Already a comic and a computer game, this extra-terrestrial smack down from Mortal Kombat and Resident Evil director Paul WS Anderson is a murky, unsatisfying mess. Lance Henriksen?playing the human antecedent to the Bishop android from Aliens and Alien 3, and easily the best thing here?is a billionaire industrialist who leads a team of archaeologists into a pyramid buried beneath Antarctica. There they discover Predators have been breeding Aliens to fight their young warriors as part of a rites-of-passage initiation. Naturally, the humans become cannon fodder, caught up in the bloody combat between these two warring species, and Anderson’s movie stumbles incoherently from one poorly executed battle sequence to another. The sets are too gloomy and the aliens too gloopy; slime, acid blood and all manner of mucus splatters the screen. Anderson clearly riffs on James Cameron’s Aliens, but possesses none of the imagination or intelligence to elevate this beyond a bargain basement thrill, devoid of shocks or style.

On paper, Finding Neverland sounds like a typical Miramax period movie. Johnny Depp tries out yet another of his accents, this time as Peter Pan author JM Barrie, and Kate Winslet looks on lovingly in an Edwardian frock. But take a look and you’ll see it’s not anywhere near as sugary as it sounds. It’s suffused with melancholy and haunted by death, as is Barrie’s original play. The story tracks how Barrie came to write it, inspired by the widow Sylvia Llewelyn Davies (Winslet) and her brood of four sons whom he befriends in a London park one day, out for a stroll to escape his social-climbing wife (Radha Mitchell). Although his bond with the family is platonic, rumours start swirling, suggesting his feelings for the widow?or even the boys! ?may not be strictly innocent. Depp underplays for once, letting the younger cast shine the more, especially Freddie Highmore as Peter Llewelyn Davies. Grainily shot with handheld cameras, it hardly looks like a costume drama and has the same pained honesty as Marc Forster’s previous film, Monster’s Ball.

In 1979 Chris Petit made one of the most atypical British films of all time. Heavily influenced by US noir and the European wanderings of Wim Wenders (the associate producer) and Godard, yet it distils a very English despair and sense of dislocation. Despite a soundtrack laced with Low-era Bowie, Kraftwerk and Stiff Records stars, its perverse, introverted slowness failed to chime with its intended audience and it’s since lain fallow, forgotten. This reissue suggests we may now be angst-ridden enough to embrace it. Its morose anti-hero (David Beames) is a graveyard shift DJ at a biscuit factory. Informed that his brother has died, he leaves London for Bristol to find out more. On the motorway he meets a series of oddballs: an army deserter, a garage attendant who’s into Eddie Cochran (a young Sting). Arriving, he interacts with glum women, gets drunk and existential. Less happens than this synopsis suggests, but the monochrome melancholy and rain will strike a chord with anyone who’s into Hopper, Ballard or always crashing in the same car. Turn on, tune in, mope out.

Computer whiz Kerry Conran’s retro fantasia is, quite literally, an art deco cartoon brought to life, following the adventures of the eponymous P-40 fighter pilot (Jude Law) and his battle against the evil Dr Totenkopf’s super-robots. On the plus side, Conran’s CGI-created opus is a thing of technical beauty laced with clever homages to pop culture classics, referencing everything form Max Fleischer’s Superman cartoons to The Shape Of Things To Come, The Island Of Dr Moreau and The Wizard Of Oz. On the negative side, the dialogue lacks the wry humour of Indiana Jones, while Law and Gwyneth Paltrow (as love interest come sidekick) appear to have forgotten how to act. Fortunately, the pace never lets up, and it kicks into overdrive when Angelina Jolie, as the commander of an amphibious squadron, replete with eye patch, ushers in a rollicking climax. All in all, it seems churlish to take issue with such a beautifully realised slice of classic pulp adventure.

Particularly when the fearless hero is?at last? an Englishman.

There’s some wicked satire in this debut from writer/director Brian Dannelly, co-produced by Michael Stipe. At American Eagle Christian High School, Hilary (Mandy Moore) domineers for Jesus. Among her serfs are Mary (Jena Malone), but when Mary gets pregnant trying to ‘save’ a gay boy, Hilary’s flock turns against her. She bonds with other misfits?Macaulay Culkin’s wheelchair-bound cynic, Patrick Fugit’s skater, Jewish rebel Eva Amurri?and wages war on the pious. Feuding at the Prom ensues, while a Christian rock band plays. It’s not as subversive as it believes, and in the last half-hour loses focus, copping out of offending the God squad. But the performances are feisty, and Martin Donovan’s wannabe-hip preacher is a gas?”Let’s kick it Jesus-style!” he exhorts.

Saved begins darker and sassier than Drop Dead Gorgeous or Bring It On, but in daring to broach sensitive ground?some churches slated as locations pulled out at the last minute?conceives its own anticlimax. It can’t follow through, for fear of crucifixion

Although it starts out in superior spooky fashion with an inventive murder sequence featuring, of all things, a pizza wheel, this psychological horror yarn from first-time director Seong-ho Kim quickly shifts its attentions elsewhere. A shopping centre is about to re-open following a fire five years earlier. But a series of murders?initially thought to be suicides?puts pressure on the mall’s head of security Yeong-min (Yoo Ji-tae), who’s already struggling with his own demons. Police procedure and Yeong-min’s personal problems take up a big chunk of the film’s overlong running time, with crucial revelations being so drawn out that the viewer constantly feels one step ahead of the game. Narrative frustrations aside, though, the film presents its ingredients with a real confidence, mixing the supernatural and the everyday in relatively believable fashion. It’s good to see a contemporary horror film taking such care with its plot and characters, but a few extra crowd-pleasing jolts wouldn’t have gone amiss.

Old Nouvelle Vague warhorse Jacques Rivette resurrects a 28-year-old ghost story and transforms it into an epic paean of Parisian angst that plays like an arthouse Sixth Sense. Originally conceived in 1976 as part of a quartet that began with Duelle, but shelved soon after, …Marie Et Julien tells the story of clockmaker Julien (Jerzy Radziwilowicz) and his dreamy otherworldly lover Marie (Emmanuelle B

Don’t be put off by singing cameos from the likes of Robbie, Alanis, Sheryl et al: this inventive, vibrant ride through Cole Porter’s life story (written by Scorsese collaborator Jay Cocks) succeeds in fusing the music’s glory with both the grandeur and gutter-trawling of the man. A clever deconstruction technique has the dying Cole watching his nights and days flash before him, the mysterious Gabe (Jonathan Pryce) choreographing, from rise to fall to comeback to big reveal. It’s visually sparkling. Kevin Kline, as Porter, wins you over with his commitment and sincerity. In the glittering Jazz Age he marries socialite Linda (Ashley Judd), who tolerates his gay flings as long as he keeps coming up with the goods. And these goods are greats: “Love For Sale” and “In The Still Of The Night” are wonderfully deployed. Moving to Hollywood, things hit the rocks, and Cole loses the use of his legs. Sure, De-Lovely manipulates your emotions, but, like the songs, it never insults your intelligence, giving you the grind as well as the glamour.

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.