ADAM AND STEVE
**
USA
Low-grade queer fluff about two insecure men who fall in love and face contrived obstacles. In this case, neither of the two contracts HIV, but each has self-esteem issues, caricatures for parents and a wooden actor playing him. Half of every scene is designed purely as a lead-up to a snappy, bitchy one-liner. The other half is intended to cater to the gay man who always felt he had to superimpose his face over Julia Roberts' or Meg Ryan's at the movies. This time, he may choose to do the same with Parker Posey's. She is the only one to bring personality to her character.
wr/dir: Craig Chester
cast: Craig Chester, Malcolm Gets, Parker Posey, Chris Kattan, Melinda Dillon, Thomas Kopache, Sally Kirkland

THE ARISTOCRATS
****
USA
The title is the punchline to an unspeakably filthy joke, which exists in countless variations and can include explicit references to such things as incest, pedophilia, scatology and bestiality. A considerable portion of these variations are featured in this documentary, as delivered by an extensive collection of comics ranging from Don Rickles and Phyllis Diller to Chris Rock and Eric Cartman. The joke is repeated many many times, but it doesn't stop being funny; the picture is remarkably well sustained. The biggest challenge is blocking off the vile imagery it conjures up, and among the bigger rewards is the inevitable insight you get into the way comedy works. Some of the deliveries are more effective than others, and several of them are extremely effective. Everyone will have their own favourites, but Billy the Mime, Whoopi Goldberg, Sarah Silverman and the South Park team acquit themselves particularly well.
dir: Penn Jillette, Paul Provenza

ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13
**½
USA/France
Although put together with more skill than most other unnecessary remakes, this one has an unfortunate tendency to take itself seriously and drag out bits that John Carpenter handled with great economy in the 1976 original.
dir: Jean-Francois Richet
cast: Ethan Hawke, Laurence Fishburne, Maria Bello, Drea de Matteo, John Leguizamo, Aisha Hinds, Gabriel Byrne, Ja Rule, Brian Dennehy

THE AX
***½
France
Still looking for a job two years after he gets fired, a paper engineer decides to literally kill off his competition.
A blackly comic attack on capitalism, globalisation and a lot of other things rich, white, middle-aged men hold sacred. The premise isn't believable for a second and the picture isn't averse to rambling, but even as it takes its precious time, it holds your attention.
dir: Costa-Gavras
cast: José Garcia, Karin Viard, Geordy Monfils, Christa Theret, Ulrich Tukur, Olivier Gourmet, Yvon Back

BASED ON A TRUE STORY
***½
Netherlands/Canada
A highly entertaining inquiry into the true events that inspired "Dog Day Afternoon" (1975), with a bunch of colourful personalities and revealing vignettes.
wr/dir: Ryan Neill, Walter Stokman

BATMAN BEGINS
***
USA
A prequel about how Bruce Wayne decided he's gonna dress up in a bat costume and fight them bad guys.
   There is well over an hour of Jung for dummies before the picture realises this is not necessarily preferable to brainless action. But then the Bat-suit comes on. And even though the action scenes continue to be consistently shoddy, the story picks up rapidly, compensates for the preceding inertia and successfully resurrects a condemned franchise.
dir: Christopher Nolan
cast: Christian Bale, Liam Neeson, Michael Caine, Gary Oldman, Morgan Freeman, Katie Holmes, Cillian Murphy, Tom Wilkinson, Rutger Hauer, Ken Watanabe

BE COOL
**
USA
A loose sequel to "Get Shorty" (1995) meant to be a satire of the music business, but mostly an excuse for a bunch of famous people to get together and act self-satisfied. A few odd lines here and there do come off, but the majority are poorly delivered and the ending is particularly misconceived.
dir: F. Gary Gray
cast: John Travolta, Uma Thurman, Vince Vaughn, Cedric the Entertainer, Steven Tyler, Christina Millan, Harvey Keitel, The Rock, Danny DeVito, James Woods

BE WITH ME
**
Singapore
A documentary account of one blind and deaf woman's remarkable life story is intercut with three banal fictional love stories, including one between a pair of schoolgirls, which serves purely as an excuse for director Eric Khoo's camera to ogle at their budding appendages.
dir: Eric Khoo
cast: Ng Sway Ah, Sanwan Bin Rais, Theresa Poh Lin Chan, John Choong, Elizabeth Choy, Leong Kooi Eng, Lim Poey Huang

THE BEAT THAT MY HEART SKIPPED
****
France
A small time hood with a troubled relationship with his father struggles to balance his shady dealings with his aspirations as a concert pianist.
   A French remake of an American indie - James Toback's "Fingers" (1977). In itself, a complex, compelling, multi-layered and deeply moving character study.
dir: Jacques Audiard
wr: Tonino Benacquista
cast: Romain Duris, Niels Arestrup, Linh Dan Pham, Aure Atika, Emmanuelle Devos, Jonathan Zaccai, Gilles Cohen, Anton Yakovlev

BEWITCHED
**
USA
Rather than a straight feature film version of the TV series, this is a comedy about a fictional Hollywood remake of the "Bewitched" series, where the lead happens to be a real witch. It was a doomed concept even before somebody got the bright idea to make a screen couple of Nicole Kidman and Will Ferrell. She tries her best breathiest Monroe impersonation but lacks warmth, while he tries to convince himself he isn't playing the love interest in a Nicole Kidman vehicle.
dir: Nora Ephron
cast: Nicole Kidman, Will Ferrell, Michael Caine, Shirley MacLaine, Steve Carrell

BRICK
****
USA
A murder mystery in the Dashiell Hammett style, transferred to a contemporary California high school with the jargon and melodrama intact. This means teenagers using phrases like ‘hop’ and ‘reef worm’ with utmost seriousness and deadpan rat-a-tat-tat delivery. You either go along with it, or you don’t, though really, for your sake, you must. It’s always exciting to watch a new filmmaker work bizarre magic on a shoestring budget.
wr/dir/ed: Rian Johnson
ph: Steve Yedlin
m: Nathan Johnson, Larry Seymour
cast: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Nora Zehetner, Lukas Haas, Noah Fleiss, Matt O’Leary, Emilie de Ravin, Noah Segan, Meagan Good

BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN
*****
USA
In the 1960s, two young cowboys fall in love.
   Two classical Hollywood genres turned upside down. At its core, the picture is less a Western and more a romance, and as a romance, it holds a universal appeal in that it's played an awful lot like a traditional, sweeping heterosexual one would be, with scenery, sunsets and breathless embraces, and without a trace of self-consciousness or irony. Unreserved as it is in its celebration of same-sex love (as well as resentful of the tragedy in its denial), it's a brave pick for a general release in a market dominated by conservatives, particularly when gay marriage is still a prickly issue.
   But more than just timely, it's an impressive artistic achievement. Superbly cast - and acted - by a mostly young cast (several of whom deliver beyond all expectation), it's restrained in its approach (the sound of howling winds is more prominent than that of soaring violins) and all the more devastating because of it.
dir: Ang Lee
wr: Larry McMurtry, Diana Ossana
ph: Rodrigo Prieto
m: Gustavo Santolalla
cast: Heath Ledger, Jake Gyllenhaal, Michelle Williams, Anne Hathaway, Randy Quaid, Linda Cardellini, Anna Faris, Kate Mara, Roberta Maxwell

BROKEN FLOWERS
****
USA
A middle-aged lothario finds out he may or may not have a 20-year-old son.
   A meditation on the past as well as a kind of career summation for the star and director. Murray carries over his minimalist middle-age melancholia from that time he bonded with Scarlett Johansson in Japan as well as that other time he found out he was maybe the father to a grown son. This time he really may be crumbling inside - it's his most subtle and impressive turn. Jarmusch on the other hand carries over his own existential malaise from everything he's ever done into one concise, deadpan package that's also probably the most accessible one he'll ever do. An all-star cast of remarkably intelligent and beautiful women puts in brief cameos as characters that on paper would appear impossible to pull off. But in a matter of minutes, each one successfully evokes a lifetime of pain and sadness.
wr/dir: Jim Jarmusch
cast: Bill Murray, Jeffrey Wright, Julie Delpy, Sharon Stone, Frances Conroy, Jessica Lange, Tilda Swinton, Chloë Sevigny, Alexis Dziena

BROTHERS OF THE HEAD
***
UK
What sets this biopic of conjoint twin glam rock stars Tom and Barry Howe above the majority of biopics is that its subjects never existed and that as far as mockumentaries go, this is an uncannily convincing one. The problem is though, if the Howe brothers did exist and this very same movie was made about them, it would class as a relatively generic one, with some nice touches (such as the Ken Russell biopic-within-biopic, but then if that was based on fact, it would be frightening).
dir: Keith Fulton, Louis Pepe
cast: Harry Treadaway, Luke Treadaway, Bryan Dick, Tania Emery, Sean Harris, Tom Bower, Howard Attfield, Steven Eagles, Jonathan Pryce, Ken Russell

C.R.A.Z.Y.
**½
Canada
My Big Fat French-Canadian Coming-Out. A high-strung dysfunctional-family dramedy, wherein director Jean-Marc Vallée races through a couple of decades worth of family feuding and self-discovery peppered with stock era-specific pop hits and lots of sanitised quirks (the mother irons bread instead of toasting it, the father is a homophobic Patsy Cline fan, various people are psychic). It isn’t as suffocating as the majority of bittersweet indie hits it is emulating. But there is something innately homophobic about a coming-out movie that piles on the hetero sex scenes yet continually goes out of its way to avoid images of same-sex budding.
dir: Jean-Marc Vallée
cast: Marc-André Grondin, Michel Côté, Danielle Proulx, Pierre-Luc Brilliant, Natasha Thompson

CACHÉ
***½
France
Haneke's gift for conjuring up tension without any of the frills ordained by genre is perhaps at its most potent here. Long takes of a suburban exterior where next to nothing happens carry a grave sense of dread.
   At first the story appears to be about an upper-middle-class family hounded by a stalker and a dark past. The tension builds to such a nerve-racking extent that when the picture finally gets around to the debriefing, it initially feels like a minor letdown. The threat of violence which was prominent throughout is barely capitalised upon. As a thriller, the picture is gripping but not completely satisfying in that it never reaches the cathartic climax that you've come to expect - and demand - from the genre.
   However, in the third act, Haneke reveals an unsuspected, overarching political context, and the picture turns out to be primarily concerned with something altogether different to what you were expecting. You need to reset your reading of the film according to this context. It's a layered, provocative drama that may need extra hours to process, and preferably a second viewing. Its impact grows with afterthought.
wr/dir: Michael Haneke
cast: Daniel Auteuil, Juliette Binoche, Maruice Bénichou, Annie Girardot, Lester Makedonsky, Bernard Le Coq, Walid Afkir

CAPOTE
****
USA
Biopics rarely come with an inspired treatment, but this one is an exception – maybe because its subject is so ignoble. Phillip Seymour Hoffman does a striking impersonation of Truman Capote. He moves and talks like him, and in time you get the impression he even thinks like him. He isn’t allowed to be likable, so he has to be complex in order to be compelling. Catherine Keener is his best friend and conscience, who also goes on to write “To Kill a Mockingbird” in the background.
   The picture covers a six-year period in Capote’s life, from the time he decides to write an article on a brutal murder of a Kansas family to the time the murderers get hanged and he is ready to finish a book. There are no flashbacks to his traumatic childhood or flashforwards to his losing battles to alcoholism.
   The impact of certain scenes and factual reconstructions will be mildly muted to those familiar with the formidable 1967 adaptation of “In Cold Blood”. But this picture has its own major strength in the way it explores an artist’s ugly conundrum. Capote stumbles upon a tragedy in the making and has to get deeply involved with a couple of unstable individuals in order to get the full story. But for the sake of great material, he must also keep himself distanced enough to let the tragedy unfold. He would never write another book after this one and at the end of this picture, you’ll feel sure you know exactly why.
dir: Bennett Miller
wr: Dan Futterman
ph: Adam Kimmel
m: Mychael Danna
cast: Philip Seymour Hoffman, Catherine Keener, Clifton Collins Jr., Chris Cooper, Bob Balaban, Bruce Greenwood, Amy Ryan, Mark Pellegrino

CASANOVA
**
USA
A cloying, candy-coated costume rom-com, where the legendary lover, as played by a sleepy-looking Heath Ledger, romances an 18^th Century Venitian feminist who looks and sounds a lot like a prospective Revlon model in period dress.
dir: Lasse Hallström
cast: Heath Ledger, Sienna Miller, Oliver Platt, Omid Djalili, Lena Olin, Jeremy Irons, Charlie Cox, Natalie Dhormer

CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY
***½
USA
A poor boy with a strong sense of family is one of five lucky children to get a chance to visit Willy Wonka's mysterious chocolate factory.
A remake that follows Roald Dahl's story more closely than the first adaptation did. It's too laboured to be brilliant - maybe because we're already familiar with the story, it's easier to spot the machinery prodding along this flashy monster. But the picture is thoroughly enjoyable all the same, and the visuals are as rich and imaginative as you would hope.
dir: Tim Burton
wr: John August
ph: Philippe Rousselot
pd: Alex McDowell
cast: Johnny Depp, Freddie Highmore, David Kelly, Helena Bonham Carter, Noah Taylor, Christopher Lee, Missi Pyle, James Fox, Deep Roy, Adam Godley, Franziska Troegner, Julia Winter, Jordan Fry, Annasophia Robb, Philip Wiegratz

THE CHILD
***½
Belgium/France
In their familiarly stark, naturalistic fashion, the Dardenne brothers present the tale of a petty teenage criminal who decides to sell his son. The drama is kept at a low pitch and proves all the more gripping for it.
wr/dir: Jean-Pierre Dardenne, Luc Dardenne
cast: Jérémie Renier, Déborah François, Jérémie Segard, Fabrizio Rongione, Olivier Gourmet

THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA: THE LION, THE WITCH AND THE WARDROBE
**
USA
The Walt Disney Corporation were after their own Harry-Potter-style franchise and they scored (at least financially) with this first of what will presumably be several adaptations of C. S. Lewis' beloved series of books. The rather simple storyline recalls another recent epic fantasy series in that it revolves around a battle between good and evil in a mythical land. But there is none of Middle Earth's grandeur to be found in the land of Narnia. There is no visual sweep to the big CGI set-pieces - they're anticlimactic, if anything - and there is none of that overarching sense of urgency that kept the Lord of the Rings series engrossing for three hours at a time. Whatever excitement Tilda Swinton manages to conjure up wielding swords as the White Witch doesn't quite make this picture's 140 minutes feel worthwhile. The voicework for the CGI characters also comes off as uninspired in light of Andy Serkis' recent achievement.
dir: Andrew Adamson
cast: Georgie Henley, Tilda Swinton, James McAvoy, Anna Popplewell, William Moseley, Jim Broadbent, Skandar Keynes, James Cosmo
voices of: Liam Neeson, Ray Winstone, Dawn French, Rupert Everett

CINDERELLA MAN
**
USA
This biopic of underdog boxing champion and 1930s' common-man hero James J. Braddock opens with a quote from Damon Runyon, and for the remainder stays true to Damon Runyon's brand of idealistic schmaltz with a black-or-white moral outlook. Braddock is a noble, God-fearing American, who, when suffering through the worst of the Great Depression, still finds a moment to praise his homeland. You're either on his side, or you're not a patriot. And in case you don't notice the hopes of an entire destitute nation are riding on Braddock's glory, Ron Howard makes sure to have a few of the extras remind you of it. The fights themselves are believable and entertaining enough - except in cases when Braddock isn't doing very well at the start of one. This means you have to wait for this crisis to be protracted before he can overcome the odds in the most dramatic manner possible. Like the majority of the picture, these scenes take far too long to get to where you knew they were going from the beginning.
dir: Ron Howard
cast: Russell Crowe, Renée Zellweger, Paul Giamatti, Paddy Considine, Connor Price, Craig Bierko, Bruce McGill

COACH CARTER
*½
USA
Highly-principled basketball-coach Samuel L. Jackson teaches a bunch of aspiring hoodlums believe in themselves and achieve anything. By the end, everybody is utterly noble. Every single cliché must be covered along the way, and so the picture drags on for well over two hours.
dir: Thomas Carter
cast: Samuel L. Jackson, Robert Ri'chard, Rob Brown, Debbi Morgan, Ashanti, Antwon Tanner, Ramsey Gbelawoe

THE CONSTANT GARDENER
***½
USA
Liberal guilt runs rampant in this political thriller revolving around a devoted husband's investigation into his activist wife's mysterious death, which also ties in with a major drug company's illegal testing on African patients. The whole thing is so tense, urgent and Important, you're forced to overlook how romanticism is favoured over complexity and to take the insistent sermonising at face value.
dir: Fernando Meirelles
cast: Ralph Fiennes, Rachel Weisz, Danny Huston, Bill Nighy, Pete Postlethwaite, Hubert Koundé, Daniele Harford, Richard McCabe, Rupert Simonian

CONSTANTINE
**
USA
Humanity yet again finds its future in the hands of Keanu Reeves. There's some interesting visuals, but the dialogue sounds straight out of a student film and the actors certainly don't help.
dir: Francis Lawrence
cast: Keanu Reeves, Rachel Weisz, Shia LaBeouf, Djimon Hounsou, Max Baker, Pruitt Taylor Vince, Tilda Swinton, Peter Stormare

COTE D'AZUR
***
France
A light, fluffy, very French confection about a summer where all the unlikeliest people experience a sexual awakening. It's the kind of movie where things like adultery, masturbation, sexuality issues and campy pop tunes are mixed together with a minimum of fuss.
dir: Olivier Ducastel, Jacques Martineau
cast: Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, Gilbert Melki, Jean-Marc Barr, Jacques Bonaffé, Edouard Collin, Romain Torres, Sabrina Seyvecou

UN COUPLE PARFAIT
*
France/Japan
A collection of underlit, interminable, insufferable takes revolving around the dissolution of a marriage between two smugly self-involved members of the upper-middle-class.
wr/dir: Nobuhiro Suwa
cast: Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, Bruno Todeschini, Nathalie Boutefeu, Louis-Do de Lencquesaing, Joanna Preiss, Jacques Doillon

DAVE CHAPPELLE'S BLOCK PARTY
***½
USA
Comedian Dave Chappelle organises a block party in Brooklyn, featuring some of his favourite names from his iPod, including Kanye West, Erykah Badu and the FuGees, who reunite especially for the event. The audience is mostly made up by masses of the under-privileged, including a selection of charmingly unassuming folks from Chappelle's old neighbourhood.
   Hip-hop & R&B enthusiasm is not a prerequisite - you're likely to come out with an appreciation for the music in any case. Half-way through the concert it starts to rain and nobody moves. The atmosphere is warm and catching.
   Decades from now people will look at this movie and get the impression that ours was a much more harmonious era than it really is.
dir: Michel Gondry

DEAR WENDY
**½
USA
The main way you can tell that this treatise on the American obsession with guns comes from a writer-director team of Danish Dogme veterans is through the backdrop. The way this particular small town looks and functions is so completely removed from reality, you wouldn't be surprised to find that it's sprung out from the mind of a man who is only familiar with his milieu from the variations on it he's seen on TV. This could have passed for stylising, and as such, wouldn't have been a problem - except little of this stylising comes off as intentional. There's a general lack of confidence both to the humour and the drama (there's plenty attempts at both). None of it is set at the right pitch. Vinterberg and Von Trier seem to be struggling to articulate an urgent point, but they never figure out the appropriate means.
dir: Thomas Vinterberg
wr: Lars Von Trier
cast: Jamie Bell, Bill Pullman, Michael Angarano, Alison Pill, Danso Gordon, Novella Nelson, Chris Owen, Mark Webber

THE DEATH OF MR. LAZARESCU
****
Romania
Mr. Lazarescu's first name is Dante and he is a sixty-something-year-old who must travel through the three circles of the Romanian health care system if he is to live through the night. However, it isn't Alighieri's poet but Franz Kafka's Josef K who is Mr. Lazarescu's true soul brother. And it is the same absurdist but terrifyingly vivid concept of Eastern European bureaucracy that informs both Kafka's fiction and director Cristi Puiu's much-lauded horror comedy. Puiu observes Lazarescu's night-long odyssey through Bucharest's inert hospitals with uncanny documentary-style detail, with Luminita Gheorghiu's initially despondent but increasingly partisan ambulance nurse representing a paralyzed glimmer of conscience in a dehumanised system.
dir: Cristi Puiu
wr: Cristi Puiu, Razvan Radulescu
ph: Andrei Butica, Oleg Mutu
cast: Ion Fiscuteanu, Luminita Gheorgiu, Gabriel Spahiu, Doru Ana, Dara Dogaru, Serban Pavlu, Florin Zamfirescu, Clara Voda, Adrian Titieni, Mihai Bratila, Monica Barladeanu

THE DEVIL AND DANIEL JOHNSTON
***
USA
The story of mentally ill cult musician Daniel Johnston is the kind of thing that gets sanitised into daytime TV movies with titles like "Insane at Seventeen". But this documentary by Jeff Feuerzeig delivers the drama in a low, steady key. The crafting is rudimentary, but the facts are well spread out and absorbing.
wr/dir: Jeff Feuerzeig

DON'T COME KNOCKING
***
USA
Wim Wenders and Sam Shepard's first collaboration since the hypnotic "Paris, Texas" (1984) is amiable, though at the same time it comes off as something of a non-event. Shepard himself takes on the lead role: an aging, weathered ex-lothario, who discovers he unknowingly fathered a son to Jessica Lange some decades ago. It's a familiar scenario - Bill Murray alone has played this role twice in the past two years - and Wenders' treatment of it is artificial. But the picture has its hooks: it looks pretty, it sounds pretty and several of the performances are quite affecting.
dir: Wim Wenders
wr: Sam Shepard
ph: Franz Lustig
m: T-Bone Burnett
cast: Sam Shepard, Jessica Lange, Sarah Polley, Tim Roth, Eva Marie Saint, Gabriel Mann, Fairuza Balk, George Kennedy

DUMA
**½
USA
One of those family movies where a kid shares a special bond with cheetah. Last year's "Two Brothers" covered similar ground, with much prettier photography.
dir: Carroll Ballard
cast: Alex Michaeletos, Eamonn Walker, Campbell Scott, Hope Davis

EAST OF PARADISE
**½
USA
Lech Kowalski has reportedly developed a reputation for self-consciously arty documentaries and this is the last of a loose trilogy. The first half has Kowalski’s mother recounting in stark close-ups her agonizing exile in wartime Siberia, whereas the second is devoted to Kowalski’s own memories of trying to establish a career in New York’s drug- and porn-fuelled underground of the 1970s and 80s. Mrs. Kowalski’s memoirs are gripping and moving, whereas Lech Kowalski’s are whiny and suffocating. He equates his mother’s misery at her separation from her daughters in wartime Russia with his own punk kid angst.
dir: Lech Kowalski

EDMOND
***½
USA
William H. Macy descends into white-middle-class-middle-aged man's hell, inevitably ruled as it is by fags, bitches and blacks. It's a forceful, purposely unpleasant anti-morality tale set against the kind of cohesively seamy urban underworld that only exists in paranoid theatre. But there's something urgent and compelling about director Stuart Gordon and, more notably, writer David Mamet's refusal to compromise to accepted modes of political correctness. There is a hollow ferocity to Edmond's anger that somehow works in the film's favour - it speaks volumes about the nature of the unfulfilled macho-man fantasy that lies in a potentially scary number of downtrodden, hen-pecked schmoes.
dir: Stuart Gordon
wr: David Mamet
cast: William H. Macy, Julia Stiles, Joe Mantegna, Rebecca Pidgeon, Bai Ling, Mena Suvari, Denise Richards, Bokeem Woodbine

THE EDUCATION OF SHELBY KNOX
***
USA
A documentary about one Texas small-town-girl's enlightenment on matters of sex education and gay rights. It would make for great television viewing, and even on the big screen it's very entertaining, though not particularly well-crafted.
dir: Marion Lipschutz, Rose Rosenblatt

ELEKTRA
**
USA
An earnest, efficient franchise spin-off that is not necessarily embarrassing, and yet neither is it remotely interesting.
dir: Rob Bowman
cast: Jennifer Garner, Goran Visnjic, Will Yun Lee, Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa, Terence Stamp, Kirsten Prout

ELIZABETHTOWN
**
USA
A sentimental Cameron Crowe dramedy about a twenty-something-year-old sorting through a mid-life crisis. In an effort to discover himself, Orlando Bloom goes to his dad's hometown (when his dad dies) and meets a lot of wacky people who say and do a lot of wacky things that aren't relevant to very many things. And just when the movie is set to finish, Bloom embarks on a poorly narrated road trip, the only reason for which seems to be for Crowe to stuff in a few more of his favourite tunes.
wr/dir: Cameron Crowe
cast: Orlando Bloom, Kirsten Dunst, Susan Sarandon, Alec Baldwin, Jessica Biel, Judy Greer, Bruce McGill, Paul Schneider

ENRON: THE SMARTEST GUYS IN THE ROOM
***½
USA
Initially it's difficult to dig through the stock exchange lingo and follow the story, but gradually you catch on and you gape at the screen in outrage and disbelief. It's a terrifying film, not least for what it reveals about the 2003 California elections.
dir: Alex Gibney

ENTRE SES MAINS
***
France/Belgium
One of those endangered-female thrillers, but dressed up in arthouse frills. So, rather than a cheerleader the heroine is an insurance saleswoman, who is also a wife and a mother, and yet finds herself attracted to one of her clients, a scalpel-savvy veterinarian.
   The first time you groan is when the radio reports that there is a serial killer of single women on the loose; the second time is when the heroine invites the scary vet into her apartment when her family is away. And you are likely to have lost all patience by the end, when she decides to isolate herself from a crowd of people in order to set up a nail-biting climax. What's more, the ending, despite much pensive brooding, turns out to be deceptively simplistic.
   Director Anne Fontaine however does break with the formula in at least one crucial way - there are no foreboding violins on the soundtrack to tell you when you should be holding on to your seat. Having been raised on a Hollywood diet, we're not used to this kind of thing. So, because we don't know when the violence may break out, we expect it at any point. This means we get tense more often for longer periods of time. It's a clever tactic.
dir: Anne Fontaine
cast: Isabelle Carré, Benoît Poelvoorde, Jonathan Zaccaï, Valérie Donzelli, Bernard Bloch

THE EXORCISM OF EMILY ROSE
**
USA
A cautionary tale aimed at chaste young women tempted to stray from a righteous small-town path. According to her mother, 19-year-old Emily Rose was a happy, kind-hearted child. But then she decided to leave home and pursue higher education, and Satan saw fit to claim her eternal soul. The picture takes off from when her priest is accused of letting her die rather than seeking medical help.
   Essentially a courtroom drama with random chunks of demon possession, it's driven by a popcorn sensibility that negates director Scott Derrickson’s portents of a philosophical treatise (on matters of religious faith versus misguided secularism, no less). The picture may be based on a ‘real life’ event, but this story as it unfolds is firmly restricted within the bounds of horror-movie-land. It’s a place entirely removed from anything relevant to real life, a place where it’s perfectly common for disfigured-looking creatures to emerge from dark places and things are difficult to take seriously because they are so often interchangeable with bits from other movies.
   So, the half-assed metaphysical debate that is set up to dominate the picture is misguided from step one. And in the end, even though the religious zealots are given far more credibility than you’d suspect they deserve, the merits of their argument aren’t at all transferable to ‘real life’ events.
dir: Scott Derrickson
cast: Laura Linney, Tom Wilkinson, Jennifer Carpenter, Campbell Scott, Colm Feore, Mary Beth Hurt, Shohreh Aghdashloo

THE FAMILY STONE
***
USA
A Christmas-time meet-the-folks ensemble dramedy that gets bogged down in romantic subplots. Whenever the focus is on family dynamics however, it works well, and in no small part thanks to its excellent ensemble.
wr/dir: Thomas Bezucha
cast: Sarah Jessica Parker, Diane Keaton, Craig T. Nelson, Dermot Mulroney, Luke Wilson, Rachel McAdams, Claire Danes, Tyrone Giordano, Brian White, Elizabeth Reazer, Savannah Stehlin, Paul Schneider

FANTASTIC FOUR
*½
USA
Yet another Marvel comics cash-in, it's not unlike a pilot episode for a teen-oriented Saturday afternoon TV series. The jokes are cheesy, the romancing more so, and the amount of time spent on the superheroes' nervous dealings with the public eye is in poor judgement. The actors - and hence, the characters - range from bland to functional.
dir: Tim Story
cast: Ioan Gruffud, Jessica Alba, Chris Evans, Michael Chiklis, Julian McMahon, Kerry Washington, Laurie Holden

FEVER PITCH
***
USA
SNL alumnus Jimmy Fallon and the Farrelly Brothers sound like one of the more unlikely teams to come up with a Nick Horny adaptation; yet, this one sort of works. The leads share a solid chemistry and a vast amount of rom-com clichés are eschewed, if not quite enough to make this particular one very memorable.
dir: Bobby Farrelly, Peter Farrelly
cast: Jimmy Fallon, Drew Barrymore, Jason Spevack, Jack Kehler, Scott H. Severance, Jessamy R. Finét, Maureen Keiller, Ione Skye

FLIGHTPLAN
**½
USA
Jodie Foster plays Harrison Ford in this thriller about a child that may or may not have gone missing aboard a passenger jet. The concept would be clever if it wasn't a rip-off of Hitchcock's already-remade "The Lady Vanishes" (1938). It still makes for efficient popcorn fun, though it's a mistake for the script to make earnest, explicit references to 9/11. This way, it's in greater danger of being taken seriously.
dir: Robert Schwentke
cast: Jodie Foster, Peter Sarsgaard, Sean Bean, Kate Beahan, Erika Christensen

FORTY SHADES OF BLUE
***
USA
The year's dramatic Grand Jury Prize winner at Sundance. A low-key, melancholy drama about a lonely Russian bride in Memphis who becomes attracted to her husband's son. Well-acted but not all that resonant. The characters aren't as complex and nuanced as the pace demands them to be. And the whole thing's just a tad too similar to every indie movie ever made.
dir: Ira Sachs
cast: Dina Korzun, Darren E. Burrows, Rip Torn, Paprika Steen

THE 40-YEAR-OLD VIRGIN
***½
USA
About 20 minutes too long - which is a shame, because with some tightening it could have passed for a minor classic. Still, considering it caters - at least in part - to Rob Schneider's target audience, it's a shockingly witty and clever comedy. All of the performances - down to the most obscure cameo - are spot-on, and the leads are particularly lovable.
dir: Judd Apatow
wr: Judd Apatow, Steve Carell
cast: Steve Carell, Catherine Keener, Paul Rudd, Romany Malco, Seth Rogen, Elizabeth Banks, Leslie Mann, Jane Lynch, Gerry Bednob, Shelley Malil

4
***½
Russia
A baffling, confounding, completely frustrating and unshakable experience. It opens with a clever, galvanising conversation between a trio of barflies. They exchange elaborate lies involving genetic research and political conspiracies in a scene that constitutes more than a third of the picture. They leave the bar and the picture takes a dream-like detour into the rural regions of Russia where particularly unorthodox things happen in a settlement principally inhabited by terrifying grannies who make dolls out of chewed bread.
   Even for the more adventurous moviegoer (and that's the only kind of moviegoer who could swallow it up), it will come as a shock. Presumably there's an allegorical dimension to this (it was banned in its home country). It's very consciously avant-garde in a way you don't want to forgive. But it won't leave your head until you do.
dir: Ilya Khrzhanovsky
cast: Marina Vovchenko, Sergei Shnurov, Yuri Laguta

GABRIELLE
***½
Germany/France/Italy
Patrice Chéreau's chilling, ravishingly photographed (by the great Eric Gautier) adaptation of a short story by Joseph Conrad, where unfaithful turn-of-the-century aristocratic wife leaves her husband and, hours later, decides to return to him. It's a marital breakdown of Bergmanesque proportions bursting out amidst an irreproachably, dauntingly elegant environment.
dir: Patrice Chéreau
ph: Eric Gautier
cast: Isabelle Huppert, Pascal Greggory, Claudia Coli, Thierry Hancisse, Chantal Nieuwirth, Thierry Fortineau

GEMINIS
**
Argentina
Low-key melodrama about incest going on in an upper-class Argentinian family. Well-acted and disturbing but not at all interesting or incisive.
dir: Albertina Carri
cast: Christina Banegas, Daniel Fanego, Maria Abadi, Lucas Escariz, Damian Ramonda, Silvia Baylé

GOOD NIGHT, AND GOOD LUCK
***½
USA
A stately, economical account of the battle waged between legendary newsman Edward S. Murrow and legendary villain Joe McCarthy. It's documentary in style - it's presented in a lean, crisp monochrome (it was originally shot in colour, but the colour was drained in post-production, hence the slightly muted contrast), the dialogue is sparse (as is the score), the acting is restrained, the sets are unobtrusive, Murrow's famous monologues are reenacted word for word, and there is a load of archival footage. Of course, emerging auteur George Clooney and his co-writer Grant Heslov take a comparatively easy route in presenting history from the side of the victorious good guys, but they make their picture relevant by the parallels they subtly raise to contemporary media's cowering before the powers-that-be. A major strength is Straithairn's dignified, masterfully understated performance.
dir: George Clooney
wr: George Clooney, Grant Heslov
ph: Robert Elswit
cast: David Straithairn, George Clooney, Robert Downey Jr., Patricia Clarkson, Ray Wise, Frank Langella, Jeff Daniels, Tate Donovan, Tom McCarthy

GRIZZLY MAN
****
USA
A documentary about obsessive grizzly bear preservationist Timothy Treadwell, who spent many months living alone with the bears in their habitat and captured a lot of it on camera. In between playing with the bears, he talks about his fears and failed relationships. In 2003 he was killed by a grizzly along with his girlfriend. In voiceover and occasionally on camera, Herzog continually provides his take on Treadwell's psyche and how it fits within the universe. As he is essentially voicing what would otherwise be the subtext of the picture, this commentary occasionally proves intrusive, to say the least. More often however, there is great insight to his observations, and the picture has a haunting power.
dir: Werner Herzog

HAPPY ENDINGS
***
USA
A dramedy with three intersecting storylines, none of which are terribly plausible. But the actors keep you involved enough so that at least two of them achieve some sort of impact.
   The most affecting one has Lisa Kudrow playing an unhappy woman who as a teenager has given away a child for adoption. Kudrow is almost always a delight to watch, but in Don Roos’ pictures she’s at her most life-like. He trusts her more than other filmmakers and she rewards this trust. Instinctively in touch with her character’s grief, she works off small gestures. This is particularly a blessing since the role could have very easily been played at a soap opera pitch.
   Another plot strand has Maggie Gyllenhaal play a promiscuous, emotionally unstable wanna-be singer almost too well (from time to time, you get the sense she isn’t trying very hard – this could either mean that she’s a natural or that she’s setting up a niche for herself), whereas the weakest one has a gay couple suspecting their lesbian friends of stealing their sperm.
   Intertitles pop up throughout the picture and inform you about the characters’ past, their future and their thought in the present. It’s a clever enough idea, except too many of them read like Creative Writing 101.
wr/dir: Don Roos
cast: Lisa Kudrow, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Steve Coogan, Tom Arnold, Jason Ritter, Laura Dern, David Sutcliffe, Bobby Cannavale, Jesse Bradford

HARD CANDY
***
USA
A glossy, nervy chamber piece about a prospective paedophile and a pubescent avenging angel. Writer Brian Nelson and director David Slade try their nastiest to get you writhing and retching in your seat. You hit the point where you sincerely wonder why you're still watching. It isn't because of the sassy, smarmy dialogue or any relevance the movie may have to child abuse in the real world (it has none). It's because the very young Ellen Page is so distressingly, hypnotically adept at floating between trembling precociousness and maniacal intensity.
dir: David Slade
cast: Patrick Wilson, Ellen Page, Sandra Oh, Jennifer Holmes, Gilbert John

HARRY POTTER AND THE GOBLET OF FIRE
**½
UK/USA
The production values and visual effects seem to improve with each installment, but the films are getting longer and the plots are getting weaker. Or maybe this 4th Harry Potter storyline is every bit as imaginative as the 3rd Harry Potter storyline, but there isn't enough in it to compensate for the been-there-done-that feeling. It takes too long to get from one big showy setpiece to the next, and there's well over an hour's worth of high school melodrama to get sorted out before anything really interesting happens anyway.
   And Harry himself still isn't a terribly interesting character. He's too much of a lowest-common-denominator. Everything about him that could potentially alienate a ticket-buying adolescent has been filtered out in pre-production. In the end there isn't enough left of him to shape a personality.
   There's lively cameos from a few seasoned veterans as well as an excellent piece of villainy by Ralph Fiennes in his post-plane-crash make-up from "The English Patient". The younger actors though have yet to learn how to be charismatic on screen.
dir: Mike Newell
cast: Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, Emma Watson, Robbie Coltrane, Ralph Fiennes, Michael Gambon, Gary Oldman, Miranda Richardson, Alan Rickman, Maggie Smith

HEART, BEATING IN THE DARK
**½
Japan
Director Shunichi Nagasaki originally made an obscure feature of the same title in 1982, and this new version constitutes both its remake and sequel, with inserts from the original thrown in to inflate the picture to a feature running time. It's moderately intriguing for its formal aspects and for its premise of a young couple going on the run after murdering their infant. But the intrigue wears off quickly and what little of it there was is thoroughly wasted.
dir: Shunichi Nagasaki
cast: Noriko Eguchi, Shoichi Honda, Kaori Mizushima, Shigeru Muroi, Takashi Naitô, Taro Suwa

HELL
***
France/Italy/Belgium/Japan
The middle part of the ‘Heaven-Hell-Purgatory’ trilogy conceived but unfortunately not finished by the late, great Krzysztof Kieslowski. The first part was directed, in 2002, in a rather un-Kieslowskian but nevertheless absorbing style by Tom Tykwer. This second part is helmed by Danis Tanovic, whose methods don’t necessarily recall Kieslowski’s as much as they do a generic fusion of anonymous arthouse favourites.
   Working off a script credited to regular Kieslowski-collaborator Krzysztof Piesiewicz, Tanovic hasn’t mustered up the level of concentration necessary to develop a single, strong feature-length narrative. Instead he has opted for the free-for-all approach of three under-developed storylines about three miserable sisters.
   The cast is brimming with reliable veterans at this sort of thing. Emmanuelle Béart finds herself in yet another situation where she has to convince you that despite being perhaps the most fetching woman alive, she would drive a husband to adultery. Karin Viard plays the only sister still willing to pay respects to their gloomy, disabled mother (an unrecognisable but still commanding Carole Bouquet) – the kind of habit that automatically translates into spinsterhood. Marie Gillain is the pretty but irritatingly melodramatic baby of the fractured family, who is infatuated with a married professor and gets to deliver the least subtle of the picture’s many unsubtle metaphors. Jean Rochefort also shows up for a useless cameo.
   Tanovic’s trick to keep you from throwing festival programs at the screen is to have you guessing at what painful event will finally reunite these tortured souls. It’s arthouse melancholia by the numbers – with sweeping camera movements and a ponderously foreboding score – and what ironically makes it compelling is its disguised fetish for soap opera.
dir: Danis Tanovic
wr: Krzysztof Piesiewicz
cast: Emmanuelle Béart, Karin Viard, Marie Gillain, Guillaume Canet, Carole Bouquet, Miki Manojlovic, Jacques Gamblin, Jacques Perrin, Jean Rochefort

HIDE AND SEEK
**
USA
I can't be sure whether De Niro was embarrassed or it was me who was embarrassed for him. In any case, it's uncomfortable viewing for all the wrong reasons.
dir: John Polson
cast: Robert De Niro, Dakota Fanning, Famke Janssen, Dylan Baker, Robert John Burke, Elizabeth Shue

A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE
***½
USA
David Cronenberg screwing with Hollywood conventions almost subliminally. The plot is a pretty familiar one (adapted from a graphic novel) about a seemingly pacifist small town guy with a shady past put in a compromising position with his impossibly perfect family's safety at stake. Except instead of Mel Gibson, you get Viggo Mortensen. Instead of a warm exchange of loving glances between husband and wife in a well-lit kitchen, the soothing, equilibrium-establishing woodwind instruments accompany a 69-er. And instead of no-good hoodlums expiring out of frame, you get to see their faces fall apart in close-up. It's still an action movie and a revenge melodrama, but it's also an art film, a subtle subversion of century-old conventions. However, while in their own right both aspects are adroitly handled, they don't necessarily carry a lasting impact either individually or collectively. Mortensen's family is practically a parody of movie families, so when the picture asks that you invest some emotion into their predicament, it's not possible. Twenty minutes earlier, they were just a joke. You can't relate to a joke.
dir: David Cronenberg
wr: Josh Olson
cast: Viggo Mortensen, Maria Bello, Ed Harris, William Hurt, Ashton Holmes, Heidi Hayes, Stephen McHattie, Greg Bryk, Peter MacNeill

HITCH
*½
USA
A couple of attractive people waste their charisma on a paltry premise about a 'date doctor' who is unlucky in love himself. The picture goes to great lengths to fit in a maximum of candy-coated, pseudo-sassy rom-com clichés. And in the end, the underlying message is that pretty rich girls should settle for overweight accountants whereas pretty rich boys should settle for no less than Eva Mendes.
dir: Andy Tennant
cast: Will Smith, Kevin James, Eva Mendes, Amber Valletta, Adam Arkin, Michael Rapaport

THE HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY
***
USA
Douglas Adams' fans aren't likely to be impressed, but to the uninitiated, this adaptation makes for a decent diversion with an eccentric, pleasing sense of humour (the producers did well to let the Brits handle the majority) - despite the slight tendency to shove the political implications out of the way.
dir: Garth Jennings
cast: Martin Freeman, Sam Rockwell, Zooey Deschanel, Mos Def, Alan Rickman, Bill Nighy, Warwick Davis, Anna Chancellor, John Malkovich
voices of: Stephen Fry, Helen Mirren

HUSTLE & FLOW
***
USA
First-time writer-director Craig Brewer takes a stale formula - 'the no-good hood who done good' - gives it grit and gives it air. He has Terrence Howard playing a pimp who's got a dream (cuz everybody gotta have a dream!) to be a hip hop star, and he pitches him against a Memphis-ghetto backdrop that may or may not be authentic but for the purposes of the story is entirely convincing. He doesn't skip many of the clichés but he zooms through them with such energy that the movie leaves you feeling satisfied for quite some time before the nasty notion kicks in that you've just participated in the glorification of a pimp as a misunderstood genius.
wr/dir: Craig Brewer
cast: Terrence Howard, Taryn Manning, Taraji P. Henson, Anthony Anderson, D.J. Qualls, Ludacris, Paula Jai Parker, Elise Neal, Isaac Hayes

THE ICE HARVEST
***
USA
A cynical noir caper that isn't funny enough to be billed as a comedy (which was reportedly the intention) but as a thriller it's watchable. There is some hardboiled posturing in the script department, but director Harold Ramis keeps things economical and brings it in at 85 minutes, which is a good length for it. The acting is solid and the femme fatale uncommonly sultry.
dir: Harold Ramis
cast: John Cusack, Billy Bob Thornton, Connie Nielsen, Randy Quaid, Oliver Platt, Justine Bentley

IN HER SHOES
**½
USA
Two sisters of contrasting personalities fall out.
Despite a few solid one-liners and an excellent cast, this new-age attempt at an old-style woman's picture ultimately doesn't amount to very much. Every conflict is resolved in a simplistic fashion, often long before it is properly developed.
dir: Curtis Hanson
cast: Cameron Diaz, Toni Collette, Shirley MacLaine, Mark Feuerstein, Candice Azzara, Ken Howard, Francine Beers, Jerry Adler, Brooke Smith, Anson Mount, Norman Lloyd

INSIDE DEEP THROAT
***
USA
An entertaining look at "Deep Throat", its cultural impact and its legacy, alternately funny and tragic. Sadly though, the makers don't delve very deep into the main characters involved in the scandal.
dir: Fenton Bailey, Randy Barbato

THE INTERPRETER
***
USA
An interpreter for the UN overhears plans for an assassination attempt on a controversial African leader.
   It's wonderful to see a big-budget Hollywood thriller aim to be smart, edgy and political. Now we wait for a big-budget Hollywood thriller to really be smart, edgy and political. In the meantime though, there's several expertly staged setpieces here to keep you tense.
dir: Sydney Pollack
cast: Nicole Kidman, Sean Penn, Catherine Keener, Jasper Christensen, Earl Cameron

IRON ISLAND
***
Iran
An allegory involving a community of poverty-stricken people working and living on an abandoned oil tanker in the Persian Gulf. It’s an offbeat, imaginative concept, with plenty of things to ponder.
   The crafting – the photography, in particular – is skillful and polished and there is complexity to director Mohammad Rasoulof’s attitudes towards notions of utopia and the price it comes at. But he isn’t necessarily good at drawing you in to take part in his dialectics. The characters, both individually and en masse, come off as a blank. This likely serves a philosophical purpose, but at the same time doesn’t allow for audience identification and neither does it make for compelling cinema.
wr/dir: Mohammad Rasoulof
cast: Ali Nassirian, Hossen Farzi-Zadeh, Neda Pakdaman, Nemat

THE ISLAND
**½
USA
A small army of cinema fans around the world had been waiting impatiently for a Michael Bay production to bomb at the box office, but why did it have to be the one where he hires decent actors to star? Bay dumbs down and depoliticises the issue of cloning into a silly action plot and even has the nerve to stretch it beyond a two-hour running time. But the crafting is relatively slick and the actors, particularly the increasingly reliable Scarlett Johansson, manage to keep you involved throughout. (Ironically, the producers blamed the picture's financial failure on Johansson's reported lack of star status rather than the shoddy trailers.)
dir: Michael Bay
cast: Ewan McGregor, Scarlett Johansson, Djimon Hounsou, Sean Bean, Steve Buscemi, Michael Clarke Duncan

THE ITALIAN
****½
Russia
The promotional material and the basic plot outline (a Russian 6-year-old escapes from his grimy orphanage in search of his biological mother) would have you expect a heartwarming, Academy-Award-friendly tale of (what else?) the Triumph of the Human Spirit. But it isn't that. This is a dark, searing account of a human spirit that believes itself deprived of something that may never have existed, one that rejects a future of practically guaranteed contentment and opportunity in order to pursue a spectre - a delusion so vividly ingrained that it becomes more real and majestic than the rare glimmer of genuine hope that can present itself before the eyes of a prematurely disillusioned mind. There is an undercurrent of repressed pain that makes the movie almost unbearable to watch - and results in a sense of relief rather than frustration every time it skips into the machinations of a fairy tale. Writer-director Andrei Kravchuk's remarkable sense of the squalor and atrophy of a battered, post-Communist Russia makes the story's impact that much more immediate.
wr/dir: Andrei Kravchuk
ph: Aleksandr Burov
pd: Andrei Rudiev, Vladimir Svetozarov
cast: Kolya Spiridonov, Denis Moiseenko, Sasha Sirotkin, Andrei Yelizarov, Vladimir Shipov, Polina Vorobieva, Olga Shuvalova, Dima Zemlyanko, Mariya Kuznetsova, Nikolai Reutov, Dariya Lesnikova

JARHEAD
***½
USA
An adaptation of Marine Anthony Swofford’s memoirs of his experience in the Gulf War. There is little here along the way of an emotional crux or narrative drive. For a war picture, there’s also a commendable lack of reflective monologues about what might have been if one of the officers stayed home and became a schoolteacher.
It’s actually deceptively well controlled. What you are given to follow is Swofford’s gradual process of disillusionment, beginning from the (far from idealistic) state of mind that leads young men to sign up for the army and how it gets manipulated in bizzare ways when exposed to the human condition at its ugliest. It's a philosophical war picture and the philosophy it best prescribes to is the philosophy of the absurd (a paperback copy of Camus' "The Stranger" is prominently flashed a couple times in the opening sequences).
Director Sam Mendes’ other overarching objective is to show you the demythified version of what it feels like to go through war. The Gulf War is presented as a chaos, as the mess it was, and in this aspect, the picture is vivid and absorbing. It’s anti-recruitment propaganda at its most potent.
Where Mendes is less successful is in the final reels when he tries in retrospect to hurriedly establish war as a psychological time bomb. That’s a whole other movie that needs two hours of its own.
Where the actors are concerned, as Swofford, Jake Gyllenhaal shows off a fine torso and turns in a quietly studied, layered performance. As his sergeant, Jamie Foxx does more acting (much better) than he ever did in "Ray" (2004). Everybody else in the large cast of mostly male, mostly new-and-upcoming stars is also solid. 
dir: Sam Mendes
wr: William Broyles, Jr.
ph: Roger Deakins
cast: Jake Gyllenhaal, Peter Sarsgaard, Jamie Foxx, Jacob Vargas, Chris Cooper, Dennis Haysbert, Katherine Randolph

JUNEBUG
****
USA
A British art dealer travels from Chicago to North Carolina to meet a new talent as well as her in-laws.
   This warm-hearted indie could have easily suffocated under its own quirk, but the quirk just serves as an entry point into some oddly touching drama, very observant of family dynamics and small town mentality. The acting is layered, unaffected and rather remarkable.
dir: Phil Morrison
wr: Angus MacLachlan
cast: Embeth Davidtz, Alessandro Nivola, Amy Adams, Celia Weston, Scott Wilson, Ben McKenzie, Frank Hoyt Taylor, Joanne Pankow

JUST LIKE HEAVEN
*½
USA
Another flossy step in Reese Witherspoon’s campaign to rule the chick flick market. In this one, she improbably finds herself as a workaholic doctor so detached from life’s pleasures that she doesn’t even notice when a motor accident renders her comatose and she’s left behind as a ghost to haunt her impeccably decorated apartment. As fate would have it however, grieving widower Mark Ruffalo moves in and he’s the only person she’s able to communicate with. They have cute little arguments about using coasters and trashcans, then things get slimy when it turns out that Witherspoon’s sister has the option to take her off life support, thus killing both her body and her spirit. In the end the message is that even smart scientists have no business promoting euthanasia because they don’t realise that comatose people are each tied to a perky spirit of their own, who has as much right to life as a living, breathing Reese Witherspoon. (Also, when it comes to curing a coma, science is nothing compared to a kiss from “the one”.)
dir: Mark Waters
cast: Reese Witherspoon, Mark Ruffalo, Donal Logue, Dina Spybey, Ben Shenkman, Jon Heder

KICKING AND SCREAMING
**
USA
A juvenile vehicle for Will Ferrell where he is kept surprisingly restrained for the most part. This is a silly idea - the picture only feels alive in the scenes where he is let loose (by a dangerous caffeine addiction, no less). He plays an inept soccer coach to his son's junior league soccer team. It's the kind of movie that climaxes during the boys' final game and there's slow motion, soaring violins and a win against the odds involved. Finally, there's also an old-fashioned moral that's hammered for a long time after the movie should have ended.
dir: Jesse Dylan
cast: Will Ferrell, Robert Duvall, Mike Ditka, Kate Walsh, Musetta Vander, Josh Hutcherson, Dylan McLaughlin

KILOMÈTRE ZÉRO
**½
France/Iraq/Finland
An awkward farce/tragedy that charts a couple of ineffectual Kurdistani's plight during the Iraq-Iran war in the 1980s. It's conspicuous amid the glut of (generally superior) absurdist middle-Eastern wartime movies however, in that the US Army force is positioned as the genuine liberator.
wr/dir: Hiner Saleem
cast: Nazmi Kirik, Eyam Ekrem, Belcim Bilgin, Ehmed Qeladizeni, Nezar Selami

KING AND THE CLOWN
**
South Korea
Up until Bong Joon-ho's The Host the following year, this historical melodrama was South Korea's highest-grossing film of all time as well as the country's official submission to the Academy's Best Foreign Film category. But you wouldn't believe it if you saw the movie, since a) it essentially revolves around a love triangle between three men; and b) it's a stodgy soap opera.
dir: Lee Jun-ik
cast: Kam Woo-seong, Jeong Jin-yeong, Lee Jun-gi, Kang Sung-yeon, Jang Hang-seon, Yu Hae-jin, Jeong Seok-yong, Lee Seung-hun

KING KONG
***
USA
"King Kong" (1933) is Peter Jackson's favourite film, so he has decided to remake it.
   The picture is at its worst when it summons up comparisons to Joseph Conrad's work, proclaiming itself as "more than an adventure" and when Jack Black is given dialogue (in fact, aside from Watts and her gutsy, wide-eyed conviction, all of the actors are either horribly miscast or given misconceived parts to work with). It works best when it agrees to deliver in terms of good old-fashioned shallow spectacle, when chunks of dinosaurs get mashed and when monsters have heads come out from what you thought were their mouths.
   After a bloated first hour, it improves generally as it goes along and people are required to speak less often and Jackson even develops a love story between Ann Darrow and Kong that becomes freakishly touching. But is meditation on the potential for love between man and ape ultimately enough to justify a 187-minute remake of an unsurpassable 100-minute classic?
dir: Peter Jackson
ph: Andrew Lesnie, Derek Whipple
m: James Newton Howard
cast: Naomi Watts, Jack Black, Adrien Brody, Thomas Kretschmann, Colin Hanks, Andy Serkis, Evan Parke, Jamie Bell, Lobo Chan

KINGDOM OF HEAVEN
**
USA
A bit like "Gladiator" pushed back to the Crusades. The politics are lazy, the battle scenes - uninspired, and the lead is profoundly unexciting to watch.
dir: Ridley Scott
cast: Orlando Bloom, Eva Green, Jeremy Irons, Brendan Gleeson, Marton Csokas, Liam Neeson, David Thewlis

KISS KISS, BANG BANG
****
USA
Technically you could complain about all the po-mo self-consciousness and the last minute attempt to pretend this noir send-up/homage is about something relevant to the world. But then you'd miss out on a whole lot of fun - this movie is so in love with movies, you can't help but go along with its self-conscious, self-deprecating sense of humour. It's clever, witty and biting, and it unfolds in chapters titled after Raymond Chandler novels. And Robert Downey Jr. and Val Kilmer make a great team.
wr/dir: Shane Black
cast: Robert Downey Jr., Val Kilmer, Michelle Monaghan, Corbin Bernsen, Dash Mihok, Larry Miller, Rockmond Dunbar, Shannyn Sossamon, Angela Lindvall

LEMMING
***½
France
A promising young engineer and his loving wife are expecting his boss for dinner. The boss shows up late and visibly at odds with his wife, who refuses to take off her shades, causes a scene and ensures they leave very quickly. But she finds her way back into the young couple's home and creates havoc.
   For a solid half hour, director Dominik Moll appears to be interested in raising issues to do with marriage in the corporate world as much as he is in crafting an offbeat thriller. As the unhinged boss's wife, Charlotte Rampling is in full-fledged nightmare-diva mode and very good at it. But she dies early on.
   The characters start having strange visions and behaving inexplicably. The picture takes on a supernatural dimension and becomes something altogether different to what you expected. What it becomes is still quite involving. Moll knows when to fall back on his macabre sense of wit and he's skilled at building and keeping up the tension (even if he doesn't have the good sense to wrap things up in less than two hours). As a piece of escapism, the picture is technically satisfying. But you end up mildly disappointed all the same. The first act led you to expect something fresher and a little more relevant to the world.
dir: Dominik Moll
wr: Dominik Moll, Gilles Marchand
cast: Laurent Lucas, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Charlotte Rampling, André Dussollier, Jacques Bonnaffé

LINDA LINDA LINDA
***
Japan
Don't get scared off by the quirk-factor behind the concept of a bunch of Japanese schoolgirls having to learn how to play a particular cheesy (and insanely catchy) pop song before the school's big festival. It's quite a sweet little movie, with at least one very charming performance - from Bae Du-na as the Korean exchange student and last-minute lead vocalist.
dir: Nobuhiro Yamashita
cast: Bae Du-na, Aki Maeda, Yu Kashii, Shiori Sekine, Takayo Mimura, Shione Yukawa, Yuko Yamazaki

LITTLE FISH
**½
Australia
An ex-heroin-addict is trying to make good.
   All of the characters are so haunted by a tragic past that not much drama gets to develop in the present tense. The whole thing is very capably crafted and the acting - with the possible exception of the nervy, mannered lead - is excellent even, but it never feels like there's a lot happening behind it.
dir: Rowan Woods
cast: Cate Blanchett, Sam Neill, Hugo Weaving, Dustin Nguyen, Martin Henderson, Noni Hazlehurst, Lisa McCune

A LITTLE TRIP TO HEAVEN
**½
Iceland/USA
For his first American feature, talented but overly ambitious Icelandic filmmaker Baltasar Kormákur attempts a contemporary noir set in a wintry isolated town in Minnesota, no less. The aim is to squeeze in as many plot twists as possible, without much of an effort to tie them down to any internal logic.
dir: Baltasar Kormákur
cast: Forest Whitaker, Julia Stiles, Jeremy Renner, Peter Coyote, Philip Jackson, Anne Reid

LONESOME JIM
***
USA
With his third directorial effort, Steve Buscemi doesn’t necessarily bring anything new to the world - it’s exactly the type of quirky sadsack indie you’d expect to see shortlisted at Sundance. But it’s too easy-going and sweet-natured to be disliked.
   Casey Affleck plays a depressed wanna-be writer who’s gone broke in Manhattan and has to move back to live with his parents in his sleepy mid-Western hometown. He says things like “I came here to have a nervous breakdown” without a trace of sarcasm and there’s a gently melancholic guitar-and-harmonica score to make sure you understand that he’s sad. With a less likable cast, the whole thing would have very likely been insufferable.
dir: Steve Buscemi
cast: Casey Affleck, Liv Tyler, Mary Kay Place, Seymour Cassel, Kevin Corrigan, Jack Rovello, Rachel Strouse, Sarah Strouse, Mark Boone Junior

THE LONGEST YARD
*
USA
If you think prison is cool and the biggest problem in life are fags and bitches, you'll love this. If on the other hand you're not a 14-year-old boy, you won't be able to track down a decent joke in here.
   In the meantime, of course, it earned shitloads, so there'll be more where this came from.
dir: Peter Segal
cast: Adam Sandler, Chris Rock, Burt Reynolds, Nelly, James Cromwell, William Fichtner, Steve Austin

LOOK BOTH WAYS
***
Australia
The lives of a disparate group of people intersect when a man dies in a freak train accident.
  A quirky-melancholic ensemble piece in the "Short Cuts" vein, though more modest and grounded than most similar rip-offs. Some of the monologues are awkward and the indie-adult-alternative tracks on the soundtrack have to do too much of the work, but Watt displays quite a bit of spirit and imagination and a lot of the performances are wonderful.
wr/dir: Sarah Watt
cast: William McInnes, Justine Clark, Anthony Hayes, Lisa Flanagan, Andrew S. Gilbert, Daniella Farinacci, Maggie Dence, Edwin Hodgeman, Andreas Sobik, Sacha Horler

LORD OF WAR
***
USA
A slick, entertaining if confused message picture about an arms dealer. Writer-director Andrew Niccol wants to be cool and Funny! but also deep and Serious. He wants to have all the fun you can have with big shiny guns and he wants to enlighten you on how you can't have any fun with big shiny guns.
wr/dir: Andrew Niccol
cast: Nicolas Cage, Ethan Hawke, Ian Holm, Jared Leto, Bridget Moynahan, Eamonn Walker, Sammi Rotibi

LOST AND FOUND
***½
Bosnia-Herzegovina/Serbia & Montenegro/Bulgaria/Estonia/Germany/
Hungary/Romania
An omnibus of mostly warm, richly textured films by emerging Eastern European filmmakers. The highlights are a gentle black Romanian comedy from soon-to-be-Palme-d'or-winner Cristian Mungiu, and the Serbian chapter, featuring the great Milena Dravic who used to pop up a fair bit in the great Dušan Makavejev's films of the 60s and 70s.
dir: Mait Laas, Nadejda Koseva, Cristian Mungiu, Jasmila Zbanic, Kornél Mundruczó, Stefan Arsenijevic
cast: Anna Brouquet, Krassimir Dokov, Ana Ularu, Dan Burgelea, Valentin Popescu, Dunja Obradovic, Ines Cule, Zsolt Trill, Orsolya Tóth, Milena Dravic, Raivoj Knezevic, Nikola Simic, Fedja Stojanovic

MAD HOT BALLROOM
***½
USA
There probably isn't a lot that is productive about this documentary on NYC public school dance competitions. But it's great fun. By the time your favourite team reaches the finals, you well and truly find yourself tensing up. The kids' - and their teachers' - enthusiasm is infectious.
dir: Marilyn Agrelo

MADAGASCAR
**
USA
A contrived CGI flick, with strained humour and characters far too closely patterned after the voice actors' tired (yet still somehow marketable) personas.
dir: Eric Darnell, Tom McGrath
voices of: Ben Stiller, Chris Rock, David Schwimmer, Jada Pinkett Smith, Cedric the Entertainer, Andy Richter

MARCH OF THE PENGUINS
***
USA
A perfectly pleasant documentary on the mass mating rituals of Antarctica’s Emperor penguin. Though it is about as suited to cinema distribution as it is to a Sunday evening TV timeslot, the Academy deemed it fitting to award it with its very own stamp of mediocrity.
   Morgan Freeman does the voiceover very much in earnest, Biblical mode. Roughly every four minutes, he forebodes: “Not all of them will survive.”
dir: Luc Jacquet

MARY
**½
Italy/France/USA
Another one of Abel Ferrara's grandstanding, hollow meditations on Catholic guilt, this one concerns an egomaniac who has made a film about Jesus, a journalist who co-ordinates a primetime talk show about Jesus and an actress who takes her role of Mary Magdalene a tad too personally. It's difficult to discern whether Ferrara's aim is to castigate or justify other people's self-absorption. In either case it's a dubious venture insofar as Ferrara still appears thoroughly ignorant of his own.
dir: Abel Ferrara
cast: Julitte Binoche, Forest Whitaker, Matthew Modine, Heather Graham, Marion Cotillard, Stefania Rocca

MASSACRE
**½
Germany/Lebanon
A documentary consisting of interviews with six of the mass murderers from Sabra and Shatilla.
It's obviously confronting and deeply disturbing subject matter, but the main problem here is that the questions asked come up with little insight to warrant exposure to humanity at its ugliest and most repugnant. On top of that, the crafting is exceptionally shoddy and only adds to the discomfort.
dir: Monika Borgmann, Nina Menkes, Lokman Slim, Hermann Theissen

MATCH POINT
***½
USA
Despite some hype, this dark little romantic thriller isn't the second coming of Annie Hall. But it is Woody Allen's first really solid picture in a while. The plot is that old dependable one about the social climber who has to choose between a comfortable marriage to a pretty but plain rich girl and the blonde bombshell with whom he's having an affair.
   The rich people in this movie do things like hunting for sport, taking tennis lessons and occupying a balcony at the opera. All of it seems awfully familiar but also somehow new. You rarely see these kinds of things in a contemporary setting anymore - the movies will have you believe a class system no longer exists - and it's even more rare for them to feel natural.
   The characters are so sharply drawn that everything they do, and a lot of what they do rarely happens outside of B-films, also feels natural. The entire cast is commendable, but Scarlett Johansson shows particular skill in tackling a stereotype - she's the femme fatale - the same way she would a flesh-and-blood-based character.
wr/dir: Woody Allen
cast: Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, Scarlett Johansson, Emily Mortimer, Matthew Goode, Brian Cox, Penelope Wilton

ME AND YOU AND EVERYONE WE KNOW
****½
USA
A new age screwball comedy that tells of, among other people, the nervous romancing between a performance artist and a newly single father of two. Yes, it's a quirky arthouse movie, but this one is really about things. First-time writer-director Miranda July (a performance artist herself) explores notions of love and sexuality in the contemporary world, where children want to be adults, and adults want to be children. She pulls it off with a faux naivete, which comes off as endearing rather than unnerving. This is in part because of her charming, self-effacing lead performance. And she draws similarly charming performances from her entire cast, which is largely made up of children.
wr/dir: Miranda July
ph: Chuy Chávez
m: Mike Andrews
cast: Miranda July, John Hawkes, Miles Thompson, Brandon Ratcliff, Carlie Westerman, Hector Elias, Brad William Henke, Natasha Slayton, Tracy Wright

MEMOIRS OF A GEISHA
**
USA
This adaptation of Arthur Golden’s bestselling novel caters to the housewife who always dreamed of seeing Japan but didn’t want to deal with the Japanese. It’s an arrogant American’s conception of Japan: turn any corner and you come across a plastic-looking cherry blossom; all the foreigners speak in broken English; and the Chinese and Japanese are content to be interchanged for one another.
   As the heroine, Zhang Ziyi looks exceptionally pretty but sounds anaemic. As her wise instructor, Michelle Yeoh seems drained of character, whereas Gong Li, as her witch-like tormentor, has it in excess.
dir: Rob Marshall
cast: Zhang Ziyi, Michelle Yeoh, Gong Li, Ken Watanabe, Koji Yakusho, Mako

MR. AND MRS. SMITH
***
USA
A bored suburban couple discover they work as assassins for rivaling organizations.
They probably should have hired someone from Asia to direct the action sequences, but the film still works very well as light, witty entertainment - which is all you should ever want it to be.
dir: Doug Liman
cast: Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, Vince Vaughn, Kerry Washington, Adam Brody

MRS. HENDERSON PRESENTS
***½
UK
An eccentric widow opens a theatre hall with a nude revue in London just before WWII.
Primarily a reminder of what a treasure Judi Dench is. As such, it isn't technically necessary, but it's perfectly enjoyable. The production numbers are handled with wit and style.
dir: Stephen Frears
wr: Martin Sherman
ph: Andrew Dunn
m: George Fenton
cast: Judi Dench, Bob Hoskins, Kelly Reilly, Will Young, Christopher Guest, Thelma Barlow

MONSTER-IN-LAW
**½
USA
For her big-screen comeback Jane Fonda (after a fifteen-year absence) chose to channel the Bette Davis school of restraint for a romantic comedy 'from the makers of Legally Blonde' . She spends the picture hovering somewhere in the middle between funny and irritating, but the romantic leads are so wooden that you tend to find your spirits raise a little every time she makes an entry. She's entertaining by default.
dir: Rob Luketic
cast: Jennifer Lopez, Jane Fonda, Michael Vartan, Wanda Sykes, Adam Scott, Will Arnett, Annie Parisse

MUNICH
***
USA
A half-political thriller, half-philosophical drama about a team of Israeli agents sent to kill off the 11 people who organised the terrorist attack in Munich in 1972. Director Spielberg and writers Tony Kushner and Eric Roth show great ambition here: to address the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from a neutral, ambiguous standpoint, within a big-budget Hollywood context. They never pull off the fact-based urgency they strive for - for one, there's too many clashing, fluid accents - but for a solid two hours, the picture is absorbing. There's mild could-killing-ever-be-justified contemplation mixed in with some good old-fashioned suspense. But the picture falters around the two-hour mark when the portrayal of the central protagonist requires more along the way of complexity than the wrinkled eyebrows and perpetually concerned look that Eric Bana brings to the table. There are clunky bits of soul searching throughout the picture - every time the camera enters Bana's head, it's a bad idea - but those towards the end are misguided with a greater intensity. A sex scene which forms the emotional climax is in shockingly poor judgment.
dir: Steven Spielberg
wr: Martin Sherman
ph: Janusz Kaminski
ed: Michael Kahn
m: John Williams
cast: Eric Bana, Daniel Craig, Geoffrey Rush, Ciaran Hinds, Mathieu Kassovitz, Hanns Zischler, Ayelet July Zurer, Gila Almagor, Michael Lonsdale, Mathieu Amalric, Moritz Bleibtreu, Marie-Josee Croze, Lynn Cohen, Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi, Yvan Attal

MURDERBALL
***½
USA
One of the more remarkable things about this documentary on quad rugby is how it's not entirely about establishing the players as noble superhuman survivors. These people's resilience and courage is self-evident, there is no need for slow-motion, violins and inspirational monologues. Rubin and Shapiro understand this and spend just as much time covering the players' flaws and failings as they do their overcoming of obstacles.
dir: Henry Alex Rubin, Dana Adam Shapiro

MUTUAL APPRECIATION
**
USA
Your fondness (and some people's is considerable) for Andrew Bujalski's second malnourished indie feature may depend on your fondness of the arty, aggressively plain-looking hipster's post-grad lifestyle traditionally founded as it is on stretched-out awkwardness, insecurity and navel-gazing.
wr/dir: Andrew Bujalski
cast: Justin Rice, Rachel Clift, Andrew Bujalski, Seung-Min Lee, Pamela Corkey, Kevin Micka, Ralph Tyler, Peter Pentz, Bill Morrison

THE NEW WORLD
*****
USA
Terrence Malick has always had his serene, impressionistic way of going about things, but in his take on that often-mythologised first encounter of European and Native American cultures, he takes his style to a kind of extreme.
   During the opening reel, you may be wondering whether you’re watching the movie or just its trailer. He ignores every rule and technique that prizes spatial continuity. Every new image seems to bear only an arbitrary link to the preceding one – it seems to exist in and of itself. As a result, even time appears to take on its own entity.
   All of these things have been done before, both in American cinema and particularly in European avant-garde cinema, but never in this way. No other picture – at least none where the narrative plays a key role - has followed this pattern for its entire feature length. It feels jarring at first – the way you’re thrown into a busy situation, on the face of it without anything tangible to hold onto. But in time the rhythm grows entrancing. You begin to experience every sound, every colour and every texture on an unusually direct, intimate level. An element of revelation may very well come over you as the movie reaches its closing, painfully gorgeous London sequences.
   And the young Q’Orianka Kilcher, who plays Pocahontas, is a real find. You’re arrested by every emotion that registers across her soft, vulnerable face, and she doesn’t even appear to be conscious of projecting it.
wr/dir: Terrence Malick
ph: Emannuel Lubezki
ed: Richard Chew, Hank Corwin, Saar Klein, Mark Yoshikawa
m: James Horner
cast: Q'Orianka Kilcher, Colin Farrell, Christian Bale, Christopher Plummer, August Schellenberg, Wes Studi, David Thewlis, Yorick van Wageningen, Noah Taylor, Jonathan Pryce

THE PACIFIER
*½
USA
Vin Diesel's "Kindergarten Cop". Not really necessary.
dir: Adam Shankman
cast: Vin Diesel, Lauren Graham, Faith Ford, Carol Kane, Brad Garrett

PARADISE NOW
***½
France/Germany/Netherlands/Israel
Even as it settles into a familiar suspense genre format, this look into the final hours of a pair of suicide bombers remains engrossing and never descends into moralising, sensationalising or anything cheap.
dir: Hany Abu-Assad
cast: Kais Nashef, Ali Suliman, Lubna Azabal, Amer Hlehel, Hiam Abbass

PEACOCK
****
China
Winner of the Silver Bear at Berlin, this dramedy portrays 10 years in the life of a working-class family in 1970s China. It unfolds in three sub-sections, each revolving around one of the three offspring: the stubborn daughter, the mentally handicapped older brother and the meek, resilient younger brother. What's wonderful about this picture is that neither of these three is the image of adorable blank-faced innocence that teenage characters in foreign small-scale family dramas tend to be. Each of them is flawed and frustrated like a flesh-and-blood human being. Not one of them begs for your sympathy and neither does first-time director Gu Changwei. He has a healthy sense of humour. He throws in a kick from left field every time the picture gets a chance to devolve into the kind of hollow, sterilised lyricism that tends to come with this kind of subject matter.
dir: Gu Changwei
wr: Li Qiang
ph: Yang Shu
m: Dou Peng
cast: Zhang Jingchu, Feng Li, Lu Yulai, Huang Meiying, Zhao Yiwei, Lei Liu, Wang Lan

THE PIPELINE NEXT DOOR
**½
France
A crude if moderately engaging no-budget documentary, covering the outrage felt by Georgian farmers when an international oil pipeline is set to cross through their village. It's an enlightening decision on director Nino Kirtadze's part not to position either the villagers or the oil execs as the heroes or villains, but the insight he manages to plumb from a situation so rich in potential is limited.
dir: Nino Kirtadze

THE PRESIDENT'S LAST BANG
**½
South Korea
A pretty uninventive account of the assassination of South Korean pseudo-dictator Park Chun-hee. There's a bit of very black humour which, to some people, has qualified it as a political satire.
wr/dir: Im Sang-soo
cast: Song Jae-ho, Han Suk-kyu, Baek Yun-shik, Jeong Won-jung, Jo Sang-geon, Kim Sang-ho, Kwun Byung-gil, Lee Jae-gu

PRETTY PERSUASION
**½
USA
A Beverly Hills high school girl accuses her teacher of sexual harassment.
The writer and the director are too nervous to let their jokes build or settle - the principle is cram one in any way you can. They also can't make up their mind whether they want to be witty or tasteless so they just settle for obnoxious and eager to shock. And then in the final reel they pretend the movie is relevant to life. Evan Rachel Wood however, exudes exactly the right kind of semi-subdued menace, and holds your interest - for better or worse.
dir: Marcos Siega
cast: Evan Rachel Wood, Ron Livingston, James Woods, Jane Krakowski, Elisabeth Harnois, Selma Blair, Stark Sands, Danny Comden, Jaime King, Josh Zuckerman

PRIDE AND PREJUDICE
***
UK
Today you need a very strong supporting argument to justify adapting Jane Austen, since Jane Austen’s entire output has had all its life adapted out of it. First-time director Joe Wright’s excuse is that he seeks to modernise and grittify Austen. He wants to reproduce her beloved English countryside as he believes it really was, with a focus on rain-soaked gowns and goose-filled dirt roads. He comes up with something altogether removed from what you tend to associate with Jane Austen.
   The story of Elizabeth Bennett and Mr. Darcy, played here by Keira Knightley and Matthew Macfadyen (both of them much nearer the character’s true age than is traditional), becomes something like a Brontefied version of a high school romance. Knightley regularly retreats to windy places to look longing and horny. Macfadyen gets to emerge from foggy moors looking all smouldering and open-shirted (Heathcliff comes to mind every time). The photography is coarse and moody, with deliberately awkward framing and hand-held camerawork to bring in a sense of immediacy, as well as natural-looking light sources and thick colours to bring out a sense of burdening sensuality. The score is constantly heaving and hinting at big emotions being repressed.
   The approach is indeed novel. It holds your attention far more effectively than the frigid, outmoded BBC-drama aesthetic. Wright deserves an A for effort. But his effort is misguided. His notion of making Austen look more ‘now’ and down-and-dirty also means draining Austen of all her cultured bite and playfulness. And these things are the strongest elements of her work. Without them, her characters are basically blathering fools and giggly airheads (and the giggling is shrill enough to suffocate at least the first half-hour). In this movie, even though Knightley is the least strained she’s ever been on-screen, Austen’s famously headstrong heroine is rendered anaemic. She’s agreeable enough, but in a bland way. She has none of the wit and spirit that used to be the best thing about Elizabeth Bennett.
dir: Joe Wright
wr: Deborah Moggach
ph: Roman Osin
m: Dario Marianelli
cast: Keira Knightley, Matthew Macfadyen, Donald Sutherland, Brenda Blethyn, Judi Dench, Rosamund Pike, Jena Malone, Kelly Reilly

PRIME
USA
**
A sitcom about an insecure 30-something woman who unwittingly ends up dating her conservative Jewish therapist’s 20-something son. Uma Thurman plays the patient, with Meryl Streep as her therapist. Thurman gushes and gets misty-eyed, then waits for Streep to purse her lips and contort her eyebrows. They establish a kind of rapport based on a familiarity not with each other but with the clichés they’re playing. Their scenes may not have much spark, but they do carry a sense of efficiency. As such, they’re endurable.
   On the other hand, there’s Bryan Greenberg. He plays the child of a fussy, twitchy therapist, who has still somehow managed to grow up into a wholesome teen idol. He is also an aspiring young artist – the kind who has the power to make reportedly credible people mistake his bad paintings for good paintings. As written, his role is already impossible to pull off. But of all the candidates toned, tanned and old enough to take on the role, Greenberg would have been maybe among the three or four most wooden. Every time he speaks, the picture dies a little.
wr/dir: Ben Younger
cast: Uma Thurman, Meryl Streep, Bryan Greenberg, Jon Abrahams, Zak Orth

PRINCESS RACCOON
***
Japan
A banished prince falls in love with a raccoon princess disguised as a human.
A strange, initially striking, then increasingly tedious operetta. The vast majority of it is filmed on a sound stage with occasional bits of location footage spliced in without concern for continuity. Its charms include crude animation, cheap blue-screen effects, hordes of people who can't dance dancing, a human toilet and a middle-aged sorceress hip-hopping.
wr/dir: Seijun Suzuki
cast: Zhang Ziyi, Jô Odagiri, Hiroko Yakushimaru, Mikijiro Hira, Taro Yamamoto, Gentaro Takahashi, Saori Yuki

THE PRODUCERS
***
USA
As your grandmother knows by now, before this was a movie musical, it was a stage musical, and before that, a movie non-musical. This version seems faithful to both its predecessors; it's just as flawed and it's just as enjoyable. The ratio of missed opportunities and jokes that hit the target has survived the recycling pretty much intact. The two stars are still projecting for the cheap seats at the back, certain scenes drag out too long, and others are rushed. But, if anything, "Springtime for Hitler" is even funnier than it was originally, more notes are successfully hit than in most recent musicals, and you leave the theatre smiling, or at the very least, smirking.
dir: Susan Stroman
wr: Mel Brooks, Thomas Meehan
cast: Nathan Lane, Matthew Broderick, Uma Thurman, Will Ferrell, Gary Beach, Roger Bart

THE PROPOSITION
**
Australia
A bloated, violent, deeply pretentious Aussie Western about a trio of bandit brothers in the Outback towards the end of the 19th Century, and an officer of the law who can't quite figure out how to deal with them even after he imprisons a couple.
   Nick Cave has written the ponderous screenplay seemingly with the express intent to elegise something but without much concern about what exactly in it warrants elegising. The script's several incongruous elements appear to have gone by unchecked based on Cave's forbidding indie rock star reputation. The characters make decisions which are never rendered plausible. The picture is as much about the self-serving, self-consciously post-modern score (which Cave has also provided) as it is about anything to do with humanity.
   The performances vary from the professional (Ray Winstone and Emily Watson as the sheriff and his wife) to the mannered (Guy Pearce as the morally ambiguous brother, David Wenham as a good old-fashioned, sneering British villain)
dir: John Hillcoat
wr/m: Nick Cave
cast: Guy Pearce, Ray Winstone, Emily Watson, Danny Huston, John Hurt, David Wenham, Tom Budge, Richard Wilson

PUNK: ATTITUDE
**½
USA
A history of the punk movement starting from its roots with Velvet Underground in the late 60s al the way through to present times - or at least very close, the picture was finished just before Limp Bizkit were certified as has-beens. It's info-packed, but too much of it is made up of talking heads name-dropping.
wr/dir: Don Letts

RED EYE
***
USA
A thriller so preposterous and contrived that you're never in any danger of taking it seriously and cheap thrills are all you could possibly expect. On that level it delivers. It's tight, it's well-paced and it knows when to end.
dir: Wes Craven
cast: Rachel McAdams, Cillian Murphy, Brian Cox, Jayma Mays, Jack Scalia

RING OF FIRE: THE EMILE GRIFFITH STORY
***
USA
There is a lot to absorb and equally as much that's missing in this documentary of the notorious six-time world welterweight champion, one of whose opponents died as a result of injuries sustained in the ring. Berger and Klores don't delve very deeply into Griffith's responsibility for the death of Benny "The Kid" Paret, and they skirt around the issue of his homosexuality on the way to a maudlin cop-out of an ending.
dir: Ron Berger, Don Klores

RIZE
***
USA
A documentary by famed photographer Dave LaChappelle covering the rise of the underground dance movement known as clowning, or krumping - it's a bit like an extreme-sports version of hip hop dancing.
   This is the kind of documentary that emphasises the movement's roots in South Central's oppressed youth and doesn't mention its popularisation via Christina Aguilera's "Dirrrty" video clip (though Aguilera's "Soar" does, embarrassingly enough, make it onto the soundtrack). It's rambling, repetitive and unstructured but the dance scenes - of which there's plenty - are hypnotic. You may be skeptical of the subjects' eagerness to make big claims, but you do come out with an appreciation for their art.
dir: Dave LaChappelle

ROBOTS
**
USA
It feels so long now since cartoon features lost their sense of imagination and wonder that something this airless and market-tested can pass for well-animated and moderately enjoyable. There's a few decent one-liners amid the aggressive merchandising.
dir: Chris Wedge
voices of: Ewan McGregor, Robin Williams, Halle Berry, Jim Broadbent, Terry Bradshaw, Mel Brooks, Greg Kinnear, Amanda Bynes, Drew Carey, Jennifer Coolidge

RUMOR HAS IT
**
USA
An oddly bitter chick flick – the message is that if you can’t find a true, romantic love, you might as well marry your best friend.
   Jennifer Aniston plays an obituaries writer who finds out her family was the inspiration for “The Graduate”. Her mother has since died (why must every romantic comedy heroine be an orphan?), but her grandmother, the original Mrs. Robinson, is still around and played by Shirley MacLaine, who does a rather one-note imitation of Anne Bancroft. Kevin Costner plays the aged Benjamin Braddock as a corporate sleazebag, but with heart. Overripe one-liners are liberally exchanged.
   It takes special skill to pull off neurotic comedy. The material isn’t at all suited to Rob Reiner’s sanitising touch. Aniston tries hard to defeat her wholesome image, but she never stops to consider what she would have to offer in lieu of it.
dir: Rob Reiner
cast: Jennifer Aniston, Kevin Costner, Mark Ruffalo, Shirley MacLaine, Richard Jenkins, Mena Suvari

SAHARA
**½
USA
A light, bright, old-fashioned adventure about a pair of treasure hunting Americans saving the world in an exotic setting. The action setpieces are perfectly well handled and the whole thing is very comfortably forgotten.
dir: Breck Eisner
cast: Matthew McConaughey, Penélope Cruz, Steve Zahn, Delroy Lindo, William H. Macy, Rainn Wilson

SARAH SILVERMAN: JESUS IS MAGIC
***½
USA
"I was raped by a doctor... which is, you know, so bittersweet for a Jewish girl." A recording of Sarah Silverman's genius stand-up routine interspersed with backstage diva antics and production numbers. The backstage stuff doesn't quite come off, though the songs are hysterical and the stand-up comedy of the highest, filthiest demented order: "When God gives you AIDS - and God does give you AIDS, by the way - make lemonAIDS."
dir: Liam Lynch
cast: Sarah Silverman

SHANGHAI DREAMS
***
China
In the late 1960s, a poor factory worker in the southern Cinese hinterlands dreams of returning his family to their native Shanghai, while his daughter looks for love locally.
A slow-burning family drama with a strong sense of time and place.
wr/dir: Wang Xiaoshuai
ph: Wu Di
cast: Gao Yuanyuan, Yan Anlian, Wang Xueyang, Bin Li

SERENITY
**½
USA
A big-screen sequel to a short-lived Joss Whedon TV series. It concerns a psychic teenage girl on board a freedom-fighting spaceship, who is wanted by the evil force who indoctrinate and rule the universe. It's involved, mildly clever sci-fi, but you never get rid of the feeling that you could be vacuuming while watching it. Whedon has a way of dressing up clichés with sassier clichés: "Captain, I have to say that I am impressed that you could make it this far... in that outfit." The visuals are glossy and plastic like those in a Stargate episode.
wr/dir: Joss Whedon
cast: Nathan Fillion, Gina Torres, Alan Tudyk, Morena Baccarin, Adam Baldwin, Jewel State, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Sean Maher, Summer Glau, Michael Hitchcock

SHAPE OF THE MOON
***
Netherlands
A documentary charting one Christian family's three generations in contemporary Indonesia.
Ambitious in scope and fascinating, even if it is heavy-going in parts.
dir: Leonard Retel Helmrich

SIN CITY
***½
USA
Three hyper-violent stories set in a lawless town, insanely faithful to the graphic novels they're based upon.
Rodriguez's sense of pace and storytelling isn't exemplary, the performances vary in quality and the violence gets a bit much. But why complain when literally every single frame is spectacular to look at and the whole package is so very entertaining.
dir: Robert Rodriguez, Frank Miller (and Quentin Tarantino)
wr: Frank Miller
ph: Robert Rodriguez
ad: Jeanette Scott
cast: Mickey Rourke, Clive Owen, Bruce Willis, Jaime King, Rosario Dawson, Jessica Alba, Nick Stahl, Josh Hartnett, Benicio Del Toro, Brittany Murphy, Elijah Wood, Alexis Bledel, Carla Gugino, Devon Aoki, Michael Madsen, Michael Clarke Duncan, Powers Boothe, Rutger Hauer

THE SKELETON KEY
**½
USA
An efficient haunted house chiller where you recognize the true villains about an hour before the heroine does. There's a clever semi-twist towards the end as well as slick incorporation of the Deep South's racist past, but if the picture is to be remembered at all, it will be as the last major Hollywood production to be shot in the old New Orleans.
dir: Iain Softley
cast: Kate Hudson, Gena Rowlands, Peter Sarsgaard, Joy Bryant, John Hurt, Maxine Barnett

SHAKESPEARE BEHIND BARS
***½
USA
Though the notion of a men's prison staging of Shakespeare's "The Tempest" is an unorthodox one, it's that much more startling to discover the impassioned, accomplished performances delivered by convicted felons in Kentucky's Luther Luckett Correctional Complex. Watching these men pounce on the rare chance for release and redemption is a humbling experience.
dir: Hank Rogerson

SKY HIGH
**
USA
This witless, plastic tale about a family of superheroes came so soon after "The Incredibles" (2004) it was hard to say whether it was a matter of imitation or bad luck. Nobody really noticed it, and it wasn't worth noticing. You might catch it some time in the near future when you're bored in front of the TV on a Sunday afternoon. You'll probably change the channel.
dir: Mike Mitchell
cast: Michael Angarano, Danielle Panabaker, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Kurt Russell, Kelly Preston, Steven Strait, Bruce Campbell

THE SQUID AND THE WHALE
****½
USA
Writer-director Noah Baumbach is the child of two divorced literary figures and his first picture is a black comedy about the divorce of two literary figures. Even if you aren't aware of this in advance, you can sense that there is an autobiographical element to the picture. The characters say and do silly, cruel and needy things that people only say and do in real life, and then only in intimate surroundings.
   It is a productive decision on Baumbach's part to emphasise the comic aspects of traumatic events as well as not to treat anybody in particular as a victim. This way he avoids that exhibitionistic streak that comes with the public airing out of dirty laundry.
   He has also been wise in selecting and directing his main actors. They're all commendably natural and restrained, and they show great sensitivity in the way they interrelate. It's unusually easy for us to believe them as a family.
   At 82 minutes, it makes for a relatively short feature. It ends very suddenly and avoids the kind of closure that can only ever exist in movies and expose them as contrived.
wr/dir: Noah Baumbach
cast: Jeff Daniels, Laura Linney, Jesse Eisenberg, Owen Kline, Halley Feiffer, William Baldwin, Anna Paquin

STAR WARS - EPISODE THREE: REVENGE OF THE SITH
**½
USA
Far better received and generally more watchable than the other prequels, this one finds a bit of space amidst the CGI to appreciate the tragedy at the heart of the story. But it's still overlong and riddled with dialogue exchanges that have all the sense of wonder of a "Dawson's Creek" episode. And just when you think it's about to gather some dramatic heft, there's Darth Vader screaming 'NOOO!' out to the heavens in slow motion.
dir: George Lucas
cast: Hayden Christensen, Ewan McGregor, Natalie Portman, Frank Oz, Ian McDiarmid, Samuel L. Jackson, Christopher Lee

STRANGERS WITH CANDY THE MOVIE
**½
USA
Amy Sedaris takes her grotesque creation, Jerri Blank, to the big screen, with uneven results. You have to chuckle at some of the throwaway one-liners. But the majority of the jokes depend on caricature and exaggeration and as such would have been better served by a snappier pace.
dir: Paul Dinello
cast: Amy Sedaris, Stephen Colbert, Paul Dinello, Dan Hedaya, Ian Holm, Matthew Broderick, Sarah Jessica Parker, Alison Janney, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Kristen Johnston, Justin Theroux

THE SUN
****
Russia/Italy/Switzerland/France
Having already tackled Hitler in "Moloch" (1999) and Lenin in "Taurus" (2001), Alexander Sokurov turns to self-proclaimed saint and Japanese ruler Hirohito in this idiosyncratic meditation on power and the delusions of power, on men who seek to control history and are inevitably swallowed up by it. It's a haunting, dream-like, moving piece of work.
dir/ph: Alexander Sokurov
cast: Issei Ogata, Robert Dawson, Kaori Momoi, Shirô Sano, Shinmei Tsuji, Taijiro Tamura, Georgi Pitskhelauri, Hiroya Morita

SYMPATHY FOR LADY VENGEANCE
***½
South Korea
It's hard to say whether the world needed another Korean stylised revenge saga, but for what it's worth this is an especially shrewd, bracing one.
dir: Park Chan-wook
cast: Lee Yeong-ae, Choi Min-sik, Go Su-hee, Oh Dal-su, Kim Shi-hoo, Lee Seung-shin, Kim Bu-seon

SYRIANA
***½
USA
A dense, tangled, elusive ensemble-driven political thriller that may or may not be about greedy governments and corporations doing nasty things to people for the sake of oil. Whatever plot there is is impossible to follow. But you do get a strong enough feel for the various interconnecting relationships between characters to make each individual scene compelling. Although you’re not sure you will ever completely grasp what is happening, you keep watching. You’re dying to know. It all looks so urgent and Top Secret. Writer-director Stephen Gaghan was previously best known for his heavy-handed Academy-Award-winning script for “Traffic” (2000). His efforts here are a major departure in mostly the right direction.
wr/dir: Stephen Gaghan
cast: George Clooney, Matt Damon, Mazhar Munir, Jeffrey Wright, Tim Blake Nelson, Chris Cooper, Christopher Plummer, Amanda Peet, William Hurt

TAKESHIS'
**½
Japan
The kind of bloated, opaque, self-indulgent public therapy session that just about every great director makes at least once, having grown dangerously accustomed to critical and popular success.
wr/dir: Takeshi Kitano
cast: Takeshi Kitano, Kotomi Kyono, Kayoko Kishimoto, Ren Osugi, Susumu Terajima, Tetsu Watanabe, Akihiro Miwa

TALE OF CINEMA
***
South Korea/France
Far too soon after the beginning of this Hong Sang-soo joint, the angsty hero enters into a double suicide pact, undergoes a life-affirming epiphany and develops a suicidal urge all over again. Around the halfway point however, the picture takes a profoundly, self-consciously naughty postmodern twist, which renders the first half into something notably less grating in retrospect. The overarching mood of melancholia does persist all the way through, but the angst disappears and things take on a more relaxed and contemplative nature.
wr/dir: Hong Sang-soo
cast: Kim Sang-kyung, Lee Ki-woo, Uhm Ji-won

THANK YOU FOR SMOKING
**½
USA
Purportedly a satire of the tobacco and media industries, though its central and single concern is to convince you of its fabulous sassiness. First-time writer-director Jason Reitman is otherwise far too cool to make any kind of statement that is relevant to real life.
wr/dir: Jason Reitman
cast: Aaron Eckhart, Maria Bello, Cameron Bright, Adam Brody, Sam Elliott, Katie Holmes, David Koechner, William H. Macy, J.K. Simmons, Robert Duvall, Rob Lowe

13 TZAMETI
**½
France/Georgia
A gimmicky, no-budget neo-noir vaguely patterned after a hollow, moody trend that was spawned some years back when upstart hacks in their twenties began reproducing all the wrong aspects of Jean-Pierre Melville's work. It's an empty, repetitive bit of popcorn anti-fun, dolled up in a grungy, existentialist aura.
wr/dir: Géla Babluani
cast: George Babluani, Pascal Bongard, Aurélien Recoing, Fred Ulysse, Nicolas Pignon, Vania Vilers, Olga Legrand

THE THREE BURIALS OF MELQUIADES ESTRADA
***
USA
In his directorial debut, Tommy Lee Jones also stars as a noble, laconic, distant-but-secretly-cuddly would-be-lone-ranger-who-
adores-his-buddy-but-never-to-his-face. And he hacks at it with a grace and dignity that belies the trademark didacticism of a Guillermo Arriaga script in which the villain does little other than beat the living shit out of destitute immigrants and the women who are not destitute immigrants have only the choice of being needy whores with a heart of gold.
dir: Tommy Lee Jones
wr: Guillermo Arriaga
cast: Tommy Lee Jones, Barry Pepper, Julio Cedillo, Dwight Yoakam, January Jones, Melissa Leo, Vanessa Bauche, Levon Helm

THREE TIMES
***½
France/Taiwan
Chang Chen and the entrancingly beautiful Shu Qi each portray three separate characters in Hou Hsiao-hsien's three love stories that take place across three eras. The first, set in 1966, is nostalgic and intoxicating, as is the second (though it transpires in a turn of the century brothel a little too familiar from Hou's Flowers of Shanghai). The final chapter is a banal ode to contemporary ennui, though it's as pretty to look at as the first two.
dir: Hou Hsiao-hsien
ph: Lee Pin Bing
cast: Shu Qi, Chang Chen, Mei Fang, Liao Su-jen, Di Mei, Chen Shi-Zheng, Lee Pei-Hsuan

THROUGH THE FOREST
**
France
In 65 minutes and ten insufferably long takes, writer-director Jean-Paul Civeyrac charts one young woman's grief process after the sudden death of her boyfriend. It's worth considering how quickly the character played by the talented Camille Berthomier slips into the denial stage and refuses to budge, but Civeyrac's film isn't about consideration and insight, it's about hollow pseudo-poetic posturing.
wr/dir: Jean-Paul Civeyrac
cast: Camille Berthomier, Aurélien Wiik, Alice Dubuisson, Morgane Hainaux, Mireille Roussel

THUMBSUCKER
**½
USA
Writer-director Mike Mills' debut, it's the kind of movie where an alienated teenage hero repeatedly walks through a high school corridor in slow motion with Chris Elliott suffering on the soundtrack. Mills may have a sure touch with actors (the principals are solid, even if the peripheral actors are all awkward) but little else. All of the characters can be described in two sentences' worth of quirks and it's entirely up to unrelated indie adult-alternative singer-songwriters to deliver the emotional impact.
wr/dir: Mike Mills
cast: Lou Pucci, Tilda Swinton, Vincent D'Onofrio, Vince Vaughn, Keanu Reeves, Benjamin Bratt, Kelli Garner, Chase Offerle

TICKETS
***
Italy/UK/Iran
Three poignant, uniformly well-acted stories by three esteemed auteurs, each set on a train bound for Rome. Olmi's is about an elderly pharmacologist fantacising about a connection he made with his Viennese assistant, while the security officers on board abuse their powers. It's a gentle, sentimental vignette, with political undertones and an atmospheric use of sound. Humour pops up in the middle section - by Kiarostami - which shifts around dealings between an irate officer's widow, her put-upon assistant and a teenage girl he meets aboard. The narrative is elusive as is the point, but the characterisations are vivid. The last section is Loach's and probably the most accessible. Revolving around a trio of teenage Irish football fans, whose ticket is stolen by a young Albanian refugee, it starts off savagely funny, becomes rather tense and leads to an even more sentimental finale than the first segment.
dir: Ermanno Olmi, Abbas Kiarostami, Ken Loach
cast: Carlo Delle Piane, Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, Silvana De Santis, Fillipo Trojaro, Martin Compston, William Ruane, Gary Maitland, Blerta Cahani, Sanije Dedja, Aishe Gjuriqi, Klajdi Qorraj

TIM BURTON'S CORPSE BRIDE
****
USA
A gem. A warm, old-fashioned stop-motion reminder of how witty and wondrous cartoons could be. It revolves around a nervous bachelor who unwittingly woos a dead bride. The visuals are predictably pretty, the story is poignant and sweet and the songs are catchy and memorable. If there is a complaint to be had, it's that it ends too quickly.
dir: Tim Burton, Mike Johnson
wr: John August, Pamela Pettler, Caroline Thompson
pd: Alex McDowell
m: Danny Elfman
voices of: Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, Emily Watson, Albert Finney, Richard E. Grant, Joanna Lumley, Christopher Lee, Tracey Ullman, Paul Whitehouse

TIME TO LEAVE
***½
France
If you skip the titles sequence, you probably won’t realise this is a François Ozon picture until well into the second act, when an absurd and absurdly touching three-way comes about.
   Almost everything he’d done thus far (including his shorts) had dealt with death on a certain level. So, it isn’t a surprise that he would be tempted by a story that revolves entirely around a gay man, who finds out he is terminally ill, and as a means of coping, systematically alienates everyone who’s attached to him. What is unusual though, is for Ozon to have his alienated hero run into himself as a child every ten minutes, with violins wailing on the soundtrack.
   But then, just when you’re ready to cry ‘sell out!’ Ozon’s latest muse, the very lovely, very warm Valeria Bruni Tedeschi shows up. And soon after, he even brings the great Jeanne Moreau out of retirement. So you have to drop whatever qualms you may have with the direction his career may be taking, at least for now.
wr/dir: François Ozon
cast: Melvil Poupaud, Jeanne Moreau, Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, Daniel Duval, Marie Rivière, Christian Sengewald, Louise-Anne Hippeau

TRANSAMERICA
**½
USA
Felicity Huffman shows off a prosthetic dick in the role of a pre-op transsexual who, days before her operation, finds out she has a teenage son. A road-trip of mutual self-discovery, fraught with bitchy one-liners and strained hilarity, ensues. Huffman is very well made up to look the part and she keeps you in good spirits on a sitcom level, but overall her performance feels uneasy. You can sense her striving to lend the character heart and dignity to stick out from the pool of over-the-top caricatures that surrounds her. But you can’t get past the more mannered things she does, such as her attempt at a low-register tranny vocal. Not only does it feel very much put-on, but it never varies in tone. At least part of the blame though, lies with writer-director Duncan Tucker, who makes every one of the principal characters sound like a glib teenager putting on a funny voice.
wr/dir: Duncan Tucker
cast: Felicity Huffman, Kevin Zegers, Fionnula Flanagan, Graham Greene, Burt Young, Elizabeth Peña

TRISTRAM SHANDY: A COCK AND BULL STORY
****½
UK
It was the first postmodern novel. As Steve Coogan will tell you, "It was postmodern before there was any modern to be post about." Many screen adaptations have stuck very closely to the plot of their source material without necessarily capturing its drive and spirit. But in the absence of a plot, Michael Winterbottom and regular collaborator Frank Cottrell Boyce have achieved precisely that with Laurence Sterne's thoroughly idiosyncratic prose.
   Theirs is in fact a movie about the making of a movie based on Sterne's bawdy, digressive eighteenth-century satire of (mostly) English life. Shot through as it is with that exceptionally, delightfully dry English wit, the picture is as clever and telling about the moviemaking process as it is about Tristram Shandy, who famously only manages to get himself born about a third into Sterne's novel. The cast is note-perfect.
dir: Michael Winterbottom
wr: Frank Cottrell Boyce
cast: Steve Coogan, Rob Brydon, Keeley Hawes, Shirley Henderson, Dylan Moran, David Williams, Jeremy Northam, Benedict Wong, Naomie Harris, Kelly Macdonald, Elizabeth Berrington, Mark Williams, Ian Hart, Ronni Ancona, Stephen Fry, Gillian Anderson

TWELVE AND HOLDING
***½
USA
A melodrama in the increasingly familiar interrupted rites-of-passage indie mould, though director Michael Cuesta coaxes impressively layered performances from his young leads and brings complexity and earned feeling to the otherwise contrived material.
dir: Michael Cuesta
cast: Conor Donovan, Jesse Camacho, Zoe Weizenbaum, Jeremy Renner, Annabella Sciorra, Jayne Atkinson, Linus Roache

U-CARMEN E-KHAYELITSHA
***½
South Africa
Even William Shakespeare has written plays that haven’t been adapted and re-adapted for the screen anywhere near as often as Bizet’s opera. This dusty South African working-class variation on it however, does differ from all previous editions. Carmen herself has been rendered into a factory cigarette roller played by the commanding Pauline Malefane. And 19^th century Seville is discarded in favour of a South African tenement. All of the singing is done in Xhosa, one of South Africa’s eleven official languages. Overall, it’s a zesty, invigorating two hours. You wouldn’t be angry to discover it was awarded the Golden Bear at the year’s Berlin Film Festival.
dir: Mark Dornford-May
cast: Pauline Malefane, Andile Tshoni, Lungelwa Blou, Zweilungile Sidloyi, Andries Mbali, Zamile Gantana, Andiswa Kedama

UNKNOWN WHITE MALE
**½
USA
A documentary about Doug Bruce, who woke up one day with no memory of his life up until that point.
In voiceover, Murray continually explains that 'the new Doug' is having identity issues, but he doesn't necessarily explore these. The picture is as entertaining as just about any record of such a fascinating freak incident would be, but not much more.
dir: Rupert Murray

UNLEASHED
**
USA
Jet Li plays a human attack dog for a larger-than-life Glasgow mobster, who has trained him to respond to a remote-controlled collar. The premise is so ludicrous on such an elementary level that you have to take some time to consider whether it’s all meant to be taken as a joke - the majority of the main cast and crew stems from outside the US, so maybe the movie could be taken as a warning of the culturally polluting effects of dumb Hollywood action movies. And yet the execution is very moody and straight-faced. The promoters even had guts to announce this as a “psychological action film”. The fight scenes are competently handled, but nothing else is. There is an assortment of smarmy, posh-British villains directly transferred from Li’s early Asian pictures, where Western imperialism was the prime force of evil that needed suppressing. And towering above them is Bob Hoskins, who, in a majestic feat of scenery-chewing, hurls incessant abuse at Li and everyone else in sight, and perpetually refuses to die. Li’s gallery of facial expressions this time ranges from hurt-puppy-dog to angry-puppy-dog. Morgan Freeman also shows up to waste that magnificent voice on yet another wise old man figure.
dir: Louis Letterier
wr: Luc Besson
m: Massive Attack
cast: Jet Li, Bob Hoskins, Morgan Freeman, Kerry Condon

THE UPSIDE OF ANGER
**½
USA
An alcoholic middle-aged mother of four daughters is abandoned by her husband and starts up a tentative relationship with her neighbour, a former baseball star.
The characters alternate between authentic bitterness and sitcom cliché. Several chunks of this dramedy could almost pass for perceptive, but by the time the title is oh-so-literally pulled apart in voiceover, you stop trying to take any of it seriously.
dir: Mike Binder
cast: Joan Allen, Kevin Costner, Erika Christensen, Alicia Witt, Evan Rachel Wood, Keri Russell, Mike Binder

WALK THE LINE
***½
USA
A biopic of Johnny Cash with Joaquin Phoenix playing the man in black and Reese Witherspoon playing his chirpy Christian wife. The first half-hour is the clunkiest. Everywhere Johnny Cash turns, he spots something poignant: a guitar, a downtrodden worker, his future wife, the saw that killed his young brother. He then goes on to fight the same demons Jamie Foxx did just last year. But director James Mangold knows to give these things the efficient, old-Hollywood treatment. He shapes the scenes well. He knows not to linger on things for too long - he catches the good moments before they expire. Phoenix initially seems a little too much in awe of the figure he portrays, but in time he settles into it. When he gets together with Witherspoon - who's a delight in front of a microphone - you sense the chemistry. At the end of the picture, when the two kiss on stage and an audience applauds, you don't wanna vomit, you wanna clap along.
dir: James Mangold
cast: Joaquin Phoenix, Reese Witherspoon, Ginnifer Goodwin, Robert Patrick, Tyler Hilton, Dallas Roberts, Shelby Lynn, Jonathan Rice, Dan Beene, Ridge Canipe

WALLACE AND GROMIT: THE CURSE OF THE WERE-RABBIT
***½
UK
Wallace and Gromit go feature length - the plot doesn't necessarily warrant this, but there's more than enough wit, charm and invention to get by on in the meantime. All of the characters - even the most minor - are remarkably expressive, the voice-work is commendable, and the design is meticulous and imaginative.
dir: Steve Box, Nick Park
voices of: Peter Sallis, Helena Bonham Carter, Ralph Fiennes, Peter Kay, Liz Smith, Nicholas Smith

WAR OF THE WORLDS
***
USA
A contemporary re-telling of H.G. Wells' famous tale, this time revolving around a divorced Dad and his two alienated children.
The greater portion here is arresting, horrifying sci-fi, and you're ready to forgive the contrived family arguments and cheap 9/11 referencing in light of some expert tension-building. The picture then gradually devolves into familiar - though still entertaining - action fare, but it's only in the final reel that it self-destructs. It dumps the original ending in a context where it can no longer measure up, and Spielberg piles on a further load of comforting sentimentality at the expense of plausibility and all sense of common decency.
dir: Steven Spielberg
wr: Josh Friedman, David Koepp
cast: Tom Cruise, Dakota Fanning, Tim Robbins, Miranda Otto, Justin Chatwin

THE WAYWARD CLOUD
***½
France/Taiwan
During a drought, a porn star tentatively romances a girl who lives in the same building where he works.
A loose sequel of sorts to "What Time Is It There?" (2001), incorporating deadpan absurdist humour, long takes, hardcore sex scenes and gaudy, campy production numbers. Very much an acquired taste, since so much of the character development revolves around the no-holds-barred depiction of porn shoots. The open-minded will certainly be rewarded, and the picture is likely to gain greater appreciation in future years when we are more desensitised to things like watching a naked lady trying to shove a bottle up her rude bits.
wr/dir: Tsai Ming-liang
cast: Lee Kang-sheng, Chen Shiang-chyi, Lu Yi-Ching, Yang Kuei-Mei

WEDDING CRASHERS
**½
USA
For as long as the 'Frat Packers' continue to make movies to entertain each other, they should be stripped of access to string orchestras - and in fact, string instruments in general. At heart, this particular vehicle is just about as silly and witless as the others and none of the characters insist on making sense to interfere with the plot. But the picture still works a bit better than its direct antecedents, probably because the four principal stars are so likable.
dir: David Dobkin
cast: Owen Wilson, Vince Vaughn, Rachel McAdams, Isla Fisher, Christopher Walken, Jane Seymour

THE WEDDING DATE
**½
USA
A "Pretty Woman" with genders reversed, where an appealing cast is wasted and the hero is made to say things like: "The hardest thing about loving someone is letting them love you back." People who choose not to stop and laugh when he says that will love this picture.
dir: Clare Kilner
cast: Debra Messing, Dermot Mulroney, Amy Adams, Jack Davenport, Sarah Parish, Holland Taylor

THE WILD BLUE YONDER
**
UK/USA/France/Germany
Werner Herzog crosscuts between archived news sequences, talking heads, NASA footage of astronauts on a space shuttle, some other stoner-friendly footage off the shelves of National Geographic and a poorly-written monologue for Brad Dourif, playing an alien. Every time Herzog moves from one of the these strands to another, you get a sense of relief followed by a slowly sinking sense of doom as you realise that each new section is as wretched, misguided and deeply pretentious as the one before it.
wr/dir: Werner Herzog
cast: Brad Dourif

THE WILLOW TREE
**
Iran
A trite, mawkish melodrama about a blind man regaining vision.
dir: Majid Majidi
cast: Parviz Parastui, Roya Taymourian, Afarin Obeisi, Mohammad Amir Naji, Melika Eslafi, Leila Outadi, Mahmoud Behraznia

WOLF CREEK
***
Australia
An Aussie contribution to the current wave of sadistic slasher horrors, this one is more finely crafted and therefore more problematic than just about any of them.
   For a good 45 minutes all you get is a trio of bland twenty-somethings backpacking through the Outback, getting drunk and checking out the sights. There’s hand-held camerawork and exclusively mundane dialogue to give you the impression that what you’re watching is very close to real life in order to make the impact of the impending horror more immediate.
   The picture is half-over before what you’re waiting to happen starts happening. Writer-director Greg McLean is good at building and sustaining tension, and he eschews clichés to the point that when he dumps one in it feels unexpected. But at some point you have to wonder: what is the purpose here? Slasher flicks were never meant to be pleasant but they used to try and be thrilling and exciting. There used to be a sense of fun about them. There isn’t any fun in McLean’s picture. You get involved with a group of perfectly decent-seeming people only to watch them get butchered. It’s violent, disturbing and thoroughly depressing and there isn’t a single productive point behind any of it.
   You don’t leave the theatre feeling exhilarated, you feel violated. And yet clearly there is an audience out there for this kind of thing. Very few other independent Australian features have done as well at the box office.
wr/dir: Greg McLean
cast: John Jarratt, Cassandra Magrath, Kestie Morassi, Andy McPhee, Nathan Phillips

YET TO SEE:

BATTLE IN HEAVEN;
DESCENT, THE;
DUCK SEASON;
FATELESS;
HEADING SOUTH;
INTO GREAT SILENCE;
LAND OF THE DEAD;
LAST DAYS;
NOTORIOUS BETTY PAGE, THE;
REGULAR LOVERS;
ROMANCE & CIGARETTES;
SECRET LIFE OF WORDS, THE;
SKETCHES OF FRANK GEHRY;
TSOTSI;
WORKINGMAN'S DEATH


TOP 10 TO SEE:
REGULAR LOVERS*
THE NOTORIOUS BETTY PAGE*
THE DESCENT*
DUCK SEASON
WORKINGMAN'S DEATH
FATELESS*
HEADING SOUTH*
ROMANCE & CIGARETTES
LAND OF THE DEAD*
BATTLE IN HEAVEN*