hell-for-leather variety that could beckon cult status. That's more than can be said for The Love Punch (Entertainment One, 12), a flaccid romantic caper with Emma Thompson and Pierce Brosnan marking time against admittedly pretty Riviera backdrops, or the retrograde post-Balkan war thriller Killing Season (Lions Gate, 15). If there's a hall of fame for horrible film facial hair, however, the chin-sock beard adorning the mug of John Travolta's gruesomely accented Serbian soldier may earn it a place.

This week's upsetting one-two punch of movie-star passings has had a visible effect on the download and streaming charts, as viewers have rushed to keep the screen legacies of Robin Williams and Lauren Bacall immediately alive. It's as agreeable a way to mourn as any. iTunes, meanwhile, has been resourceful enough to group all its Williams titles in a handy retrospective section, which, in addition to the obvious, includes his underacclaimed work in Bobcat Goldthwait's gutsy 2009 black comedy World's Greatest Dad and his still-winning breakout turn as a Soviet defector in Moscow on the Hudson.