Uncut

Arnie Dreamer

DIRECTED BY Jonathan Mostow STARRING Arnold Schwarzenegger, Nick Stahl, Claire Danes, Kristanna Loken Opened August 1, Cert 12A, 109 mins So far, 2003 has been heaving with lacklustre sci-fi epics. Enter the joker in the mega-budget pack: Terminator 3, the sequel no one wanted to see, starring an ageing icon 10 years past his best and directed by someone nobody's heard of.

So Squalid Crew

Consummate, witty and wicked conmen caper

Pirates Of The Caribbean—The Curse Of The Black Pearl

Depp does Keef in swashbuckling blockbuster

The Great Dictator

Hitler satire falls victim to Chaplin overkill

Van Gogh

Absorbing portrait of the legendary artist

Angela

Mobster melodrama for girls

Swimming Pool

OPENS AUGUST 22, CERT 15, 102 MINS An uptight, emotionally constrained English lady crime-writer and a sexually aggressive Provençal bombshell, given to walking around butt naked: in his latest movie, François Ozon deals in archetypes. But having created characters who border on cliché, he then proceeds to subvert them by adding other, unexpected layers to their personalities.

Equus

Peter Shaffer's play is stripped of its stage trappings by director Sidney Lumet, exposing many of its failings—primarily Shaffer's preposterous, ponderous script. Admittedly, Peter Firth is believable as the disturbed boy with a quasi-religious fetish for horses, but Richard Burton's dreadfully hammy as his psychiatrist. Jenny Agutter supplies the gratuitous nudity.

The Lady Vanishes

A '70s remake of the Hitchcock classic, with Angela Lansbury as an English nanny kidnapped on a German train on the eve of WWII. Can dizzy US heiress Cybill Shepherd foil this Nazi plot with the aid of rugged news photographer Elliott Gould? It might have worked if they'd played it straight; instead, they go for screwball comedy, and it's a disaster.

Johnny English

John Malkovich slums it as the evil mastermind plotting to turn Britain into a giant prison camp, while Rowan Atkinson, as the titular rubbish spy, presses all the wrong buttons. Puerile, deeply unfunny and, as an advert for our country, downright treasonable. A crime, if memory serves, still punishable by death.
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