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!

OPENS JUNE 4, CERT 15, 98 MINS

This revelatory performance from Lee Evans sees him shed all traces of his familiar zany persona (along with his body hair) and replace it with a subterranean blue-grey skin hue that looks barely human.

Evans plays Sean Veil, a man so traumatised by his arrest and near conviction for a series of brutal murders that he decides he must account for every minute of his subsequent life, for fear of being accused again. To this end, he places himself under surveillance. Scores of tiny cameras map his every movement in his dungeon-like home. And on the rare occasion he goes out, Sean straps a portable camera to his chest. First-time writer/director John Simpson makes fantastic visual use of this narrative device?the film is told through snatches of grainy digital footage shot from spy cameras that peep at Sean from precarious angles.

Unfortunately, though it’s impressively realised, Simpson’s movie tails off towards the end. But when it works, it’s a genuinely sinister little thriller.

OPENS JUNE 18, CERT 15, 80 MINS

This is the story of Mark “Gator” Rogowski, the US pro-skateboarding champion who crashed and burned in the early ’90s, ultimately ending up in jail for murder at the age of 24. Just six years before, he was earning over $100,000 a year from tournaments and endorsements. But his celebrity faded with the advent of street skating (he was a star of the ramp), and his sanity swiftly followed. One minute he had a pop-star lifestyle?girls, parties, big house?the next he was a reclusive timebomb:drunken, lonely, unable to deal with the world. Then, in 1991, he raped and murdered Jessica Bergston, a friend of his ex-girlfriend.

We only hear a repentant Gator talking to director Helen Stickler on a crackly phone line from jail, but archive footage compensates, especially some arrogant TV interviews from the late ’80s (“I love getting arrested!”). The film is rough at the edges, and its storytelling is sometimes confused, but it is an entertaining slice of pop cultural history.

OPENS JUNE 11, CERT 12A, 70 MINS

The Makhmalbafs are the first family of Iranian film?the Coppolas, if you like, of Middle Eastern cinema. Father Mohsen is a veteran director, and his daughter Samira, although only 22, has three pictures under her belt, the last of which, At Five In The Afternoon, was an acclaimed portrait of post-Taliban Kabul.

Now comes the debut film from Samira’s little sis, 14-year-old (yes, 14!) Hana. It’s a documentary about the filming of At Five In The Afternoon, concentrating on Samira’s attempt to cast non-professionals as her leads. As you’d expect from a film made by a 14-year-old, it’s rough and ready, and lacks the visual panache of its subject. But Joy Of Madness is also less didactic, full of touching portraits of ordinary people coping with life after the Taliban. Plus there’s a cherishable star turn from the indefatigable Samira as she cajoles bemused Afghanistanis into working for her. The film may be a bit slight to warrant a cinema release?its ideal home is surely as an extra on the At Five In The Afternoon DVD?but there’s still fascinating material here.

OPENS JUNE 18, CERT 12A, 88 MINS

Each June, in the small, well-heeled town of Siena outside Florence, thousands gather in the vast, sloping square to witness the infamous palio, a horse race which over the years has attracted the ire of animal rights activists, been the scene of vicious fist fights and become mired in shady dealing. It also inflames the passions of the 11 Siena districts who compete in the race. John Appel’s documentary is set in the tiny Civetta district in the weeks prior to the race. Civetta has not won the palio since 1979, and this sorely affects the pride of its residents. But this year they have their best chance in living memory to make amends…

The Last Victory grippingly depicts the strangely cloistered lives of the Civetta residents and their peculiarly intense attachment to their neighbourhood, as well as their huge emotional investment in the race. As the day approaches, there’s no joy in their faces, be it the 92-year-old Edigio or a young female student?only the sickly dread of failure. And, by the end, you’re just as nervous as they are.