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She Hate Me

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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 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.

The Terminal

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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...

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

Track Record

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DIRECTED BY Bob Smeaton STARRING Janis Joplin, The Grateful Dead, The Sand Opens September 3, Cert U, 90 mins In the summer of 1970, The Grateful Dead and a bunch of musical friends, misfits, oddballs and weirdos were booked by an enterprising local promoter on a week-long trek across Canada by private train. "A bunch of crazy people careening across the countryside making music night and day," as Dead bassist Phil Lesh eloquently puts it in one of the retrospective interviews recorded for this film by Bob Smeaton, whose previous credits include The Beatles Anthology DVD. The recollections of Lesh and others (including most of the Janis Joplin band) more than three decades on acts as a commentary to previously unreleased footage shot on the trip which captures Janis, The Band, The Flying Burrito Brothers, Delaney & Bonnie and the Dead hanging out on the train, passing the bottle and jamming, as well as various stop-offs en route for a series of scheduled concerts, conceived as a kind of travelling Woodstock circus. Deadheads might be disappointed that the egendary stories of Joplin getting the Dead drunk and the band retaliating by spiking her birthday cake with LSD aren't touched on here. But we get a strong whiff of the freewheeling mayhem of the trip in such scenes as the train halt in Saskatoon, during which Joplin's tour manager John Cooke?son of the recently deceased BBC broadcaster Alistair Cooke-gleefully buys the entire contents of the local liquor store on the grounds that they didn't know when they'd next get the opportunity. Somehow, they still managed to consume even this unholy quantity of booze by the next morning. Mischievous shenanigans aside, it's the music that's at the core of the film. At the first scheduled concert, a full-blown riot breaks out as anarcho-hippies demand it should be a free event, and the scenes, reminiscent of Mick Farren and co tearing down the fences at the Isle of Wight, make dramatic viewing. But Festival Express is most memorable for the charismatic presence joplin and Garcia, whose musical vitality is as intoxicating as anything they were drinking or ingesting along the way.

DIRECTED BY Bob Smeaton

STARRING Janis Joplin, The Grateful Dead, The Sand Opens September 3, Cert U, 90 mins

In the summer of 1970, The Grateful Dead and a bunch of musical friends, misfits, oddballs and weirdos were booked by an enterprising local promoter on a week-long trek across Canada by private train. “A bunch of crazy people careening across the countryside making music night and day,” as Dead bassist Phil Lesh eloquently puts it in one of the retrospective interviews recorded for this film by Bob Smeaton, whose previous credits include The Beatles Anthology DVD. The recollections of Lesh and others (including most of the Janis Joplin band) more than three decades on acts as a commentary to previously unreleased footage shot on the trip which captures Janis, The Band, The Flying Burrito Brothers, Delaney & Bonnie and the Dead hanging out on the train, passing the bottle and jamming, as well as various stop-offs en route for a series of scheduled concerts, conceived as a kind of travelling Woodstock circus.

Deadheads might be disappointed that the egendary stories of Joplin getting the Dead drunk and the band retaliating by spiking her birthday cake with LSD aren’t touched on here. But we get a strong whiff of the freewheeling mayhem of the trip in such scenes as the train halt in Saskatoon, during which Joplin’s tour manager John Cooke?son of the recently deceased BBC broadcaster Alistair Cooke-gleefully buys the entire contents of the local liquor store on the grounds that they didn’t know when they’d next get the opportunity. Somehow, they still managed to consume even this unholy quantity of booze by the next morning.

Mischievous shenanigans aside, it’s the music that’s at the core of the film. At the first scheduled concert, a full-blown riot breaks out as anarcho-hippies demand it should be a free event, and the scenes, reminiscent of Mick Farren and co tearing down the fences at the Isle of Wight, make dramatic viewing. But Festival Express is most memorable for the charismatic presence joplin and Garcia, whose musical vitality is as intoxicating as anything they were drinking or ingesting along the way.

Kontroll

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DIRECTED BY Nimr...

DIRECTED BY Nimr

The Clearing

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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, T...

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

Anchorman: The Legend Of Ron Burgundy

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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.

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.

The Village

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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 creature...

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

Hellboy

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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 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.

The Alamo

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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.

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.

The Frying Game

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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 ...

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

Gaul To Arms

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La Haine has got the lot: fantastic music, powerhouse performances and ravishing visuals wedded to propulsive action. Not forgetting an anti-racist message that went off like a pump-action shotgun in the face of modern Europe's rising New Right. But above and beyond such political credentials, this ...

La Haine has got the lot: fantastic music, powerhouse performances and ravishing visuals wedded to propulsive action. Not forgetting an anti-racist message that went off like a pump-action shotgun in the face of modern Europe’s rising New Right. But above and beyond such political credentials, this digitally remastered pulp-thriller landmark simply explodes across the screen like a Molotov cocktail.

An early triumph for writer-director Mathieu Kassovitz, La Haine (1995) was filmed in the hard-knuckled high-rise fringes of Paris that are rarely seen on screen. “People think of Paris as the city of love or the city of light,” the 27-year-old Kassovitz argued. “But where you got love you got hate, where you got light you got darkness.”

Shot with restless cameras in sumptuous high-contrast monochrome, the film traces 24 eventful hours for three Parisian boys in the hood. In the role that catapulted him to stardom, Vincent Cassel plays Vinz with all the swaggering, wired, ugly-sexy insolence of a young Belmondo. Vinz is Jewish, sharp as a blade and seething with attack-dog anger. Meanwhile, Sa

Star Wars Trilogy

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Brian De Palma called the first Star Wars movie "gibberish". But George Lucas' vision, Harrison Ford's gruff charm, the Irwin Kershner-directed/Leigh Brackett-scripted The Empire Strikes Back and, of course, Darth Vader?one of cinema's great villains ?ensure the trilogy's immortality. Just don't mention the prequels.

Brian De Palma called the first Star Wars movie “gibberish”. But George Lucas’ vision, Harrison Ford’s gruff charm, the Irwin Kershner-directed/Leigh Brackett-scripted The Empire Strikes Back and, of course, Darth Vader?one of cinema’s great villains ?ensure the trilogy’s immortality. Just don’t mention the prequels.

Broth Of The Gods

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DESPITE ALL THE giddy revisionist hyperbole about midnight screenings, mass faintings and studio bidding wars during the unveiling of Reservoir Dogs at the 1992 Sundance Film Festival, the real winner of that year (with a Grand Jury prize to show for it, plus a Special Recognition award, compared to Tarantino's big fat zilch) was Alexandre Rockwell's sly, unassuming In The Soup. The movie was the then-35-year-old Rockwell's third attempt at a breakthrough picture, and though it bravely satirises the lot of the ambitious yet essentially mediocre film-maker, it does so with the effortless grace of a seasoned auteur. We have new-wave wannabe Aldolpho Rollo (Steve Buscemi), burdened by his own artistic pretensions and an obtuse 500-page screenplay called Unconditional Surrender. Aldolpho is broke, he can't afford to eat, he does nude cable TV for cash and has fallen behind on his rent. Enter garrulous Mafia hood and sometime aesthete Joe (Cassavetes regular Seymour Cassel) with the promise of full $250,000 budget. There's just one catch... OK, so the premise isn't revolutionary (and the likes of Bullets Over Broadway and Get Shorty have since made it feel even less so), but that's not Rockwell's priority. Instead he lets the story, told in inky monochrome, roll inexorably towards a bittersweet climax while he concentrates on razor-sharp character work and comic vignettes, like the crooning mobsters who sing Sinatra before extorting rent, or Joe's psychopathic haemophiliac brother Skippy (Will Patton), or Gregoire (Stanley Tucci), the hysterical French lover of Aldolpho's neighbour and secret crush Angelica (Rockwell's then wife Jennifer Beals), or the angry drug-dealing midget from Brooklyn with his ape-man bodyguard. And at the centre of all this there's Buscemi and Cassel? two stars of American indie credibility, one rising, one waning, both turning in peerless performances. Here Buscemi's protruding Peter Lorre eyes and overcrowded mouth hint at soulfulness rather than the weaselly mendacity of Reservoir Dogs, while Cassel's galumphing ebullience is infectious ?his rough'n'tumble relationship with his skeletal co-star is reason enough to see the movie in itself. As is Buscemi's sardonic voiceover. After Skippy's murder, he muses, "Something had gone wrong. There must've been one pissed-off midget out there." Brilliant. Sadly, Rockwell's career didn't ignite after Sundance '92, and was dogged by repetition and stagnation (see his Four Rooms story and his 1998 'Soup knock-off Louis & Frank) whereas Tarantino's was defined, as we know, by blinding dynamism and regeneration. Which somehow makes this tale of cinematic passion and noble failure even more crushingly poignant.

DESPITE ALL THE giddy revisionist hyperbole about midnight screenings, mass faintings and studio bidding wars during the unveiling of Reservoir Dogs at the 1992 Sundance Film Festival, the real winner of that year (with a Grand Jury prize to show for it, plus a Special Recognition award, compared to Tarantino’s big fat zilch) was Alexandre Rockwell’s sly, unassuming In The Soup. The movie was the then-35-year-old Rockwell’s third attempt at a breakthrough picture, and though it bravely satirises the lot of the ambitious yet essentially mediocre film-maker, it does so with the effortless grace of a seasoned auteur.

We have new-wave wannabe Aldolpho Rollo (Steve Buscemi), burdened by his own artistic pretensions and an obtuse 500-page screenplay called Unconditional Surrender. Aldolpho is broke, he can’t afford to eat, he does nude cable TV for cash and has fallen behind on his rent. Enter garrulous Mafia hood and sometime aesthete Joe (Cassavetes regular Seymour Cassel) with the promise of full $250,000 budget. There’s just one catch…

OK, so the premise isn’t revolutionary (and the likes of Bullets Over Broadway and Get Shorty have since made it feel even less so), but that’s not Rockwell’s priority. Instead he lets the story, told in inky monochrome, roll inexorably towards a bittersweet climax while he concentrates on razor-sharp character work and comic vignettes, like the crooning mobsters who sing Sinatra before extorting rent, or Joe’s psychopathic haemophiliac brother Skippy (Will Patton), or Gregoire (Stanley Tucci), the hysterical French lover of Aldolpho’s neighbour and secret crush Angelica (Rockwell’s then wife Jennifer Beals), or the angry drug-dealing midget from Brooklyn with his ape-man bodyguard. And at the centre of all this there’s Buscemi and Cassel? two stars of American indie credibility, one rising, one waning, both turning in peerless performances. Here Buscemi’s protruding Peter Lorre eyes and overcrowded mouth hint at soulfulness rather than the weaselly mendacity of Reservoir Dogs, while Cassel’s galumphing ebullience is infectious ?his rough’n’tumble relationship with his skeletal co-star is reason enough to see the movie in itself. As is Buscemi’s sardonic voiceover. After Skippy’s murder, he muses, “Something had gone wrong. There must’ve been one pissed-off midget out there.” Brilliant.

Sadly, Rockwell’s career didn’t ignite after Sundance ’92, and was dogged by repetition and stagnation (see his Four Rooms story and his 1998 ‘Soup knock-off Louis & Frank) whereas Tarantino’s was defined, as we know, by blinding dynamism and regeneration. Which somehow makes this tale of cinematic passion and noble failure even more crushingly poignant.

Like A Rat Out Of Hell

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THREE STARS BY any normal evaluation. For Crispin Glover fanatics, however, a five-star experience. No one was waiting for a remake of the 1971 horror in which Bruce Davison trained killer rats to eat Ernest Borgnine, but here it is. Glover steps delicately into Davison's pumps as Willard Stiles, the milquetoast living in a crumbling gothic pile with his dying mother, mocked mercilessly at work by R Lee Ermey (Kubrick's favourite Marine instructor, in the Borgnine role). He's the world's loneliest boy, but finds comfort, and a solution to torment, when he strikes up a loving friendship with hyper-intelligent basement rats Socrates and Ben and several thousand of their hungry chums. Glen Morgan's direction has the quirky stylisation of a kid's movie? think Mousehunt gone seriously wrong?but lacks pacing, and, crucially for a horror, contains not a single scare. Difficult to imagine who it's aimed at beyond Glover fans, who'll have a ball. Made-up to look like Franz Kafka, his performance has all the rhythm and sinister, icky undercurrents lacking elsewhere, a long solo of neurotic melancholy, sexual angst and explosive fits of screaming, crying and running headfirst into doors. That he sings Michael Jackson's "Ben's Song" over the credits is but the cherry on the sundae.

THREE STARS BY any normal evaluation. For Crispin Glover fanatics, however, a five-star experience. No one was waiting for a remake of the 1971 horror in which Bruce Davison trained killer rats to eat Ernest Borgnine, but here it is. Glover steps delicately into Davison’s pumps as Willard Stiles, the milquetoast living in a crumbling gothic pile with his dying mother, mocked mercilessly at work by R Lee Ermey (Kubrick’s favourite Marine instructor, in the Borgnine role). He’s the world’s loneliest boy, but finds comfort, and a solution to torment, when he strikes up a loving friendship with hyper-intelligent basement rats Socrates and Ben and several thousand of their hungry chums. Glen Morgan’s direction has the quirky stylisation of a kid’s movie? think Mousehunt gone seriously wrong?but lacks pacing, and, crucially for a horror, contains not a single scare. Difficult to imagine who it’s aimed at beyond Glover fans, who’ll have a ball. Made-up to look like Franz Kafka, his performance has all the rhythm and sinister, icky undercurrents lacking elsewhere, a long solo of neurotic melancholy, sexual angst and explosive fits of screaming, crying and running headfirst into doors. That he sings Michael Jackson’s “Ben’s Song” over the credits is but the cherry on the sundae.

Shaun Of The Dead

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Suburban horror comedy from the creators of warped sitcom Spaced. When a mysterious plague strikes London, Shaun (Simon Pegg) has to battle hordes of blood-crazed zombies to rescue his mum and girlfriend. The zombie sequences pastiche the genre, adding genuinely witty slapstick, and the script is as good as Spaced or better. A delight.

Suburban horror comedy from the creators of warped sitcom Spaced. When a mysterious plague strikes London, Shaun (Simon Pegg) has to battle hordes of blood-crazed zombies to rescue his mum and girlfriend. The zombie sequences pastiche the genre, adding genuinely witty slapstick, and the script is as good as Spaced or better. A delight.

What’s New Pussycat?

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Definitively 'zany' '60s farce, written by Woody Allen, with Peter O'Toole as a Paris fashion editor inundated with willing, eager ladies. This sends him to mad shrink Peter Sellers, who's jealous. Meanwhile, Allen longs for O'Toole's fianc...

Definitively ‘zany’ ’60s farce, written by Woody Allen, with Peter O’Toole as a Paris fashion editor inundated with willing, eager ladies. This sends him to mad shrink Peter Sellers, who’s jealous. Meanwhile, Allen longs for O’Toole’s fianc

The Station Agent

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In a New Jersey backwater, Fin (Peter Dinklage), a dwarf fed up with the way the world reacts to him, moves into the derelict train station he's inherited and tries to ignore offers of friendship from a lonely snack-van man (Bobby Cannavale) and a divorced artist (Patricia Clarkson). Tom McCarthy's gem has something like the drift and precision of early Jarmusch?nothing much happens, except life.

In a New Jersey backwater, Fin (Peter Dinklage), a dwarf fed up with the way the world reacts to him, moves into the derelict train station he’s inherited and tries to ignore offers of friendship from a lonely snack-van man (Bobby Cannavale) and a divorced artist (Patricia Clarkson).

Tom McCarthy’s gem has something like the drift and precision of early Jarmusch?nothing much happens, except life.

The Charge Of The Light Brigade

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Tony Richardson's 1968 version of the military disaster mirrors the decade it was made in, with a strong anti-war theme. David Hemmings is a young trooper, Trevor Howard his brutal commanding officer and John Gielgud the high-ranking buffoon who orders the attack. An ambitious mess, but still compelling.

Tony Richardson’s 1968 version of the military disaster mirrors the decade it was made in, with a strong anti-war theme. David Hemmings is a young trooper, Trevor Howard his brutal commanding officer and John Gielgud the high-ranking buffoon who orders the attack. An ambitious mess, but still compelling.

Luis Buñuel Box Set

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Three of Bu...

Three of Bu

Zatoichi

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Takeshi "Beat" Kitano goes blond as well as blind to resurrect the long-running samurai avenger, and has more fun with it than original star Shintar...

Takeshi “Beat” Kitano goes blond as well as blind to resurrect the long-running samurai avenger, and has more fun with it than original star Shintar

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