DIRECTED BY Michael Moore

STARRING Michael Moore, George W Bush, Osama Bin Laden

Opens July 2, Cert TBC, 121 mins

In principle, Michael Moore seems like a good thing. He’s grass-roots politics’ own 300lb gorilla film-maker, an instantly recognisable gadfly guru in a baseball hat. After his Oscar-winning Bowling For Columbine, a string of best-selling books and now a Cannes victory to his name, Moore easily generates more press, positive and negative alike, than John Kerry, who’s supposed to be the left’s last hope for ousting George W Bush from office.

With his Palme d’Or-winning Fahrenheit 9/11, Moore adds armour to his knight errant image, going into combat with little more than stacks of statistics, rare news footage smuggled to him by reporter contacts, and a sarky sense of humour, lancing the Bush administration’s murderous mendacity while also laying bare the sheer pointless waste of human life that the war in Iraq has wrought. If seen by enough floating voters in America, it could potentially be more damaging to Bush’s re-election prospects than a hundred landfills-worth of Democratic pamphlets on foreign policy ever could.

Though Moore’s principles may be sound, you can’t help wishing his practice were sounder. Fahrenheit 9/11, like Bowling For Columbine, is an almost-great film?passionate and polemical, but also slapdash and silly. Like an out-of-shape boxer, Moore jabs well but gets lazy with his footwork, and throws too many punches that don’t quite connect, especially in the later rounds. He gets Dubya and co on the ropes, but then never delivers a knockout.

The film is worth seeing for its first finely focused hour alone. Wisely keeping himself out of the picture and the jokes to a minimum, Moore’s distinctive voiceover talks us through the now familiar story of how Bush snatched victory from Al Gore in the 2000 presidential elections and then proceeded to spend most of his first year in office playing golf. The sheer gormlessness of Bush is brought home in a chilling yet blackly comic sequence showing Dubya, frozen rabbit-like in the headlights, spending 10 minutes reading the children’s book My Pet Goat at a primary school moments after he’s been told a plane has flown into the World Trade Center. Stanley Kubrick and Terry Southern at their Strangelove-era peak couldn’t have made this sort of thing up. It’s the little details that deliver the cruellest body blows. Utilising skills honed from years of TV sketch comedy, Moore shows off Bush and his cronies at their worst in quickfire cutaways, from Dubya stumbling inarticulately with issues beyond his IQ to Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz sucking on his comb to wet down his hair for the cameras, and Attorney General John Ashcroft bellowing a loony patriotic ditty of his own composition in a cracked baritone. British left-leaning viewers will be disappointed Tony Blair doesn’t get a more thorough hiding, although he does appear in Moore’s Photoshopped pastiche of the opening credits of Bonanza, riding with Dubya’s cowpoke, crackpot coalition.

But Moore’s clowning over the long haul dilutes the effectiveness of his message. Suffering from a cinematic form of Attention Deficiency Disorder, Moore can’t construct an argument that takes longer than 15 minutes to explicate. He flits abruptly from delineating the links between the House of Bush and the House of Saud, to a fairly pointless sequence about a depressive state trooper guarding the Oregon coastline, landing awkwardly with plucky Michigan mother Lila Lipscomb, who’s lost her son in Iraq. Just when he’s about to wring real pathos from his material?with Lipscomb reading an angry letter from her son denouncing the current administration, written right before he was killed on manoeuvres?Moore fumbles the film’s final section with a stunt trying to get politicians in Washington to sign their own children up for the Army.

Maybe none of the film’s ‘revelations’ are that fresh, but, like a radical Ronald McDonald, Moore has packaged and processed them for the masses, with a side order of history and a super-sized ice-cold cup of polemic. Fast food for thought, and if it helps to change hearts, minds and voting habits this election year then we can live with a bit of flabby thinking.

OPENS JULY 23, CERT 18, 95 MINS

“Much more than an exploitation film,” the makers claim, but evidence for this is hard to unearth. Writer/director Jim Van Bebber’s reconstruction of the deranged lifestyle and ritual killings perpetrated by Charles Manson and his acolytes bears many of the hallmarks of a low-rent slashploitation pot-boiler, with scenes of soft-core group sex and several blood-drenched shootings all serving as a prelude to the notorious Sharon Tate murders.

The story of how the film itself was made is far more interesting than the result. Van Bebber began in 1988, but problems with distribution and funding meant it wasn’t completed until last year, which may explain why the plot has been hacked into bite-sized chunks. Marcelo Games looks like Manson, but the script never gets anywhere near explaining what made him monstrous. The only blessing is that the violence is so crudely enacted that the viewer is in little danger of suffering any sleepless nights.

OPENS JULY 16, CERT 15, 100 MINS

Break it down and it’s almost a parody of French cinema, complete with stylish icons doing their thing. Fanny Ardant and Gerard Depardieu are a bourgeois married couple; he’s philandering. As a form of revenge, she hires a “bar hostess/erotic dancer”, played by Emanuelle Beart, to seduce him then tell her the details. There’s much analysis of relationships, plenty of fatalistic intellectualising about sex, and enough of Beart’s beauty to placate the male gaze but steer shy of exploitation.

Yet for all the potential cliches, it works. Possibly because writer/director Anne Fontaine (Comment J’Ai Tu

OPENS JULY 30, CERT 18, 102 MINS

The title may threaten a rough ride, but former Skids frontman Richard Jobson’s feature debut as a director is surprisingly tender. Graced by striking visual flourishes and spot-on musical choices, this story of a young man emerging from the haze of alcoholism to make a bid for redemption has a raw, vivid sense of reality.

Kevin McKidd?long deserving of a leading role?plays Frankie, who we follow from a boyhood spent in his father’s shadow to his teenage years as a skinhead and his subsequent struggles to fit into sober society. Inspired by his own brother’s alcoholism, Jobson’s movie is indebted to Terrence Malick; images and sounds flow together in nostalgic reveries and years pass in the space of a single cut. The first three-quarters are exhilarating and emotionally charged, although Frankie’s final attempts to get a life feel protracted, with a hint of self-pity creeping in as the film searches for an honest conclusion. No harm done though; by then you’ll be well and truly hooked.

OPENS JULY 2, CERT 15, 96 MINS

This is a case of a movie wishfully billing itself as a comedy when, in fact, its tone is largely downbeat. Written and directed by Chris Cooke, One For The Road concerns three men?alcoholic salesman Paul, dopehead cabbie Mark and the desperately ambitious Jimmy?who meet on a rehabilitation course for drink drivers. There, they meet wealthy but lonely property developer Mark (Hywel Bennett) and realise that, if they butter him up right, he represents an excellent networking opportunity.

One For The Road’s funniest moments are the role-playing scenes at the rehab course, led by the insufferable Ian (Johnny Phillips). But the despondency of the young, lovelorn Jimmy, desperate to offload an unprofitable business concern he’s inherited and move to Thailand, eventually drag the film down into a morose mire, and it slithers to a bizarre, unresolved conclusion. The semi-improvised style also leads to inconsistencies of tone. Only Bennett’s bravura performance keeps the thing afloat.

DIRECTED BY Richard Linklater

STARRING Ethan Hawke, Julie Delpy

Opens July 30, Cert 15, 80 mins

Released in 1995, Richard Linklater’s Eurodrama Before Sunrise was a charming holiday romance, a post-grunge Brief Encounter. Reuniting the same actors/characters nine years on, this sequel feels more like a Lost In Translation for the Middle Youth generation, with the same tone but higher emotional stakes. First time around, Hawke’s American slacker Jesse was heading for Vienna to fly home, only to be diverted for an overnight wander through the Austrian capital by Delpy’s winsome French student, Celine. Drifting around the city’s picturesque back streets, talking and flirting, they finally agreed to meet there again six months later. A cute, simple, self-contained gem.

So why a Parisian sequel? No reason, besides the chance to tie up loose ends. Both Hawke and Delpy contribute to this screenplay this time, making off-screen parallels hard to ignore. Jesse is now an author, unhappily married with a young family, just as Hawke is now a part-time novelist recently separated from Uma Thurman. Meanwhile, Celine is an engaging kook and surprisingly decent songwriter, much like Delpy herself. Meeting again, both characters appear leaner, sadder, wiser, a shade or two more desperate.

Linklater retains the talkie format of the first film but finesses, it into 80 minutes of ‘real’ time, framing the entire drama as a single strolling conversation through Paris. Some of the dialogue sounds stilted and a little awkward, but no more than most real conversations between semi-strangers. Although tightly scripted and shot over 15 days, the whole enterprise feels improvised on the spot in a single afternoon. In other words, it works a treat, flowing with the naturalistic ease of New Wave masters like Francois Truffaut or Agnes Varda. As with a Swiss watch, you barely see the workings, and everything glides along like silk until the final, unexpected, exquisitely romantic payoff is left hanging in the air like perfume. Before Sunset is a small story, but thoroughly intoxicating.

DIRECTED BY Lauren Lazin

OPENS JULY 23, CERT U, 99 MINS

This is a sunny, souped-up Brief Encounter with sultry southern European passions bubbling up to supplant the painful English reserve of the latter. The plot is simple?an American spinster (Katharine Hepburn) travels to Venice, buys a goblet from a silky-tongued antiques dealer (Rossano Brazzi), and ends up tumbling into a passionate affair with him.

Lean was never supposed to have liked actors much, but he coaxed a beautifully nuanced performance out of Hepburn, defiant one moment, small and lonely when she thinks no ones’s watching. The suave Brazzi is everything she both wants and wants to run a mile from, and he’s confident her veneer of frostiness is no match for his unabashed sexuality. Fireworks both literal and metaphorical result. Venice itself is as big a star as the actors, and the architecture, canals and lagoon never looked more ravishing than in this restored Eastmancolor print. It’s a movie that deserves to be a lot better known.

OPENS JULY 23, CERT PG, 103 MINS

From Jean-Jacques Annaud (The Name Of The Rose, The Bear) comes the most feline-friendly movie since The Aristocats. Imagine the most breathtaking wildlife special you’ve ever seen, and you’re halfway there. Except that these big felines can act as well as any A-lister.

Granted, the editing’s clever, but that’s Annaud’s gift. While he’ll always be a good old-fashioned film-maker and never a great or radical one, ride the hiccups in the story and this rattles along with wide-eyed charm. A few decades ago in an exotic land, two cute tiger cubs are separated. One’s flogged to a circus, caged, his spirits battered. The other gets lucky as a rich boy’s pet, only to later be trained as a ruthless killing machine. Nasty humans then pit the brothers against each other in a gladiatorial battle?but will they recognise each other?

Guy Pearce is smooth as a Dr Livingstone-style adventurer, but doesn’t do much. It’s all about the tigers: stunning creatures, burning bright. A family film with guts. Also fur.