OPENS AUGUST 13, CERT 15, 119 MINS

Coming on the back of Saving Private Ryan and Boiler Room, Pitch Black encouraged critics to imagine Vin Diesel might be the next Arnie. In the four years since we have learnt to lower our sights. The next Steven Seagal, more like.

Pitch Black 2 takes up a notional five years later. Forced out of hiding by mercs (bounty hunters), Riddick is the last of the Furions, which puts him top of the hit-list for Lord Marshal (Colm Feore), leader of the Necromongers?a kind of thespian death cult. Bizarrely, Dame Judi Dench floats through proceedings as a kind of ethereal sci-fairy godmother.

Vin certainly looks the part-and sounds it, too. If mountains could speak, this is what they might sound like. Too bad writer-director David Twohy only supplies him with groaners like: “It’s a long time since I smelled beautiful.” The CGI production design is a handsome Deco-Roman Dune rip-off. But computers can’t generate excitement, and Riddick ultimately smells like stale goods.

OPENS AUGUST 6, CERT 12A, 98 MINS

In the time-honoured tradition of body-swap comedies-Big, Freaky Friday, er, Face/Off-comes a sugary mainstream vehicle designed to do for rising Alias star Jennifer Garner what Pretty Woman did for Julia Roberts. There’s no mistaking it’s a chick flick from hat to heels, but it has a few shrewdly funny scenes, and an ’80s retro soundtrack boasting Talking Heads, Soft Cell and Pat Benatar’s “Love Is A Battlefield”. When Jen quotes the lyrics to this, her co-stars go, “Wow. That’s so…deep.”

As a 13-year-old in ’87, Jenna (Garner) is frustrated. She wishes she was 30, and some sparkly magic dust does the rest. Now it’s 2004, and Jenna’s spooked by mobile phones, bewildered by her boobs, horrified by naked men and urging everyone to dance to Jacko’s “Thriller”. She’s a hotshot NY magazine editor, and there are quality jokes at the industry’s expense. She’s also besotted with childhood sweetheart Mark Ruffalo: cue heavy rotation of Madge’s “Crazy For You”. You’ll chuckle, despite yourself.

OPENS AUGUST 27, CERT 15, 93 MINS

Here’s Colin Firth, trying to banish forever the memory of being “television’s Mr Darcy”, teaming up with Resurrection Man and My Little Eye director Marc Evans to make something edgy and intense, a dark psychological thriller. With ants. Oh, dear.

Colin plays Ben, left comatose following a car crash in which his wife died. Recently awoken, he now lives in a Gothicky converted hospital in grim old east London, with nothing but an ant farm for company and Mena Suvari as his neighbour. Ben starts having visions of his dead wife. But is she really dead? And is Mena herself real or a figment of Ben’s rapidly fragmenting imagination? And what goes on downstairs in the gloomy old boiler room…?

Evans third is, frankly, a mess, littered with clich

OPENS AUGUST 13, CERT PG, 116 MINS

My Architect… sees Nathaniel Kahn travel across America, to Israel and to Bangladesh in search of the truth about his father, the highly renowned architect Louis Kahn, who died in 1974, bankrupt and alone, and who was discovered to have been conducting three separate, secret relationships. The father appears in old film footage, as fleeting and generally elusive as he was in life. The picture that emerges is that of a determined, obstreperous, ingenious emigr

DIRECTED BY Sam Raimi

STARRING Tobey Maguire, Kirsten Dunst, James Franco, Alfred Molina

Opened July 15, Cert PG, 127 mins

After grossing more than $800 million in 2002 and converting comic-book sceptics the world over, Steve Ditko and Stan Lee’s iconic creation is back for another crack at web-spinning world domination.

Sam Raimi’s original cast and crew are reunited for this better, stronger, faster sequel. Ignore similar claims that may have been made (even by Uncut) on behalf of Raimi’s original, Richard Donner’s Superman or Bryan Singer’s X-Men 2?this, frankly, is the best superhero flick ever made.

The basic plot is ripped straight out of Ditko & Lee’s original comic books. Peter Parker (Maguire) is having trouble living up to his late Uncle Ben’s mantra: with great power comes great responsibility. Pining for a normal life where he can give up wall-crawling and spend more time with his girlfriend Mary Jane (Dunst), Peter attempts to bin his costume and retire from superheroics. Meanwhile, best friend Harry Osborn (Franco) is becoming obsessed with hunting down Spidey, who he blames for the death of his father, Norman Osborn aka The Green Goblin. When a horrific lab accident transforms Osborn-sponsored scientist Otto Octavius (Molina) into the psychotic, metal-tentacled Dr Octopus, Harry hires Doc Ock to track down the inactive wall-crawler?all of which culminates in one almighty face-off.

Raimi and his scriptwriters have distilled several years of comic-book continuity into a gripping action flick that’s both outrageously exciting and?yes?genuinely moving. Despite his undoubted genius for delivering audacious roving camera shots (back with a vengeance after being downplayed in the first instalment), Raimi’s major achievement with Spider-Man 2 is understanding that human drama lay at the heart of Spidey’s web-swinging superheroics. Peter Parker is a regular guy with regular problems who just happens to have been given an amazing gift and a set of deep-seated principles.

Stuffed with great performances, eye-popping special effects, bang-on-the-money humour and real drama, Spider-Man 2 is the ultimate slam-bang summer event movie. Where on earth can Raimi go with part three?

DIRECTED BY David Mamet

STARRING Val Kilmer, Derek Luke, William H Macy

Opens August 6, Cert 15, 106 mins

Nobody makes gusty dramas better than Chicago playwright/director David Mamet, and this relentless conspiracy thriller jumps straight to the top of his already impressive cinematic CV.

Val Kilmer, right back at the peak of his form, plays lone-wolf special forces agent Robert Scott, a roving assassin for an ultra-secret unit of the US Army. When the president’s daughter is kidnapped from college by a bunch of white slavers unaware of her political significance, Scott is partnered with rookie agent Curtis (Luke) and ordered to track down and rescue the missing girl before the press pick up the story. Scott’s ruthless, stop-at-nothing dedication brings him within a hair’s breadth of finding the girl before his mission is brought to an abrupt halt, leaving the idealistic Curtis to instigate an unofficial investigation that uncovers a conspiracy leading straight to the cold, dark heart of the US government.

Spartan has everything you could want from a David Mamet flick: seductively labyrinthine plotting, razor-sharp dialogue, rock-solid acting and a healthy undercurrent of government-baiting cynicism. The first, and best, hour is a masterclass in tension-building, and delivers complex plot exposition via pared-to-the-bone dialogue and understated performances.

A number of ever-reliable Mamet stock players are on hand to flesh out this dark political world. Ed O’Neill’s Burch and William H Macy’s Stoddard are dead-eyed officials who project genuine menace, while Antwone Fisher’s Luke contributes a quietly effective performance as the partner-cum-conscience who ultimately spurs Scott to question his superiors.

Spartan is as much Val Kilmer’s triumph as it is Mamet’s. Harnessing the leading-man brilliance he’s always been capable of, Kilmer is utterly convincing as the consummate, albeit conflicted, assassin?a man who is equally at home inspiring troops, manipulating witnesses or executing enemies of the state.

Blessed with such a charismatic central performance, Spartan powers its way through some routine second-half heroics, showcases Mamet the film-maker at his hardboiled best and emerges as that cinematic rarity: an ass-kicking action thriller with style and brains.

OPENS AUGUST 27, CERT 12A, 117 MINS

The title refers to the formal way to behave before a Japanese emperor during feudal times, a concept that seems faintly ridiculous and completely undignified to the Western mind. And this culture clash, the lack of common ground between the Orient and the Occidental, is the crux of the entire film. It’s like Lost In Translation without the scope, the humour or the achingly cool soundtrack. Based on Am

OPENS AUGUST 27, CERT 15, 104 MINS

Although the new wave of Asian horror set into motion by Ring still delivers plenty of shocks and surprises, the high level of output leaves plenty of scope for filler. Ahn Byeoung-ki’s supernatural murder-mystery is a fair-enough time-waster for completists, but the endless grinding of its expository mechanics makes it something of a chore. After a creepy prologue set in an elevator, the story proper creaks into motion: Ji-won is a reporter whose articles on sexual abuse have made her the target of crank phone calls (even worse, the new number she gets appears to be cursed). When her friend’s young daughter takes one of these calls by mistake and subsequently starts acting like a little Linda Blair, the jumble of clues, flashbacks and eerie occurrences start to fall into place. Ahn should be credited for couching his scary moments in a sturdier, more complex plot than other films of its type, but following it still feels like hard work. This Phone just doesn’t Ring.

OPENS AUGUST 13, CERT 15, 115 MINS

Asian horror-unsentimental, intelligent and deadly serious?is pretty much unimpeachable right now, so no surprise that this dark gem should emerge from Korea. Kim Ji-woon has previously dealt in black comedy (The Foul King), but here adopts the language of horror to spin a tangled tale of grief, dysfunction and regret. The outline is slight: sisters Soo-mi (Lim Su-jeong) and Soo-yeon (Mun Geun-yeong) return home after an unspecified illness and are soon squabbling with their despised stepmom (Yum Jung-ah). Not long after, strange things start to occur, half-seen shapes and scary noises about the house, as the past refuses to go away. It’s a classic premise that the director calmly twists inside out, messing with time and reality as he finds the menace in the everyday while events get darker and minds get damaged. An unsettling ride that demands a second viewing-though perhaps not in the form of the inevitable Hollywood remake that’s already in production.

OPENS AUGUST 20, CERT 15, 93 MINS

Hyped as the kind of film that would appeal to fans of Am

OPENS AUGUST 20, CERT 15, 92 MINS

Three months after their blazing turns in Starsky & Hutch, Vince Vaughn and Ben Stiller return on opposite sides of the gym court in this instant gonzo comedy masterpiece from first-time director Rawson Marshall Thurber.

Vaughn plays lackadaisical gym owner Peter La Fleur, an easygoing underachiever who’s being forced out of business by the Globo Gym chain, owned by preening fat-boy-turned-gym-nazi White Goodman (Stiller).

La Fleur enters the annual Las Vegas world dodgeball tournament, pitting his gym full of badly coordinated losers against Goodman’s psychotic muscleheads. Given that dodgeball seemingly consists of rock-hard baseballs being precision-propelled into players’ faces and testicles, there’s plenty of wince-inducing, no-holds-barred slapstick violence. If you like watching grown men and innocent bystanders getting smashed to pieces, this is the movie for you. Superb performances from the deadpan Vaughn and the fearless Stiller in one of the funniest films of the year

DIRECTED BY Richard Kelly

STARRING Jake Gyllenhaal, Drew Barrymore, Patrick Swayze

Opens August 27, Cert 12, 133 mins

Proper youth cult films don’t come along very often. Who would actually turn up to a midnight screening of Trainspotting or Slackers now? Donnie Darko, on the other hand… flea-pit cinemas around the US have been showing it constantly for 18 months, mostly to college-age repeat-viewers trying to work out what it’s about, failing, and staggering out like they’ve just OD’d on smack and acid. Everyone loves it. So why bother re-cutting it?

“I felt like there were always some plot holes and some moments that might have appeared like, oh, he’s just trying to confuse us or he’s trying to be weird,” Richard Kelly says of the original two-hour cut. So is this 133-minute version any clearer? Well, no.

The plot’s the same: oblique, dizzying, circular. Some deleted scenes have been re-inserted, fleshing out the parts of Donnie’s dad, sister (Maggie Gyllenhaal) and English teacher (Drew Barrymore). There are some visual effects-mostly when Donnie’s talking to death-bunny Frank?that arguably make the film more baroque and prog-like. But the major addition is the pages from The Philosophy Of Time Travel, the mad old lady’s book which supposedly enlightens Donnie. We get brief (too brief to read) glimpses, which initially promise to explain the whole thing: it’s about tangent universes! Of course! But then what are “the manipulated dead”? What’s a “living receiver”? Kelly dangles so much arcane information that, by the end (appropriately), you’re back where you started.

No clearer, then. Worth seeing? About 20 times at least.

OPENS AUGUST 20, CERT PG, 83 MINS

Alexander Sokurov was most recently responsible for Russian Ark, which magically took in the sweep of Russian history in a single, unblinking camera shot. Here, he returns to explore themes he took up in his previous movie, Mother And Son. Alexei attends military school with a view to becoming a soldier like his father, with whom he lives in a cloistered loft apartment. He has a girlfriend but can’t fully commit to her, so close is the bond with his father, who in turn dotes on his son because he reminds him of his late wife.

Despite an opening scene in which both father and son are entwined and writhing together (Alexei is being comforted by his father following a nightmare), Sokurov has indignantly refuted claims that the film is homoerotic, merely intense. But given the soft, idyllic fleshtones in which the film is bathed and the physical intimacy of their relationship, such connotations are hard to dismiss.

OPENS AUGUST 6, CERT 12A, 115 MINS

Based on an Isaac Asimov story, this is state-of-the-art sci-fi, slick and silvery. Directed by Alex Proyas, it’s intelligent, if not dauntingly so. Enjoyment’s boosted by the fact Will Smith makes the kind of him-against-the-world hero you can’t help rooting for. He’s muted the wisecracks, but man he looks cool in mid-air on a motorbike with two futuristic guns blazing.

It’s 2035, and robots are everywhere: helpful, industrious, courteous. But did a rogue machine bump off a scientist? Chicago cop Spooner (Smith) thinks so. Of course, nobody believes him, and you could run a book on how long it takes before his boss asks for his badge. With help from a psychologist (Bridget Moynahan), Will chases the errant, but there’s a full-on rise of the machines brewing, and our man’s motivation is fuelled by secrets of his own…

The robots, cityscapes, bangs and crashes make Minority Report seem as up-to-the-minute as Fritz Lang. Chrome sweet chrome.