DIRECTED BY Wayne Kramer

STARRING William H Macy, Alec Baldwin, Maria Bello, Ron Livingston

Opens June 18, Cert 15, 101 mins

No-one plays downtrodden losers better than Uncut favourite William H Macy, and this dark Vegas fable from South African writer/director Wayne Kramer hands him the biggest loser of his career. Macy’s Bernie Lootz is the king of fuck-ups, cursed with the worst luck of all time. Which is just as well, because Bernie is employed as a “cooler” by satanic gambling boss Shelly Kaplow (Baldwin). Lootz roams the playing tables of Shelly’s beleaguered casino, The Shangri-La, passing on this bad luck to every high-roller he rubs up against. That is, until he falls in love with sassy cocktail waitress Natalie (Bello) and his gift for calamity deserts him, to Shelly’s considerable displeasure. Shelly has enough on his plate without worrying about Bernie’s unacceptable streak of good fortune?his mob paymasters have brought in slick moneyman Larry Sokolov (Livingston) to redevelop The Shangri-La into a casino-cum-holiday resort, replete with theme rides and children’s attractions. Soon, both men are battling with their neon-lit destiny: Bernie attempts to escape Shelly’s monstrous patronage while Shelly wrestles to keep his old-school casino dream intact.

Macy hits a career high here. No matter how bad it gets for Bernie, the tenor of his performance means that the audience never loses hope?we’re willing him to succeed. He’s perfectly complemented by Bello as his damaged-yet-spirited love interest. Bello is by far the best tough-as-nails actress currently working in Hollywood. As with her criminally overlooked performance in Mel Gibson’s Payback, she contributes an undercurrent of raw emotional need to Natalie’s outwardly hard-bitten demeanour. Her graphic love scenes with Macy are refreshingly fearless and ‘real’ in a way that mainstream Hollywood usually avoids. There’s no faux-erotic Zalman King gloss on show here?just the awkward, uncomfortable reality of two battle-scarred souls finding each other and falling in love.

Band Of Brothers alumnus Livingston is suitably reptilian as Shelly’s corporate ladder-climbing nemesis, while hollow-cheeked ex-marine (and mob movie stalwart) Arthur J Nascarella excels as Shelly’s seemingly more rational and sympathetic boss, Nicky “Fingers” Bonnatto. That is, until we see him beating seven shades out of a big-mouthed redneck on the floor of The Shangri-La. In Kramer’s script (co-written with Scottish gambling expert Frank Hannah), there are no civilised men running the Vegas money palaces, just different types of monster.

Which brings us to Alec Baldwin, quite rightly Oscar-nominated for his blistering performance here. In a film full of sharp-suited, larger-than-life monsters, Baldwin is the undisputed daddy. His evil, bullying Shelly dominates the screen from the moment he bludgeons his way into focus with a growling Mamet-style rant. Spearing underlings with his psychotic piercing gaze, shooting ageing crooners full of smack and doling out savage beatings left, right and centre, this is the kind of deranged, magnificent role that Baldwin was born to play.

South African Kramer’s US feature debut is a brilliant character piece doubling as a visceral tribute to the mythic Las Vegas of countless hardboiled B-movies. Set amid the vintage casinos of Fremont Street rather than the kitsch-heavy gambling theme parks of the Strip, The Cooler peels back the layers of Sin City’s rotten underbelly, vividly capturing the hypnotic menace of a corrupt town that won’t set Bernie and Shelly free. Kramer’s plot is heavy on improbable, credulity stretching incident that serves to enhance his vision of Vegas as a velvet-draped Twilight Zone in which anything can happen, most of it bad. Forget the squeaky-clean desert paradise on show every week in CSI and James Caan’s tourist-board-friendly Sky One drama?this is Vegas as it should be.

OPENS JUNE 11, CERT 12A, 95 MINS

Decrepit, poverty-stricken villages. Searing desert heat. Bonkers religious edicts, repressed women, and lots of shouting. Yes, it’s our Iranian movie of the month. And yet this, the third film from writer-director Babak Payami (Secret Ballot), certainly has the edge on the Kiarostamis and Makhmalbafs. For a start, there’s the knockout central conceit: a soulful Executioner (real-life kung-fu champ Narouli) must marry, deflower and then execute a condemned Virgin (Moghaddam). Then there’s the black humour: “It must be written somewhere,” shrugs a village elder lazily when his religious authority is questioned. Plus there’s a hint of genre decadence here: Payami (who studied film in Toronto) has created an Iranian western, with the Executioner serving as a hired gun for local autocrat Haji, who later turns on his rebellious prot

OPENS JUNE 18, CERT 15, 101 MINS

Thirtysomething Abel (Alex Brendem

OPENS JUNE 18, CERT TBC, 119 MINS

Not a film of the opera but a movie version of M

DIRECTED BY Roland Emmerich

STARRING Dennis Quaid, Jake Gyllenhaal, lan Holm

Opened May 28, Cert, 12A, 120 mins

A throwback to the disaster movies of the ’70s, this is cinema as pure spectacle, with cities destroyed, continents smothered in snow, and much in the way of self-sacrifice, square-jawed heroics and the indomitability of the human spirit. It’s the kind of movie popcorn was invented for.

Quaid is Jack Hall, a paleoclimatologist who believes the world is at risk from cataclysmic climate change. Only no one’s listening?least of all America’s Vice President. “My 17-year-old kid knows more about science than he does,” growls Hall. They’re still not listening when research buoys in the North Atlantic start recording unprecedented temperature drops, nor when hail the size of golf balls hits Tokyo. It takes nothing less than the destruction of downtown LA by tornadoes before anyone starts paying attention.

Hall gets to spend the next 40 minutes or so watching the world kicked violently into a third Ice Age. Meanwhile, his son Sam (Gyllenhaal) is in New York on a school trip, trapped in a public library with a handful of survivors after a giant tsunami drowns Manhattan. “I will come for you, you understand?” bellows dad.

The movie is split into two halves. Act 1 sees traumatic climate upheaval leave the northern hemisphere uninhabitable, with Emmerich taking the carnage wrought in Independence Day to the next level.

Act 2 follows the impact of events on a handful of key survivors as they contend with plummeting temperatures, marauding wolves and Russian oil tankers cruising down Fifth Avenue, while also wrestling with Big Questions regarding the future of mankind?like, which books do they burn to keep warm? A Gutenberg Bible or the works of Nietzsche? Emmerich pulls off this shift in perspective smoothly, replacing the effects-driven apocalypse with human tragedies that sustain the tension long after the initial spectacle is over. His script, though, is clunky as Hell, and his characters painted in the broadest of strokes. It’s only strong performances from Quaid (driven) and Gyllenhaal (plucky) that keeps you from swallowing your tongue during the more leaden exchanges.

Ignore, too, the risible flag-waving hogwash at the end and enjoy a superior piece of multiplex nonsense.

DIRECTED BY Andrew Douglas

STARRING Jim White, Johnny Dowd, The Handsome Family

Opens June 28, Cert 12A, 85 mins

Showing for a limited time at London’s National Film Theatre prior to an airing on television, this is film-maker Andrew Douglas’ road trip through America’s Deep South, inspired by Jim White’s creepy-strange 1997 debut, The Mysterious Tale Of How I Shouted Wrong-Eyed Jesus.

“If there’s no moderation,” Jim White told Uncut recently, “the truth is easier to apprehend. Only it’s wearing a Halloween costume. It’s not the friendly face of truth. It’s kinda scary.” Trawling the truck stops, coal mines, prisons, “cut’n’shoot” bars and Pentecostal churches in a beat-up 1970 Chevy (with a 6ft effigy of Christ jammed in the trunk), White himself acts as tour guide in this riveting film.

And what does White find? A populace riven by extremes, dirt-poor white folk caught between Jesus and Hell with nothing in between. With backwater trailer parks dotting the horizon like shanty tombstones, a spiritual desperation emerges, born of isolation, where even grief is something to hold on to. It reminds you you’re still alive. At Concordia Correctional Facility, Louisiana, inmates explain simply that “doing bad is exciting.” Outside, a gun-toting Hell’s Angel wannabe unloads at a “Stop” sign. For him, being bad beats being nothing. White uncovers cyclical patterns of behaviour?on every smalltown fringe there lurks artists, criminals and religious fanatics, hollow-eyed souls for whom sin is a time-honoured ritual. Along the way, Johnny Dowd, The Handsome Family, David Eugene Edwards, David Johansen and knotty old-time banjoist Lee Sexton provide musical interludes in barber shops, houseboats and midnight parking lots (the soundtrack’s a killer, obviously).

Despite reinforcing the view of the American South as a grisly car-smash of humanity, full of freaky Deliverance hicks and Rod Steiger cops, White’s take is ultimately sympathetic. It’s a world free from sophisticated distraction, forced to stare down the truth. Communities ruled by what Flannery O’Connor called “wise blood”. Most tellingly, writer Harry Crews explains that southern culture finds its identity in deep traditions of storytelling. It’s their way of righting an imperfect world. Genuinely compelling.

OPENS JUNE 4, CERT 12A, 117 MINS

Considered outrageous in 1935, Jacques Feyder’s intriguing satire is not just a worthy archive trophy but a true oddity. Even now, there’s something bewitchingly bonkers about it. It holds its own logic, and, if a little long for a comedy of politics, it’s brain food to show up a concept like The Stepford Wives. In fact Feyder and wife Fran

OPENS JUNE 4, CERT 15, 107 MINS

A monster hit in Australia, this asks Toni Collette to carry us through fierce gear-shifts, which she does admirably, giving it more emotional wallop than it’s otherwise pack. She’s a geologist who drives a prospective client, a Japanese businessman (Gotaro Tsunashima), into the Pilbara desert, at his request. As they delve deeper?geographically and personally?it mutates from road movie into something more intense.

At first they irritate each other. He thinks Aussie women are boorish; she finds him stuffily sexist. Pitched together by danger, they stumble upon intimacy. Each reassesses their identity, discloses some secrets, hides others.

Director Sue Brooks more than once hints we’re going in one direction, then swings us in another. Collette is estimable; her co-star?perhaps because he has to remain enigmatic?less so. It’s a story which knows humans don’t amount to a hill of beans in the face of a harsh landscape, but that their feelings can seem as big as planets.

DIRECTED BY Joel and Ethan Coen

STARRING Tom Hanks, Marlon Wayans, Irma P Hall

Opens June 25, Cert 15, 103 mins

Have Joel and Ethan finally lost the plot? For the makers of Blood Simple, The Big Lebowski and Fargo to settle for a laboured transposition of an Ealing masterpiece to the Mississippi Delta suggests creative bankruptcy. And to cast Tom Hanks in the role made untouchable in 1955 by the late Alec Guinness borders on rank stupidity.

Hanks conveys ‘humour’ here via two things: a set of false teeth and an annoying southern accent. True, he gets to deliver the odd witty line, but for the most part all you see is Hanks the noble-everyman-next-door straining desperately for absurdity.

The motley crew of fools Hanks’ character gathers about him to execute the dastardly robbery of a gambling riverboat is equally unfunny: comic cardboard cutouts to a man. Ryan Hurst plays a Neanderthal linebacker who can barely talk. Tzi Ma is one of those inscrutable Chinamen. Marlon Wayans offers a virtually racist parody of a ne’er-do-well.

As for the gospel-hollerin’ landlady who inadvertently thwarts their plans, Irma P Hall also smacks of caricature. When did the Coens forget how to create rounded human beings on screen, and how can they not see that their would-be affectionate portrayal of African-Americans is condescending?

The film looks great, of course: the Coens’ hyper-retro attention to period detail and place is as arresting as it has always been. But as with 1991’s Barton Fink, the conjuring of atmosphere comes at the expense of characterisation. There’s nothing more hollow in cinema than technique for technique’s sake.

When the brothers made their first real dud, 1994’s The Hudsucker Proxy, they bounced straight back with Fargo. They’ve now made three turkeys in a row and need to take time out to re-evaluate their schtick.

Roll over Alec Guinness, and tell Alexander Mackendrick the news.

DIRECTED BY Andrey Zvyagintsev

STARRING Ivan Dobronravov, Vladimir Garin, Konstantin Lavronenko

Opens June 25, Cert 12A, 106 mins

It’s almost impossible to believe that this could be a feature film debut. The Return, which has won a slew of prizes on the festival circuit, marks Siberian-born director Andrey Zvyagintsev out as a staggering breakthrough talent.

This Russian drama follows two teenage brothers, Vanya (Dobronravov) and Andrey (Garin), whose lives are thrown off-kilter by the sudden return, after a 12-year absence, of their father, a man who they know only through a faded photograph. Initially posing some obvious questions?where has their father been for the last 12 years? And why has he returned home now??Zvyagintsev intentionally skirts round the answers, leaving much unsaid, which brings a compelling layer of mystery to the movie.

The father takes the boys on what they believe is a fishing trip, and the brothers struggle to relate to him. Andrey, the older of the two, is compliant but Vanya, disappointed by this cold, authoritarian stranger, turns rebellious. What if he isn’t our father, he wonders, and a sense of foreboding grows.

The performances from all three of the central actors are outstanding (tragically, Vladimir Garin died in an accident shortly after the film was completed). And Zvyagintsev uses the stark, rain-lashed landscape to create hypnotic visual rhythms and a palpable sense of tension. Heroically restrained, Zvyagintsev’s direction is as powerful an argument as you’ll ever see for the truism that less is more.

OPENS JUNE 4, CERT 15, 103 MINS

Charming, and far more substantial than it first appears, this comedy drama discreetly turns up the heat as it goes along, reaching an emotional boiling point by the end. Imagine Steel Magnolias as directed by a Truffaut acolyte by way of Chekhov, but set in the Georgia that used to be in the Soviet republic.

In a book-lined house, three generations of women?Francophile granny Eka (Esther Gorintin), her widowed daughter Ada (Dinara Drukarova) and Ada’s daughter Marina (Nino Khomasuridze)?have maintained a fragile grip on survival ever since the never-seen Otar, Eka’s adored son, moved to Paris. But when they hear Otar has died, Ada and Marina conspire to hide the tragedy from Eka, fearful the news would kill her. As the gentle farce of forged letters and near misses unfolds, climaxing in a fateful trip to Europe, first-time director Julie Bertucelli winkles out an affectionate portrait of female resilience and life in blighted post-perestroika economies. Ultimately very touching.

OPENS JUNE 18, CERT 15, 86 MINS

This new version of Phil Karlson’s ass-kicking classic starring Joe Don Baker, now re-tooled as a vehicle for wrestler-turned-action star The Rock, is inoffensive fun if you can banish the memory of the original. Back then, Baker starred as real-life Tennessee sheriff Buford Pusser, who cleaned up his corrupt town with the aid of a big fuck-off plank of wood. Thirty-one years later, The Rock plays fictional Washington state sheriff Chris Vaughn and, apart from the hero’s sturdy slice of timber, any similarities are accidental. This is a fast-paced teen flick heavy on cartoon mayhem and light on the original’s dramatic power and wholesale bloodletting. It just about squeaks three stars because the fight scenes are efficiently assembled by director Kevin Bray. The Rock proves once again that, despite his unfortunate name, he has way more charisma than Schwarzenegger, while Band Of Brothers’ Neal McDonough is at his snide, unsympathetic best as the sneering casino boss-cum-villain.

OPENS JUNE 18, CERT U, 83 MINS

The limitless sea stretches out before us. Syrupy strings wail. The stentorian grumble of narrator Michael Gambon announces: “Our planet is a blue planet. Deep blue.” More water shots. “Deep blue,” Gambon repeats, needlessly, but with feeling. “The source of life itself!” And so begins an intercontinental oceanic megamix of now iconic, and frankly uninspired, natural history footage. Killer whales catching seal pups? Yep. Penguins jumping out of the water? Of course. Tiny comedy crabs ‘dancing’ on a beach? Natch. Gambon returns later on, during a climactic whale hunt, with an hysterically unrestrained foam-flecked commentary (“They try to push him away from the mother! They try to drown him!!”), but mostly this is visually repetitive aqua-fodder masquerading as transcendent spectacle. And while it’s not quite as pretentious as Luc Besson’s 1991 doc Atlantis, it is equally uninformative?why bother name-checking species or mentioning environmental issues when a bit of tinkly xylophone music will do? For Finding Nemo completists only.

DIRECTED BY Peter Bogdanovich

STARRING Kirsten Dunst, Eddie Izzard, Edward Herrmann

Opens June 4, Cert 12A, 112 mins

It’s based on a true story Peter Bogdanovich first heard from Orson Welles, and anyone intrigued by Hollywood Babylon-style scandal will purr at the prospect. The venerable director’s endured his own share of front-page trauma, and it’s a delight to see him back on class-by-clockwork form. If the utterly surreal ensemble cast gives you pause, rest assured this collision of oddballs makes it all the more wittily watchable.

Twenties Tinseltown, the Jazz Age. William Randolph Hearst (multi-millionaire publishing magnate, played by Herrmann) invites high society guests for a weekend of hedonism on his luxury yacht. Among the merry-makers are woman-magnet Charlie Chaplin (a surprisingly successful portrayal from Izzard), Hearst’s mistress Marion Davies (Dunst, vibrant), gossip columnist Louella Parsons (Jennifer Tilly) and British novelist Elinor Glyn (Joanna Lumley, absolutely posh), on whose writings many of Steven Peros’ screenplay’s best passages are founded. Also present are a hotshot producer (Cary Elwes) and various lackeys and molls. The atmosphere’s ritzily decadent but tense, with Chaplin hitting on Davies every time Hearst’s back is turned. And when hesitant lust lurches into shocking tragedy, the shallowness of showbiz ‘friendships’ is exposed.

Bogdanovich allows the inherent glamour and mythology to soak over us before playing the pay-off deadpan and letting the narcissistic characters stew. The truthful performances from the unlikely crew shape a genuine rapport. The director’s quietly aware that, dealing with “the curse of California” and a tale torn from the early drafts of Citizen Kane, he’s subtly referencing his own extraordinary life and career. The tyro who once ‘owned’ Hollywood (in 1971 his The Last Picture Show was hailed as “the most important work since Kane”), then saw his runaway train derailed by jealousy, egomania and the murder of his girlfriend, just needed to put his name to this to make muscular statements, with pathos. Bogdanovich would relish being an American life with a second act, and if there’s any justice this won’t be his last picture. The old dog’s delivered another diamond.

OPENS JUNE 18, CERT 12A, 102 MINS

They say fatherhood changes all men, but rarely can it have transformed the modus operandi of one as much as it has Smith’s. The scatological slacker behind Clerks, Chasing Amy and Dogma has gone all gooey on us, making a film about how great it is to forsake shallow city life and change nappies. There are some nasty one-liners, but it’s all a bit (whisper it) Richard Curtis.

Ben Affleck is left holding the baby when J-Lo dies during childbirth. He blows his cool, loses his high-flying job and leaves Manhattan to raise his daughter in drab Jersey. Years pass, and he’s settling into the quiet life when videostore worker Liv Tyler, taking pity on his porn habit, offers him his first sex in seven years. Reinvigorated, he tries to re-enter his old circle, but after a chance meeting with Will Smith (Matt Damon and Jason Biggs also cameo), reconsiders his priorities.

On its own terms, it’s sweet and funny, but you wouldn’t know this was a Kevin Smith film if it didn’t say so on the tin. At one point, it even says, “Accept who you are.” Man down!