The mixed reception given to Birth at recent film festivals may have been unfairly distorted by weighty expectations. Glazer’s sensational 2000 debut Sexy Beast was one of the strongest British films of recent years, while anything Kidman touches these days is scrutinised as a star vehicle first and a work of cinema second. The mouthy young auteur’s second feature also arrives with a troubled history of reshoots and backstage battles, often early warnings of creative cop-out and committee-driven compromise.

But not so with Birth, which turns out to be a bold, haunting highbrow thriller with paranormal trimmings. Kidman plays Anna, a psychologically brittle Upper Manhattan widow who, on the eve of marrying her new suitor Joseph (Huston), is stalked by a 10-year-old (Bright) claiming to be the reincarnation of her late husband. He even knows enough intimate detail to prove it, plunging Anna into a vertiginous panic of impossible hopes and desires.

As co-writer and director, Glazer unwinds this bizarre premise for slow-burn suspense, but he recognises its humour, too. Joseph’s stuffed-shirt rivalry and Anna’s quasi-sexual feelings towards the young interloper are both presented as comically absurd. And yet profound emotions are never far away?one pivotal close-up on Kidman’s face, wracked with doubt and grief and terrible exhilaration, fills the screen for a cinematic eternity as it bores its way through the viewer’s skull. Fantastic.

Birth, above all, is an immensely beautiful work shot in wintry earth tones. The style is filtered through Glazer’s directorial influences without making them too blatant: Kubrick for the glacial pace and palatial elegance, Rosemary’s Baby for Kidman’s gamine crop and paranoid isolation, The Sixth Sense for Bright’s eerie calm and brooding secrecy.

But while the preposterous plot could easily have resolved itself in a schlocky Twilight Zone or X Files flourish, Glazer defies convention with a final twist that some will find disappointingly prosaic, others intriguingly open-ended. Crucially, though, the story’s ‘explanation’ is less important than its accumulated observations on grief and loss and the soul-gnawing human hunger to believe in a love that survives beyond death itself. Taken on these terms, Birth is a symphonic, engrossing, quietly devastating work.

The recent slew of documentaries and literature prompted by post-9/11 events and the excesses of the Bush administration has been bracing and heartening, but they’ve often taken a stylised, even heavy-handed approach that might alienate their target audience. There’s a feeling, for example, that Michael Moore’s overbearing presence tends to cast a shadow over the point he’s trying to make, that he pisses off even those who fundamentally agree with him.

Uncovered: The War On Iraq, a film by Robert Greenwald, who also made Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War On Journalism, is an altogether different proposition. No radical trimmings, no polemical posturing, no browbeating, no hip devices. Its contributors are establishment, or ex-establishment people?defence officials, foreign service experts, ambassadors. This film reeks of respectability, is absolutely unspun and is all the more convincing for that. For here, laid out plainly, logically and soberly, is the truth about the Iraq war. That there were no WMDs, that Saddam posed no threat to the outside world, that he had no links with Al-Qaeda, that indeed they were mutually hostile, that the Bush administration had earmarked Iraq for invasion as part of a crazed and declared neo-con plan for the “Americanisation” of the globe, and that they deliberatively contrived, spun and selectively edited intelligence concerning Iraq’s weapons capability when making their case to the public.

This is illustrated through archive footage of the various culprits?Bush, Rice, Rumsfeld, Powell, Wolfowitz, as well as some of their more moronic media cheerleaders. Their weasel words are neatly exposed. Not for nothing does one interviewee talk of the American nation being in the grip of a “historical and political lobotomy”.

Go see this film.

Joseph Ruben’s panning shots of New York’s rooftops are a subliminal nod to Rosemary’s Baby, but this workmanlike chiller doesn’t probe anywhere so dark. Softened by the relentless tinkling of James Horner’s piano, it has the safety catch on. Julianne Moore may have hoped for a role to match Kidman’s in The Others, but it’s Shyamalan-lite, not Polanski-pervy. She stresses out floridly, but isn’t helped by clumping co-star Dominic West, who does ‘alcoholic’ like he’s had too much toast. Moore believes her son’s died in a plane crash, but hubby Anthony Edwards and shrink Gary Sinise say it ain’t so. Is she going potty? Or just over-acting? When she meets an ex-hockey star (West) whose daughter’s missing presumed dead too, they pair up to investigate. Crack FBI agents, easily outrun by Julianne Moore and a lousy actor, give chase. Linus Roache creeps about, and Jools reckons alien abduction’s going down. That’s no more implausible than much of the plot. The special effect, when it comes, is a stunner. Slick hokum.

This sports comedy spiked with special-effects steroids became Hong Kong’s all-time box-office champ when it opened in 2001, a record that still stands even now as the film belatedly arrives here. It’s taken some knocks in the intervening years, though, having had almost a half-hour removed and suffering the major indignity of an English-language dub. Still, the original spirit of star-director Stephen Chow’s crowd-pleaser remains gloriously intact. Chow?a local legend in HK?plays Sing, a Shaolin disciple reduced to hawking the virtues of his kung fu lifestyle to passers-by on the street. Hooking up with former football ace “Golden Leg” (Ng Man Tat), the pair assemble a ragtag team of players with various Shaolin skills to take on the notorious Team Evil (who, for some reason, train underwater). Even those who hate football shouldn’t be put off; there’s little regular sports action?just increasingly spectacular CGI mayhem, with body collisions and the ball turning into a thermonuclear device. Highly entertaining.

Lenny (Jack Black) is the vegetarian, desperate-to-drop-out son of shark mob boss Don Lino (De Niro, brilliantly cast). When his far-tougher, fish-eating brother is accidentally killed, Lenny goes into hiding while a young fish named Oscar (Will Smith) takes the credit for “slaying” both sharks. Oscar is f

Fernando Eimbcke swept the board at the Mexican Film Festival with this gently melancholy, shrewdly funny debut. Don’t expect the flamboyance of Y Tu Mam

Twenty-year-old Lolita (Marilou Berry) wants to be a classical singer, to be slim and, most of all, she wants to win the approval of her father, Etienne (Jean-Pierre Bacri). A successful writer, Etienne has been fêted and fawned over for most of his adult life, to the extent that he no longer needs to be pleasant to those around him. His daughter is a disappointment to him because she’s dumpy, neurotic and so desperately needs his affection. Lolita can’t accept that any friendship she forms doesn’t have its roots in her father’s celebrity. Into this maelstrom of repressed tensions come Lolita’s singing teacher (Agnès Jaoui, who directed and co-wrote with Bacri), her writer husband and Sébastien, who falls for Lolita, only to discover that she can be as difficult as her father. Jaoui (The Taste Of Others) is not only a fine actress but clearly a very able ringmaster for this circus of monstrous egos and corrupted self-image. French cinema at its most sophisticated and rewarding.

Adapted by The Hours’ Michael Cunningham from his own novel, this examination of an ad hoc family is ambitious if occasionally dull. Damaged Bobby is adopted into Jonathan’s family in early-’70s Ohio; mutual adoration, and masturbation under the sheets, ensues. But when the adult Bobby (Colin Farrell) seeks out Jonathan (Dallas Roberts) in early-’80s New York, where he is living with frayed free spirit Clare (Robin Wright Penn), love becomes harder to fathom. Jonathan, gay and glumly promiscuous, is unobtainable to Clare, who falls for virginal Bobby instead. Soon all three are trying to raise a baby in an idyllic farmhouse, but old monogamous, motherly wants aren’t so easily out-run. Director Michael Mayer’s debut deals in hard emotions, which his cast hit head on. Sexuality is treated with sympathetic frankness, and love’s raw frustrations ring true. Only moments of feel-good smugness, and the turgid pace near the end, let it down.

Albert (Schwartzman) determines to deduce the meaning of a string of coincidences, and hires a pair of Existential Detectives (Hoffman, Tomlin). They snoop around his bathroom and his metaphysics, micro-analysing his life. His nemesis is golden boy Brad (Law), who’s scaling the ladder at superstore chain Huckabees, where his pin-up girlfriend Dawn (Watts) is spokesmodel. Albert finds a soulmate in earnest firefighter Tommy (Wahlberg), and this odd couple fall under the spell of the detectives’ rival, French philosopher Caterine (Huppert). Got that? Soon, Albert and Caterine are having sex in the mud, Brad is unravelling and Dawn is questioning her looks. Albert and Tommy almost find a kind of peace, embracing “pure being”.

Huckabees is like no other film you’ve seen. Russell, having broken big with Three Kings, delves back to the clever, dark zaniness of Spanking The Monkey and Flirting With Disaster in this… farce? Essay? Debate? Tragicomedy? Perhaps the wordiest movie released this year, it’s full of ideas, non sequiturs and puzzles, and insanely inspired. Many scenes will knock you sideways, and among a stellar cast Watts and Wahlberg, stretching themselves, are excellent. Law tries too hard; Hoffman and Tomlin good-naturedly send up their personae.

Whether it all hangs together to construct anything durable is yet another question. Though it starts like a runaway train and just gets faster, Huckabees at times trips over its own ambition. Do we care for these freaks? Many may lose patience, as with Soderbergh’s equally cerebral Schizopolis, and you wish maybe Charlie Kaufman had edited the confusing script, which is a forked path off Being John Malkovich remixed by Magritte.

It’s certainly mind-blowing, with some unforgettable trippy imagery. The interior of Albert’s head is a stew of envy, lust and fear. He and Tommy beat each other across the head with a spacehopper till they “stop thinking”. Shania Twain’s a running joke, till she cameos. Tippi Hedren swears. Points are made about petroleum, ecology and “cruelty and manipulation”. It’s a true one-off. But, like, what’s truth?

Fans of the book will be dying to know how Roger Michell handles the shock opening, and he sends this balloon up and away with tension, flair, colour and a sense of awe. Thereafter, a claustrophobic, twitchy domestic drama sets in, till the climax implodes with silly mad-stalker histrionics. A shame: for an hour the intricate (very French) direction and acting of Daniel Craig and Samantha Morton are totally absorbing. But the atmosphere’s derailed by the miscasting of Rhys lfans as a pitiful psychotic. You keep expecting him to bare his bum: scary, but not that scary.

Intellectuals Joe (Craig) and Claire (Morton) find faultlines in their relationship when Joe fails to save a man pulled to his death by a hot air balloon. Another witness, Jed (Ifans), begins to harangue Joe with visits and calls, until it’s clear he’s a dangerous obsessive. Surely contrary to McEwan’s intentions, it turns into Fatal Attraction without the laughs. Much analysis of What Love Means honours the novel, but the bubble pops.

Chris Roberts

So how do you remake a drop-dead, hands-down, white-kunckle cult movie classic? In Jonathan Demme’s case, with a powerhouse A-list cast, a subversively topical political agenda and an armour-piercing payload of indie-blockbuster attitude. Intelligent and engrossing, The Manchurian Candidate goes off like a smart bomb under the lazy notion that big-budget Hollywood thrillers can only be dumbed-down, neutered, reactionary crap.

Based on a 1959 novel by Richard Condon, John Frankenheimer’s 1962 blueprint for The Manchurian Candidate was a freak phenomenon. A pulpy little Cold War potboiler about psycho-sexual brainwashing and political assassination, it assumed the mantle of prophecy as the Machiavellian conspiracies of the late 20th century mushroomed around it. Thanks to historical accident or some darker kind of alchemy, it became greater than the sum of its parts.

Released a year before JFK’s death and a decade before Watergate, Frankenheimer’s film was adopted as an all-purpose allegory for half a century of government lies and Kafka-esque conspiracies. Grounded in the Korean war and the McCarthy-era Red Scare, it was a monochrome noir chiller that infiltrated our nightmares. But Demme’s slick remake adds a killer twist to the original plot, cranking up the nerve-shattering paranoia by several notches.

The action takes place Right Now, during a US presidential election fought in the teeth of a national security panic. Washington gives a more contained performance than Sinatra in the role of Bennett Marco, a US army major whose composure unravels as his recurring nightmares churn up echoes of a sinister reprogramming session during the first Gulf War. Schreiber is a revelation, meanwhile, stepping into Laurence Harvey’s shoes as the zombie-like Raymond Shaw, a vice-presidential puppet candidate controlled by the shady Manchurian Global corporation and his domineering mother, Eleanor Shaw.

Angela Lansbury, who played this matriarchal monster in the original, has already sniffed at Streep’s portrayal. But the queen of Method perfectionism delivers a deliciously toxic cocktail of incestuous mother-love and manicured spite—think Hillary Clinton meets Cruella De Vil. Streep also gets to savour some of the film’s best lines: “The assassin always dies, baby, it’s necessary for the national healing.”

Unlike its more open-ended predecessor, Demme’s Manchurian Candidate feels almost hard-wired into current events. Daniel Pyne’s screenplay about right-wing candidates stealing elections and stirring up national panic for their warmongering corporate paymasters could almost have been written last week, not three or four years ago. You needn’t dig too deep to find George Bush, Dick Cheney or even John Kerry lurking between these lines, and passing references to “regime change” and “civilian contractors” sound uncannily like tomorrow’s news headlines. For all its flashy swagger and occasional lapses into hammy melodrama, Demme’s movie shares more of a kindred spirit with documentaries like Fahrenheit 9/11 than with its big-budget studio peers.

Demme also finds time to acknowledge his roots in underground films and rockumentaries. The eccentric support cast for The Manchurian Candidate includes his legendary indie-movie mentor Roger Corman, plus cult British singer-songwriter Robyn Hitchcock. Former Fugee Wyclef Jean, who previously worked on Demme’s politically slanted documentary about Haiti, The Agronomist, also makes a soundtrack appearance. Right at the edge of the canvas, this attention to detail feels impressive.

Demme is making no inflated political claims for The Manchurian Candidate. He knows this project is first and foremost a studio star vehicle conceived as slam-bang entertainment. And he’s right, thankfully, because there are plenty of worthy arthouse fables out there for the marginal movie-goer. This film is a mainstream thriller—and therein lies its subversive Trojan Horse power to follow us home and haunt our nightmares. But, 40 years from now, who knows? We may still be talking of Demme’s remake the way we now discuss Frankenheimer’s iconic original—with shock and awe.