DIRECTED BY Takashi Miike

STARRING Hideki Sone, Sho Aikawa, Komika Yoshino

Opens July 30, Cert 18, 130 mins

Wildly prodigious and prodigiously wild, director Takashi Miike has forged a reputation for assaulting the sensibilities and stomachs of his audiences. His gleefully perverse exercises in transgression (Audition, Ichi The Killer, The Happiness Of The Katakuris) take taboo-busting sex and violence to new extremes, fusing these essential elements and twisting them into alien cinematic shapes.

The fusing and twisting continue in Gozu, although this time Miike stretches his material, too, demanding patience from his fans as he takes a detour into David Lynch territory. When yakuza Ozaki (Sho Aikawa) starts to show signs of madness (his assassination of a Chihuahua being the most overt), his sidekick Minami (Hideki Sone) is ordered to eliminate him. Driving out into the country to do the job, Minami is alarmed when Ozaki dies accidentally and then… disappears. His attempts to find the body lead to encounters with a variety of strange locals, including a junkyard dweller who’s a yakuza disposal expert and a ferociously lactating innkeeper. But it’s Minami’s dreamlike confrontation with a cow-headed spirit (the mythological “gozu” of the title) and the appearance of a mysterious woman claiming to be Ozaki reincarnated that pushes the film into the outer-limits, even by Miike’s standards. While this surreal picaresque is by turns aimless and inspired, the demented climax will leave your jaw on the floor. Without giving too much away, a gangster boss’s… er…anal stimulant proves to be his undoing and the old, familiar Ozaki finally re-emerges from an unlikely source.

Miike may make more films than you can keep up with, but this one’s a keeper. It’s a slow-burn for sure, but the ending proves that Miike has known exactly what he’s doing all along, providing a pace, a structure and a playful sense of humour that give his shock tactics even more impact than in the past. Brace yourself…

OPENS JULY 9, CERT 15, 97 MINS

Another year, another feeble sub-Seven psychological thriller starring Ashley Judd. She showed such promise once. What’s even more galling is that this clich

OPENS JULY 30, CERT TBC, 108 MINS

Last Life In The Universe starts like Harold And Maude, with a morose young man’s farcical suicide attempt, and ends on an oblique grace note reminiscent of Hal Hartley. What happens in between is a shimmer of shifting genres and influences, part chaste romance, part ghost story, part culture-clash tale, even part mob drama when cult Japanese director Takashi Miike pops up as a colourfully outfitted gangster.

The suicidal Kenji (Tadanobu Asano) is a morose Bangkok librarian, trying to escape a shady past back in Japan. During another suicide attempt on a bridge, he sees a girl killed by a car and hooks up with her sister, Thai hooker Noi (Sinitta Boonyasak). He’s an obsessive neatnik, she’s a slob, but in a remote beach house the two draft a tentative romance, shot in a wash of liquid greens and blues by Wong Kar-Wai’s cinematographer Chris Doyle. Director Pen-Ek Ratanaruang (Monrak Transistor) here proves himself to be one of Asia’s hottest new talents.

OPENS JULY 2, CERT 12, 93 MINS

If you should happen upon some bloke in your local park surrounded by a gang of screaming kids, clutching his throat, thumping his chest, his eyes fit to bulge from their sockets, don’t dash in with the Heimlich. The poor sap’s just re-enacting the hairball scene from Shrek 2, a paternal occupation set to replace the hitherto unassailable “Don’t look down donkey” playground set-piece from the original Shrek.

The good news: Shrek 2 is great. Which is crucial considering many of us dads are doomed to sit through it hundreds of times on DVD. This time Shrek (Mike Myers), Fiona (Cameron Diaz) and Donkey (Eddie Murphy) meet new characters including Rupert Everett’s uberfey Prince Charming and Antonio Banderas’ Puss In Boots, a catnip-smoking kittiefucka.

The bad news: thanks to the trip to Far Far Away, your offspring will think it hilarious to repeatedly ask “Are we there yet?” during every car journey. Bastards!

OPENS JULY 23, CERT TBC, 77 MINS

Recent Iranian art house cinema has been rightly applauded in the West for daring visual panache and effortless formal invention. So the most surprising thing about this latest release from Iran is how utterly conventional it is.

Not that there’s anything wrong here. Abdolrasoul Golbon’s debut is a solidly crafted study of 17-year-old Eidak’s frustrations with his lot as a shepherd on Iran’s mountainous border with Afghanistan. The opening reel is a delicate portrait of his tough existence, imbued with a quiet naturalism reminiscent, although not quite the equal of, Satyajit Ray’s Apu trilogy. When Eidak swears revenge on the city engineer responsible for the death of his father, there are moments of clunky melodrama, and the moral choices Eidak is faced with are a tad schematic. But the film is engaging and assured, and its final moments?where Eidak’s plans to emigrate come to a kind of fruition?are as devastating as anything in Michael Winterbottom’s far starker film about people-smuggling, In This World.

OPENS JULY 2, CERT TBC, 85 MINS

Taipei, summer. It’s hot. Be-dimpled spiky-haired school stud Zhang Shihao (Bo-Lin Chen) has fallen for kooky but feisty Meng Kerou (Lun-Mei Guey). Only problem is Meng, who has ‘gender issues’, has fallen for girlfriend Lin Yuezhen (Shu-hui Liang). And to make matters worse, pretty but shy Lin is obsessed with Zhang!

The kind of flick that would be complete cheese if pumped out by a major studio somehow reaches near-transcendent heights in the hands of second-time director Chin-yen Yee. Yes, he frames gorgeously, shoots under metallic blue Taiwanese night skies, and isolates the protagonists almost entirely from the adult world (although these are chaste kids?lock-lipped kisses is as far as it goes). But, most importantly, he treats the subject of adolescent love with the deadly earnestness it deserves?some tense, taciturn scenes are reminiscent of Bergman, while the juvenile cast interact with impressively fraught intensity. The Taiwanese Teen Movie phenomenon starts here!

OPENS JULY 2, CERT 15, 103 MINS

Greg Kinnear and Rebecca Romijn-Stamos play Paul and Jessie Duncan, a professional urban couple with a seven-year-old son, Adam. When Adam dies in a car accident, kindly geneticist Dr Richard Wells (Robert De Niro) offers to retrieve Adam’s cells, clone him and return an identical foetus to Jessie’s womb. The only catch is, they’ll have to raise Adam in Dr Wells’ private rural community.

Cut to seven years later and everything is going swimmingly until Adam Mk II outlives the original, whereupon he becomes a very troubled kid?thousand yard stares, homicidal behaviour. Is Adam remembering his former life/death, or is something more sinister going on? Is Dr Wells all he seems? The answer is, of course, “no”, and what starts as a well-played psychological thriller/rumination on scientific ethics descends into the usual mix of jump-cuts, pyrotechnics and logic-defying plot twists. Good, unnerving fun for the first hour, though.

DIRECTED BY Takashi Shimizu

STARRING Megumi Okina, Takako Fuji, Yuya Ozeki

Opens July 2, Cert 15, 92 mins

Prepare yourself for a fresh batch of Japanese psychological horror movies being remade in Hollywood. This creepy Japanese film?the culmination of two earlier video releases in Japan?is from the same production stable as The Ring, and will soon receive a similar US makeover. In Japan, the sequel is already in the can.

Rika (Okina), a young social worker, is called out to the home of Sachie, an elderly woman who lives alone in a suburban home in Tokyo. While Sachie cowers in her bed, Rika breaks the cardinal rule?don’t explore a haunted house alone. Gradually, the ghostly presence lurking in the property reveals itself to be an oversized black cat and a mute young boy, Toshio?as potent an icon of the new wave of Japanese horror as The Ring’s Sadako?before a thick, black vapour swallows up Sachie altogether.

These mysterious, unexplained forces proceed to terrorise, possess and destroy a whole series of characters. The subsequent deaths of Sachie’s son and daughter-in-law spark off a police investigation that gradually reveals the grim legacy of the old woman’s home.

The vengeful ghost is a familiar figure in Japanese horror. Tracing the story backwards, through the numerous victims of the house, we discover the origin of the curse, tied to the brutal massage of an entire family who lived there. The grudge of the title is the curse now unleashed on those who come into direct contact with the house and its purposeful but angry spirit. The film’s confusing plot, swinging between past and present, detracts from the claustrophobia and mystery of the story, and the characters are muddled. Still, Ju-On: The Grudge hits all the right horror buttons?grim music, sinister child, mysterious house?to be determinedly creepy, even if its mechanisms of fear are repetitive. The image of the possessed, taciturn child is a powerful one, while the palette of cold blues and white is particularly effective. The Hollywood remake, though, will surely be less stark and more straightforward.

OPENS JULY 9, CERT 15, 95 MINS

Half the population of Iceland saw Fridrik Thor Fridriksson’s last film, Angels Of The Universe. Okay, so the Icelandic population’s small, but that gives you some indication of the esteem in which he’s held there. His main influence is Kurosawa. This, then, is no explosive thrill ride but melancholy art house cinema of the highest order.

Keith Carradine plays Simon, a man who’s spent too much time in US jails, taken too many blows and can’t face any more. He returns to Iceland, his ancestral homeland, to consider suicide. Then fate introduces him to free spirit Dua (Margr

OPENS JULY 30, NO CERT, 114 MINS

Coming-of-age sports movies tend to adhere to a formula and, in essence, this debut feature from computer-effects whiz Fumihiko Sori is no exception. Familiar setbacks and triumphs are all present and correct, but this adaptation of a five-volume manga delivers enough character quirks, visual flair and unique detail to make it the Japanese equivalent of a Wes Anderson film.

Friends since childhood, the wild, outgoing Peco (Y

OPENS JULY 2, CERT 15, 100 MINS

Chabrol seems to have a taste for morbid, murderous secrets that ruffle the comfort of bourgeois existence. But his latest, the tale of a wealthy Bordeaux family, seems rather prosaic next to the suffocating, gothic malevolence of predecessors like Merci Pour La Chocolat.

Fran

OPENS JULY 2, CERT 12A, 124 MINS

The smart feature debut from Faouzi Bensa