Eric Rohmer has always made quite cerebral films where people, usually ethereally pretty girls and their beaus, yak at each other for hours. Now in his 90th decade, he’s still at it, although the actors chosen are inching towards middle age and Rohmer has taken to setting the stories in historical periods?the French Revolution for The Lady And The Duke, and now the 1930s for Triple Agent. Lord love him for trying something different, but sadly Triple Agent is almost excruciatingly dull.

Fiodor Voronin (Serge Renko) is a White Russian living in Paris with his Greek wife Arsino

When folks talk about the “curse of The Exorcist”, this prequel should join the two sequels to William Friedkin’s landmark original as a key exhibit. Directed in its first incarnation by Paul Schrader, Exorcist: The Beginning was repossessed by Cutthroat Island’s Renny Harlin, who reshot it with a new draft of the script, a new cast (save Stellan Skarsg

“What’s it all about?” It’s about transposing Bill Naughton’s morality tale of an upwardly mobile shagaround in swinging ’60s London to skinny latte 21st century Manhattan. It’s about casting Jude Law in the role that provided Caine with his career breakthrough in 1966. It’s about Hollywood trying to revamp one of the greats and fucking it up, yet again. In its day, Alfie worked as a satirical comedy exposing the pursuit of the post-war ‘permissive society’ as a hollow, misogynous sham. Forty years later, its central message?that commitment-fearing blokes who think women are just “face, boobs and bum” are inadequate pond scum who’ll end their days weeping over their Viagra?lacks any revelatory clout, even as a post-’90s lad critique. Law is too posh and pretty to earn our sympathy, while the necessary brutality of Naughton’s play (notably its infamous abortion scene) is also neutered amid the Sex And The City makeover. And sickly new MOR tunes from Mick Jagger are no substitute for Sonny Rollins. Pointless.

DIRECTED BY Mark Achbar, Jennifer Abbott

STARRING Noam Chomsky, Michael Moore, Jane Akre, Naomi Klein Opens October 29, Cert PG, 144 mins

With the political left helpless, with US news media quiescent, the burden of protest against George Bush and his cronies has fallen to docu-cinema, an unlikely genre spawned by the success of Michael Moore. The Corporation is co-made by Mark Achbar, who has form in this field?he made Manufacturing Consent, a fast-cut, arresting depiction of the political thinking of Noam Chomsky. He employs the same techniques here?splicing recent footage, such as a montage of TV spokespeople using the spurious phrase “bad apples” to explain away corruption in the corporate cart, or archive footage of old movies to illustrate points. It’s very postmodern, very hip hop, this ingenious visual sampling, but there’s no play here?this is deadly vital. The film explains how in an inspired act of callous legal opportunism 150 years ago, US businesses appended themselves to a new law designed to protect the personal rights of emancipated blacks by arguing that they, too, should be treated like “persons”. Thereafter, corporations grew into the most dominant and rapacious institutions of the modern age.

The film-makers methodically demonstrate, by individual examples of corporate misbehaviour what kind of “person” the corporation is?a psychopath. Individuals from within corporations express misgivings and, as Noam Chomsky observes, these people might be the nicest guys in the world?but no matter, because the corporation is a monster.

Length-wise, this movie might have benefited from some judicious editing. Still, whether it’s one Michael Walker, unblinkingly arguing for the privatisation of every last inch of the globe, or the saga of Fox News gagging their own investigative team from running a story on a dangerously infectious synthetic hormone manufactured by megacorp Monsato, this film will make your blood boil. Essential.

DIRECTED BY Chanwook Park

STARRING Min-sik Choi, Ji-tae Yoo, Hye-jung Gang

Opens October 15, Cert 18, 119 mins

the second instalment in director Chanwook Park’s so-called “Revenge Trilogy” (begun with 2002’s Sympathy For Mr Vengeance) would put even Tarantino to shame. Here Park loosely adapts a Japanese Manga about a family man imprisoned, transformed into a killing machine and eventually returned to civilian life to wreak havoc on his former captors.

In this case, the family man is Dae-su, introduced as an irascible drunk (and bravely played by the craggy, Bronson-esque Min-sik Choi) but soon kidnapped, placed in a cell that’s mocked up as a garish motel room and fed on a 15-year diet of bad TV, Valium gas, remorse and recrimination. He then finds himself back on the streets, dressed in sharp black Armani, with a mobile phone, a wad of banknotes and a near psychotic desire for revenge. Which is when the real fun begins.

Along the way, Park?like Tarantino, a natural cinematic stylist? ticks all the boxes. There’s Hitchcockian paranoia and voyeurism as Dae-su and his beautiful young sidekick Mido (Hye-jung Gang) piece together the movie’s central conspiracy; there’s Fincher-esque psychosis implicit in Dae-su’s slightly unhinged nature, as well as explicit reference to Fight Club in the high-rise d

From the Danish film-making collective Hr Boe & Co, this is a hip, confident and original piece of cinema. A daring postmodern take on the classic love triangle, it’s also infuriating and baffling. At the crux of the story is one stolen night of passion that fundamentally changes the life of Alex (Nikolai Lie Kaas). He locks eyes with Aimee (Marie Bonnevie) on a train platform and on a whim follows her, leaving his bewildered girlfriend (also played by Bonnevie) on the train. Alex and Aimee spend the night together, but by next morning everything has altered?his flat is no longer where it was and his friends fail to recognise him. His only hope is to find Aimee again and try to reclaim his former life. Director Boe flashes a message at the start of the movie: “Remember, this is all a film. It is a construction.” He’s not concerned with hiding the artifice of film-making and he doesn’t care whether the movie makes sense to us. Curiously, that’s one of the reasons why it works?Boe lays down a challenge, and the audience can only rise to meet it.

Another ambitious British attempt at tapping into the ever-elusive horror market (see also My Little Eye, The Hole, Dog Soldiers), director Christopher Smith’s debut sends gutsy fashionista Franka Potente down into the London Underground for a night of terror at the hands of a goofy-looking, prosthetically enhanced mutant skate-boy (Sean Harris). Although Smith is extremely genre-aware and strains to press every horror button (bloodied corpses leaping out of the shadows, false alarms, comic relief terrier surviving carnage), his film comes over as rather empty?like a Scream movie minus the laughs. In fact, bizarrely, it only ever comes to life during a needlessly sadistic and misogynistic torture sequence in which a female junkie is brutalised while strapped into a gynaecological chair. You’ve got to question a movie that’ll bust a gut to keep a cutesy terrier alive for the closing credits but will gloat over the depiction of a woman getting a 22-inch hacksaw shoved up her crotch.

Filmed during last year’s uncharacteristically hot summer in the Yorkshire Dales, Pawel Pawlikowski’s lyrical movie basks in a honey-coloured glow that evokes Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides. And the similarities with Coppola’s film run deeper than the lighting? both deal with teenaged girls on the bewildering cusp of maturity, all inchoate sexual urges and revealing tops. Nathalie Press and Emily Blunt are the impressive newcomers who take the two central roles?Mona, a bright working-class girl and Tamsin, a disgraced boarding-school student. Their tentative friendship soon takes on a greater significance ?they become lovers and, as far as Mona is concerned, soulmates. But Tamsin is more in love with the thrill of conquest. And there’s the added complication of Mona’s born-again-Christian brother (Paddy Considine), another challenge for the manipulative and flirtatious Tamsin. This heartfelt, humorous paean to the agony of the teen crush is one of the best British films of the year.

Elvis, as you know, didn’t die. Neither did John F Kennedy. No. As Bubba Ho-Tep reveals, Presley and the Pres wound up together in an old folks’ home in East Texas, where they teamed up in a life and death struggle against the spirit of an ancient Egyptian mummy who was bumping off the residents. Reading that synopsis, and knowing that Bruce Campbell? groovy splatstick genius of the Evil Dead series ?stars as the superannuated King opposite Ossie Davis’ JFK (“But, uh, Jack Kennedy was a white guy and, uh, you’re black”?”I know. When they faked my assassination, they dyed me”), you could be forgiven for thinking Bubba Ho-Tep is just another geriatric-Elvis-teams-up-with-an-old-black-JFK-to-take-on-an-evil-soul-sucking-mummy movie. Don’t be fooled. Adapted from novelist Joe R Lansdale’s short story by Don Coscarelli, auteur of the Phantasm films, Bubba is a mess, but a cracked gem of a mess.

On one level, it’s exactly the dumb-ass, six-pack flick it sounds, with toilet gags, a little gore, and Campbell’s jumpsuited Elvis casting his zimmer aside during his climactic battle with the mummy to adopt a creaking, arthritic version of that famous karate stance and mutter, “Don’t make me use mah stuffonya, baby.”Underneath this, though, courses a slow, bittersweet, almost elegiac current, moving at the same shambling pace as the pensioner protagonists. Campbell, whose meditative, muttering, weary-boned narration cushions the film, is a revelation. He’s obsessively turning over thoughts of his life: about the empty circus of fame he walked away from in the early ’70s to swap places with a lowly Elvis impersonator; about the failures of his career; about Priscilla and Lisa Marie; about this dumping ground for the elderly where he’s ended up, trying to get along with a madman who thinks he’s JFK.

There you have it. A meditation on the price of fame, the loss of youth, and the fate of the elderly. The poignancy of two men forging a twilight friendship. And Bruce Campbell, as Elvis, fighting a mummy and saying stuff like, “Cumman’ git it, you undead sackashit.”Why resist?

This 1999 film from Ring director Hideo Nakata has been cruised by Hollywood for a while now, with director Jonathan Glazer at one point attached to bring this fiendishly fragmented kidnap yarn to mainstream audiences. Good luck to him if he tries, as Nakata’s film delights in the sort of confusion that could cause riots in the multiplex. Things start simply enough: an executive (Ken Mitsuishi) and his beautiful young wife (Miki Nakatani) are enjoying lunch in a ritzy Tokyo restaurant. While he’s paying the bill, she’s snatched off the street by a young man (Masato Hagiwara) who’s soon on the phone demanding a ransom. It’s at this point that Chaos begins to live up to its title, with a dash of S&M perversity leading to a complex series of double, triple and?quite possibly?quadruple crosses… Nakata scrambles the chronology to such an extent that nothing can be taken for granted at any time and, although this isn’t a horror film, he gives the proceedings a genuine sense of dread.

Peter Sellers said he was a man of many guises but had no personality of his own. Actually, he did, but it was an unpleasant one. Stephen Hopkins’ biopic pinpoints the source of his dysfunction?the unhealthily mutual affection between him and his mother which left him prone to tantrums and bursts of insecurity. This film is less a celebration of Sellers’ ‘genius’ than of his tragic inability to become a decent, loving human being, to exist independently of his acting props. If the film disappoints it’s partly because Sellers was such a disappointment? yet this also adds to its poignancy, thanks to Geoffrey Rush’s sensitive playing of an insensitive man. One effective device, at moments of high drama, is for Rush/Sellers to switch to playing the roles (in drag if necessary) of those nearest to him. It ironically points up the actor’s inability to connect with his supposed loved ones, including his mother, whose betrayal by Sellers is one of the film’s cruellest moments.

DIRECTED BY Shane Meadows

STARRING Paddy Considine, Gary Stretch, Toby Kebbell

Opened October 1, Cert 18, 86 mins

Now that the ’90s trend for chucking Lottery cash at tax-break B-movies is over, we’re left with a stripped-down who’s who of great British directors. Jonathan Glazer’s in it. Guy Ritchie isn’t. Matthew Vaughn and Paul Greengrass are new entries. All great, but perhaps none are as worthy of your attention as Shane Meadows. With Dead Man’s Shoes, he brings the ’70s revenge movie cycle to rural Derbyshire and makes it look not only plausible but compelling.

Paddy Considine gives a career-best performance as a soldier returning to his home town for the first time in seven years to confront the bullies who (we learn in flashback) teased and exploited his simple-minded brother in increasingly sadistic ways. Initially it seems he’s just going to humiliate them. Staring at them in pubs, making up their faces while they’re asleep, spray-painting insults on their coats…the tone is similar to Meadows’ previous films. The baddies listen to gangsta rap in a knackered Citro

A film about cocaine, directed by Claudia Schiffer’s husband, starring Jude Law’s current belle? On paper, this has “Avoid” written all over it. Instead, it’s a straight-up-gangster flick (adapted from JJ Connolly’s superb novel) that doesn’t hit a bum note throughout. Daniel Craig plays a rich coke dealer desperate to retire but tangled ever tighter in a plot involving Scouse and Irish mobsters, a heist on a Dutch Ecstasy factory, a rampaging Serbian hitman and a kingpin (Michael Gambon) tracking down his missing daughter (Sienna Miller). Anyone doubting Lock, Stock… producer Matthew Vaughn was up to the director’s job will be amazed. He’s easily Guy Ritchie’s equal, confidently wielding pace, humour, setting, photography and some very flashy editing to create a modern thriller that’s 100 per cent free from cliche, irony and lazy postmodern bullshit. So many recent gangster films have just fiddled about with ’60s iconography. Layer Cake creates its own?with a truly brutal ending.

DIRECTED BY Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky

STARRING James Hetfield, Lars Ulrich, Phil Towle, Kirk Hammett

Opened October 1, Cert 15, 140 mins

You don’t need to be a Metallica fan to enjoy the bust-ups and breakdowns caught on camera here. Closer in tone to the grimly funny confessional psychodramas of reality TV than the corporate whitewash of most music docs, this is an extraordinary film about a multi-platinum supergroup running headlong into mid-life marital crisis. Think This Is Spinal Tap meets I’m A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here.

Directors Berlinger and Sinofsky were initially hired by Metallica’s label to document the recording of the band’s 2003 album, St Anger. A routine commission, except they arrived in the teeth of internal power struggles which almost finished off the Frisco foursome.

The first tremor is the departure of bass player Jason Newstead, who blames the tyrannical leadership style of “my main cat” James Hetfield, singer and guitarist. The band are clearly in a bad way, inviting cameras in on their torturous group therapy meetings in between studio sessions. Then, Hetfield storms out to spend almost a year in rehab, leaving drummer Lars Ulrich to ponder a bleak future without his beloved Metallica.

The contrast between Metallica’s public image as the four hoarse men of the rock apocalypse and their private existence as bickering millionaires trading feel-my-pain psychobabble is very funny. But Sinofsky and Berlinger go beyond the joke to explore the darker tensions behind the HM overlords. Especially Hetfield, who opens up about the abusive family background which informs his doom-laden lyrical vision. On finally returning to finish St Anger, Hetfield is a changed man, but his paranoid and controlling side hasn’t been entirely banished. He appears to have transformed from overtly aggressive tyrant to passive-aggressive, humourless prima donna. The pre-detox Hetfield was a wild-haired boozer who joked about skipping his son’s birthday to hunt bears in Russia. The new Hetfield looks neat and studious as he dutifully attends his daughter’s ballet lessons. It’s a toss-up which one is scarier.

The supporting cast in Some Kind Of Monster is also a scream, and another gift to the directors. Phil Towle, a middle-aged “performance coach” who steers Hetfield and Ulrich through their rocky patch, gets the deadpan straight-man role. Towle became a fixture in the band for two years on a handsome retainer, only to be jettisoned with indecent haste when the rock gods got their mojos working again. Dave Mustaine, forced out of Metallica to form splinter group Megadeth in the early ’80s, also offers a classic cry-baby cameo when a therapy-inspired Ulrich tries to settle old accounts. But best of all is Torben Ulrich, father of Lars and former Danish Olympic tennis champion, looking like some grand wizard from Middle Earth. In one painfully funny scene, Ulrich Sr offers his thumbs-down verdict on the latest Metallica recordings. Paging doctor Freud or what?

Fully endorsed by the band, Some Kind Of Monster could have been an almighty indulgence, but in some ways it’s the opposite. Casual viewers could be forgiven for reading the exercise as a forensic Trojan Horse demolition of Metallica. Except that Sinofsky and Berlinger clearly take the band’s tantrums and traumas seriously. Whether by accident or design, both band and film-makers have starkly illuminated the peculiar cocktail of privilege and pressure, pampering and pain at the heart of 21st-century rock-star mega-fame. This is a hugely entertaining film which proves that the line between clever and stupid is often very fine indeed.