DIRECTED BY Andrew Lau and Alan Mak

STARRING Anthony Wong, Eric Tsang, Carina Lau, Francis Ng

Opened August 20, Cert 15, 119 mins

THE CHARGED, HAUNTED atmosphere of Infernal Affairs, with its tortured cops and brooding criminals, seemed to suggest that somewhere along the line we’d missed out on something. The prologue alone hinted at past events to which the ensuing narrative could only allude. Well, prequel Infernal Affairs II?in true Godfather fashion?provides the back story, explaining how cop Yan (Tony Leung) ended up undercover in the triads and gangster Ming (Andrew Lau) became a mole in the police force. Suffice to say, it’s not exactly simple to follow…

Leung and Lau’s roles are taken here by Hong Kong pop heartthrobs Shawn Yue and Edison Chen, although their characters are given little more to do than react with increasing concern as events around them spiral out of control. The main focus this time is on their superiors, Inspector Wong and mob boss Sam (Anthony Wong and Eric Tsang, reprising their roles from the original), who orchestrate a series of betrayals and double-crosses in their shared desire to bring down the head of the Ngai crime family (Francis Ng). Wong, being on the ‘right’ side of the law, is the more compromised of the two, and it’s his efforts to exercise some sort of control over proceedings that gives the film its real dramatic power. Further complicating matters is the presence of Sam’s mistress Mary (Carina Lau), whose involvement in these tangled conspiracies expands the narrative range beyond the first film’s cat-and-mouse simplicity.

Relentlessly busy, IA2 contains more character detail and plot revelation than any viewer could hope to absorb. But directors Lau and Mak adhere so closely to genre archetypes that you can happily follow its drift even if you miss some of the particulars. Although bloated by operatic, slo-mo set-pieces seemingly designed to force it into epic territory, the film gives action fans the kicks they crave while deepening some already memorable and complex characters. No wonder Scorsese wants a bit of this for himself with a remake?the spadework’s been done, and the classic ingredients are all here.

OPENS SEPTEMBER 10, CERT 12A, 114 MINS

You’ll anticipate heinous sacrilege, this being Hollywood’s cover version of Gilles Mimouni’s magical 1996 French romance-thriller L’Appartement, with dozy Josh Hartnett in the Vincent Cassel role. Yet with Brit Paul McGuigan (Gangster No 1) at the helm, they not only get away with it but almost match the original’s cerebral and emotional punch. It’s heavily over-stylised, but the complex affairs tug towards a satisfying, powerful climax.

In case you’ve forgotten the story (shame on you), Matthew (Hartnett) is on the verge of a career marriage when he glimpses the long-lost love of his life: Diane Kruger. He tries to track her down (the titular park’s their old meeting place), but becomes embroiled with her friend (Rose Byrne), a neurotic actress. Serving as buddy and chorus is Matthew Lillard, toning down his excesses and even conveying a broken heart with due pathos. Mimouni’s labyrinthine plot remains miraculous even if you know the twists, and the direction’s slick but smart. A crazy, impassioned conceit which shouldn’t work but does.

DIRECTED BY Michael Mann

STARRING Tom Cruise, Jamie Foxx, Jada Pinkett Smith Opens September 17, Cert 15, 120 mins

Taxi driver Max (Foxx) pulls out onto Sunset and into his nightshift. His first couple of fares are nothing special. Then, when Jada Pinkett Smith gets in, we may feel the movie is about to pick up speed. In fact, it slows down for a lengthy dialogue scene.

Michael Mann is in no hurry to cut to the chase in this, his first film since the poorly received Ali. Rather, he wants to slip into the rhythm of the ride, to savour the LA nocturne ?after all, it’s his favourite tune.

What a pleasure to submerge yourself in this masterly film-maker’s vision?except that an Armani-grey Tom Cruise is about to commandeer both the cab and the movie. “Vincent”, as he calls himself, has five names on a list, a loaded gun and need of a dependable chauffeur between hits. Fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be a bumpy night.

Highly improbable, to put it mildly, Collateral could easily have been downright laughable, save for the acumen with which Mann pulls the strings. By his own high standards, this is a cartoon caper, but judged beside what passes for thrillers these days, Collateral has the texture and gravity of an old-school classic.

The mental?or rather philosophical?duel played out between Vincent and Max is prime Mann: it echoes the battle of wits and wills in Heat (another Vincent) and Manhunter?and if Cruise looks something like William Petersen in that film, it’s surely no coincidence (guess they couldn’t afford the real thing.) Max is Joe Schmo, stuck in a dead-end job, dreaming of the better life forever round the corner. Vincent is the existential super-ego who jazzes himself taking the cabbie for a ride.

If Collateral ultimately fails to transcend its join-the-dots plotting, at least Mann gives it the allure of something crafty. He’s on home ground here; it’s a predictable winner.

OPENS SEPTEMBER 10, CERT 18, 88 MINS

Those who first encountered director Kim Ki-Duk via this year’s serene Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter… And Spring are in for a surprise if they’re expecting more of the same. Finally getting a UK release following a run-in with the BBFC that left it lighter by almost two minutes, The Isle both seduces and repels. Set on a lake dotted with floating cabins in which men live, fish and entertain local hookers, the film zeroes in on suicidal artist Hyun-Shik and silent prostitute Hee-Jin. Unconventional by anyone’s standards, their courtship involves self-mutilation with fish hooks, strenuous sex and defecation, some animal torture and a lot of primal screaming. It’s painful stuff for both characters and audience, but Kim dives deep to touch on loneliness, artistic and sexual frustration, societal divides and personal redemption. The film shimmers on the surface-it’s as visually pleasing as Spring, Summer…?but its enigmatic nature and wince-inducing violence is sure to put people off. Get past the fish hooks though, and you’ll find it mesmerising.

OPENS SEPTEMBER 24, CERT 18, 124 MINS

Marvel’s resident vigilante originally turned up as a supporting character in The Amazing Spider-Man and limped along as a bit character for 30 years. That is, until writer/artist duo Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon revamped him, adding a darker edge and filling his adventures with ultra-violence and black humour. First-time director Jonathan Hensleigh uses Ennis and Dillon’s opening story arc, “Welcome Back, Frank”, as a jumping-off point for this screen rendering of the revenge-obsessed Castle.

Bulked-up indie actor Thomas Jane nails Big Frank’s cold-eyed stare and growling voice, Hensleigh whips up an enjoyably dopey revenge fantasia in which Castle doles out bloody retribution to the man who slaughtered his family, corporate gang boss Howard Saint (John Travolta, chubbier than ever). Hensleigh struggles with the humour, which lurches between ill-judged and outright embarrassing, but his gloriously violent action sequences have a refreshingly downbeat ’70s exploitation edge. Nasty, brain-dead fun.

OPENS SEPTEMBER 24, CERT PG, 84 MINS

Dour, taciturn men in fur hats. Vast expanses of frozen steppe. A cheap, poisonously alcoholic beverage called Vodka Lemon. And the kind of mordant black comedy that thrives in extreme hardship. This atmospheric, starkly beautiful film is set in a small, ice-bound Kurdish village that’s struggling to come to terms with life after Soviet rule. With the fall of Communism comes the free market, but that’s small comfort for the villagers who have no money to buy and little to sell. And widowed former army officer Hamo really starts to feel the cold now that gas and electricity are no longer free.

But there are flashes of hope amid such privation. A letter from Hamo’s son in Paris is a cause for misplaced optimism for the whole village. And Hamo quietly and sorrowfully finds himself falling in love with a woman he sees at the cemetery. With the bleak humour of Aki Kaurism

OPENS SEPTEMBER 17, CERT 15, 87 MINS

Harold And Kumar (John Cho and Kal Penn) falls into the elusive ‘not as dumb as it looks’ sub-category of American gross-out comedies (see also the original American Pie). On the one hand, it’s got two English girls having a defecating competition and Neil Patrick Harris (aka Doogie Howser) snorting coke off a girl’s ass in a moving car. On the other, it offers a spliffed-up riff on that corny American ideal, the pursuit of happiness, even if that means nothing more than frying your brain with the finest weed and then pigging out on greasy burgers?our heroes’ ultimate goal. Who’d have thought something so smart could come from the director of Dude, Where’s My Car?

Admittedly, Cheech and Chong were up to similar high jinks 25 years ago, but the classic inebriated double-act gimmick is smartly updated by making the leads just very unlucky rather than stupid. And, what’s more, there’s not a shred of ‘just say no’ preachiness. Sublime.

OPENS SEPTEMBER 17, CERT 15, 93 MINS

Imagine a society where past events, friends and lovers can be wiped from your memory using high-tech neuroscience. Now imagine that Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind has been surgically scrubbed from your own brain. No matter, because here is a bizarrely similar plot reborn as a globe-trotting sci-fi romance from Michael Winterbottom and Frank Cottrell Boyce, the prolific director-writer team behind 24 Hour Party People and other Britfilm gems. Tim Robbins and Samantha Morton play illicit lovers whose brief encounter sets off a lethal domino effect across a scarily plausible globalised class system, where only possession of the right genetic insurance papers allows escape from the Third World wasteland into the fortress citadels of privilege. Shot in China, India, Dubai and Britain, Winterbottom’s latest effort may nod to Gattaca or Minority Report in style, but it also serves as a companion piece to his docudrama In This World. Although slow and opaque, there are more provocative ideas lurking in these low-budget depths than in a dozen Will Smith blockbusters.

Here are some things you’re unlikely to see in any other film this year: a cop vs bees shoot-out; a steam-cleaner anal probe; a fat trapeze artist crushed to death by a robot… I could go on.

The point being that Save The Green Planet is either an insight into a dizzying and unfamiliar culture or a jumble of off-cuts that can’t decide if it’s a na

OPENS SEPTEMBER 10, CERT 15, 104 MINS

Ken Loach has taken his title from a poem by Robert Burns-“Ae fond kiss, and then we sever/Ae fareweel, alas, for ever!” ? so you wouldn’t expect his inter-denominational love story to run smoothly. Loach wanted to explore the issues of racial and religious identity, with one eye on the climate of intolerance since 9/11. Second-generation Pakistani Casim (Atta Yaqub) is a Glasgow DJ gripped by the ambition to buy his own club. He meets schoolteacher Roisin (Eva Birthistle), tumbles into an affair, then is forced to confront the entrenched attitudes of his Muslim family, who plan for him to marry a cousin from Pakistan. The contrast between the new generation of assimilated Pakistanis and the medieval conservatism of their forebears is skilfully depicted, but Loach also peels strips off the Catholic church, which hauls Roisin over the coals of hellfire. Loach’s improvisatory style means there are a few gaffes and bald patches, but it’s a price worth paying for the insight and passion of the narrative.

OPENS SEPTEMBER 24, CERT 15, 140 MINS

The disappointment of the year. When Lee’s got game, he makes vibrant films with plenty to say?The 25th Hour was a triumph. But this is disastrous. On every conceivable level it flounders and, halfway through its marathon running time, you’re embarrassed for him.

It can’t decide whether it’s a limp satire on big business or a sex comedy. Jack (Anthony Mackie, for whom oblivion beckons) is fired from a corrupt biotech company for whistle-blowing. He’s persuaded by an ex-girlfriend, now a lesbian, to father kids for her gay friends at $10,000 a tryst. Cue much shagging and dire sperm-egg jokes which Woody Allen would have rejected in the ’70s. Jack’s soon in trouble with the law (framed for fraud) and a gaggle of greedy lesbians. There’s the odd comment on race or gender, but they’re lost in this incohesive mess.

Cameos from John Turturro (as a Mob don), Woody Harrelson, Ellen Barkin and Monica Bellucci lend hope that Lee will rectify the nosedive, but they’re mirages. An utter dog.

OPENS SEPTEMBER 3, CERT 12A, 128 MINS

Spielberg’s latest casts Tom Hanks as Viktor Navorski, a confused traveller from the fictional, troubled state of Krakoshia. Poor Viktor is alone and stranded at JFK Airport when war breaks out back home during his flight to the US, leaving him with no definite nationality. It all springs from the real-life story of an Iranian who lived for several years in Paris’ Charles de Gaulle airport (the subject, also, of Glen Luchford’s terrific 2000 film From Here To Where). This is social realism Hollywood-style: Viktor’s accent is as clich

DIRECTED BY Nimr

OPENS SEPTEMBER 3, CERT 12A, 94 MINS

Having assembled a cast to die for?Robert Redford, Willem Dafoe, Helen Mirren? first-time director Pieter Jan Brugge made the disastrous error of not giving them material to stretch them. He’s an experienced producer, having helped to steer such epics as Heat, The Insider and The Pelican Brief to fruition, but, behind the camera, Brugge seems so reserved and over-scrupulous that the story splutters along on three cylinders before expiring prematurely. Dafoe plays ghoulish dork Arnold Mack, who kidnaps self-made businessman Wayne Hayes (Redford) outside the luxurious house he shares with wife Eileen (Mirren, cruelly deprived here of balls-out feistiness). Brugge’s plan is apparently to use the terror and uncertainty triggered by the kidnapping to probe behind the Hayes’ affluence and reveal their hidden failures and disappointments, but his technique is as artless as his manipulation of time-schemes is clumsy. And the film ends just as you’re expecting the big gear-change into a pulverising d

OPENS SEPTEMBER 10, CERT 12A, 94 MINS

Ron Burgundy is a newsreader from a distant era, some time deep in the 1970s, a time “before cable” when orange-brown rollnecks were the height of fashion and real men “musked up” with gallons of after shave. Ron is the number one broadcaster in San Diego, but when beautiful young reporter Christina Applegate is made his co-anchor, Ron’s testosterone-fuelled world begins to fall apart. It’s just not right, the idea of a woman reading the news: as one of Ron’s clueless colleagues says: “It’s anchorman, not anchorlady.”

Forget this thin plot, though, because Anchorman is really just a series of sketches based around Will Ferrell’s droll turn as Ron, a shameless chauvinist who thinks ‘diversity’ is “the name of an old, old wooden ship”. Inevitably this kind of comedy?based on improvs by the cast?is a hit-and-miss affair, but there are more than enough funny lines for 90 minutes, and even the lame gags are executed with amiable good humour.

OPENED AUGUST 20, CERT 12A, 107 MINS

An improvement on the thin Signs and the spurious Unbreakable, Shyamalan’s latest feature is a gothic period piece set in a 19th-century rural village. We learn that the inhabitants are prevented from leaving for fear of incurring the wrath of a race of creatures who reside in the nearby woods. Then Joaquin Phoenix’s Lucius leaves the village to procure vital medicines?the first to breach the boundaries in years. Which, of course, is when things start to go bump in the woods.

The Village boasts fine performances from Adrien Brody as a halfwit and Bryce Dallas Howard as a blind but resourceful girl in love with Lucius. But this movie stands and falls on a number of twists, including one brutal and literal one. Once the d

OPENS SEPTEMBER 3, CERT 12A, 122 MINS

Guillermo del Toro’s adaptation of writer/artist Mike Mignola’s celebrated comic strip opens at the close of WWII: Brit paranormal scientist Bruttenholm (John Hurt) prevents Hitler’s SS forces from successfully opening a gateway to hell and claims a baby demon which manages to make it through as his adopted son. Sixty years later, Bruttenholm runs the Bureau Of Paranormal Research And Defence, and the cigar-chomping Hellboy (Ron Perlman, replete with scarlet skin, cement arm, horns and tail) is his major weapon against the forces of evil.

The warped visual style Del Toro brought to offbeat, low-budget chillers like Cronos and The Devil’s Backbone perfectly complements Mignola’s baroque source visuals. Perlman is outstanding as the wise-cracking demon adventurer, and his effects-laden war against the foul armies of hell whips along merrily without pausing for breath. On the downside, the final act is rushed, and Del Toro’s self-penned script makes little sense. Over-the-top fun while it lasts, though.

OPENS SEPTEMBER 3, CERT 12, 137 MINS

John Wayne’s Oscar-winning epic from 1960 gets a proficient if slightly bloodless revamp courtesy of $100m from journeyman director John Lee Hancock (replacing original director Ron Howard) and an erratic cast that veers from the sublime Billy Bob Thornton to the near-catatonic Jason Patric. It’s 1836, and 183 brave “Texians” are cornered in the titular San Antonio mission while the Mexicans are baying for blood outside. Tragedy beckons. And yet the unfashionable chest-beating patriotism of the Wayne version has been keenly excised, as has the iconic status of defenders Crockett, Travis and Bowie. Instead we have a tentative attempt at western revisionism which aims to humanise the triumvirate, but mostly drains them of colour. That leaves some rich pink-sky cinematography from Dean Semler, a few diverting gore-free skirmishes, and a standout performance from Thornton?his Crockett has both tremulous self-doubt and charisma, providing the movie with much-needed soul, and making a fine counterpoint to Wayne’s monolithic standard-bearer.

DIRECTED BY Morgan Spurlock

STARRING Morgan Spurlock Opens September 10, Cert 12A, 98 mins

This has been the year of the documentary, with Fahrenheit 9/11, Capturing The Friedmans, Bus 174, The Fog Of War and Control Room stealing thunder and prestige away from Hollywood’s traditional output. Now add to that list Super Size Me?New York film-maker Morgan Spurlock’s award-winning assault on America’s fast-food culture.

Prompted by a lawsuit launched against the Golden Arches by two overweight teenage girls, on the grounds that eating McDonald’s was the cause of their obesity, Spurlock undertook to eat a McDonald’s-only diet for a month?three square meals a day ordered from their menu, with a stipulation that he had to accept any offer of the mega Super Size option.

Before starting his mischievous experiment, Spurlock?whose girlfriend, a professional vegan chef, clearly considered the project to be dangerous lunacy?had himself checked out by a team of medics, scoring well on blood pressure, cholesterol count and heart-rate. Although his doctors counselled against the McDonald’s binge, no one could foresee the speed and scale of its negative effects. Shockingly, Spurlock gained 10lb within five days, and began to suffer chest pains, palpitations and headaches. His cholesterol boomed, and his blood pressure could have landed the starring role in The China Syndrome. His horrified GP discovered that Spurlock’s liver, inundated by the onslaught of sugar and fat, was turning to p