Much as we love Robert Altman, we’ll be candid, or else you’ll think we’re afraid to ever criticise such a legend. Sometimes, watching The Company is like watching paint wonder whether or not to dry. The other director whose work comes to mind? Warhol, mostly. Not much happens, very slowly. And what does happen is ballet.

On the plus side, the visuals?the paints, if you like?look lovely. Altman’s view of ballerinas is clearly influenced by Degas. Everything’s tinted in pinkish hues and burned golden light (no red shoes, though). But let’s be clear: this is no subversive McCabe And Mrs Miller, and no satirical The Player. It’s Gosford Park, only more mum-friendly.

Bear in mind that The Company began life as Neve Campbell’s pet project. Keen to show there was more to her than Scream-ing, the young actress developed a story to show off her pre-acting talent. A ballet dancer since age six, she collaborated with Barbara Turner (Georgia, Pollock) on a screenplay about the everyday trials and triumphs of a ballet company. When Altman agreed to direct, she was “delighted”. Well, you would be.

Technically, he films the dance sequences brilliantly. The music’s by Van Dyke Parks, though there’s much classical, and about nine versions of “My Funny Valentine”. Neve and the Joffrey Ballet of Chicago rehearse, perform, survive injuries and nagging parents. She has a vague, under-explored affair with James Dean lookalike Franco. In fact one of the frustrations of The Company is that subplots do suggest themselves, only to remain unprobed. Surely that’s cutting Altman off from his greatest strength?

McDowell’s a camp, bossy “artistic leader”, a luvvie with inspirational sermons like: “It’s not the steps, it’s what’s inside that counts.” There are times when it’s like Chicago without the songs or Showgirls without the flesh. “I hate pretty,” hisses McDowell, but the film is, at best, just pretty.

OPENED APRIL 16, CERT 12A, 129 MINS

Despite the title, this Japanese period drama is no swords-and-gore fest. Instead, director Yoji Yamada has crafted a sensitive study of small-town Japan at the sunset of samurai culture in the 19th century. Our hero is Seibei (Hiroyuki Sanada), a middle-aged widower with two daughters, torn between domestic and clan duties. When his colleagues complain he always goes home at the end of the day instead of going for a drink, the nickname ‘Twilight Samurai’ sticks.

This is a restrained piece of film-making that focuses on the everyday, not the extraordinary. The fight scenes are dampened by Seibei’s reluctance to engage, yet made poignant by his unwavering loyalty to his family and the difficulty he has caring for them without a wife. The narrator is Seibei’s elder daughter who, at the film’s close, delivers a moving testimony to her father: an ordinary, poor man who loved his daughters and wasn’t dissatisfied with his meagre lot. This is excellent historical film-making, presented at the most real and human of levels.

DIRECTED BY Donald Cammell and Nic Roeg

STARRING James Fox, Mick Jagger, Anita Pallenberg, Mich

OPENS MAY 14, CERT 15, 103 MINS

Director Kim Ki-Duk, Korean cinema’s ‘angry young man’, takes a chill pill for this, and creates arguably his best work yet. A contemplative, Zen koan of a movie which, like the remote mountain lake that provides its setting, finds hidden depths beneath a calm surface. It’s about the big stuff: the meaning of life, time, the nature of redemption…

An old monk (Oh Yeong-Su) lives on a floating temple in the middle of the lake with his young disciple. One springtime, the disciple, a small boy, indulges in a childish act of cruelty which will have repercussions for the rest of his life. Time passes and he falls in love one summer with an ailing girl sent to live with him and the master. They run away together. Years later, he returns as autumn arrives, a heinous crime hanging over his head. The master helps him readjust to the monastic life, and the whole cycle looks set to start again. Although unabashedly austere, it’s a film that lingers in the mind for weeks after, hitting all the right cinematic pressure points.

OPENS MAY 14, CERT 15, 95 MINS

It happened recently with Jayson Blair at The New York Times, and it happened in 1998 with Stephen Glass at The New Republic?the story retold here. The lauded, popular journalist is on a hot streak, finding great stories and influencing the US’s political heartbeat. Only thing is, the journalist is lying, inventing these stories out of thin air due to an eagerness to please and a lust for fame. When he’s exposed, the whole house of cards comes tumbling down.

Director Billy Ray’s debut feature tells its own true story with gradually increasing tension, and Glass (Hayden Christensen, bravely doing some proper acting) is such a smug, sycophantic prick from the off that we relish his humiliation.

Despite some sentimental guff about how saintly editors are (the catch with true stories is the living must be flattered), both Hank Azaria and Peter Sarsgaard are brilliant as the mag’s supremos, and the idealistic office’s internal politics are well nuanced by Chlo

OPENS MAY 14, CERT PG, 114 MINS

Le cin

OPENS MAY 7, CERT 15, 93 MINS

When northern nice guy Eddie (John Lynch) and his wife are seen having sex by young daughter Katie (Lauren Cook), Eddie is totally forthcoming when answering her questions. But his explanation, along with his role as a “rough old granny” in harmless bath-time games, is passed on at school, triggering a damaging social services investigation. Soon, Eddie’s helplessness as inflexible state mechanisms plough into his life, compounded with his innate immaturity, threaten to tear the family apart.

Lynch’s brooding performance makes it hard to immediately find sympathy for Eddie, but this is balanced by the profound love he obviously has for his children. Director Jim Doyle creates a grim, all-too-believable movie here, and as the story builds, we find Eddie ostracised by co-workers and neighbours, irrespective of the social services’ eventual verdict. Sadly, the Alfie-like to-camera asides (retained from the story’s origins on the stage) and attempts at Britcom jauntiness undermine the seriousness at this story’s core.

As the success of Bowling for Columbine, Etre Et Avoir, Capturing The Friedmans and The Fog Of War attests, the biggest story in cinema recently has been the resurgence of the documentary. No better time, then, to re-release one of the form’s most sacred beasts, Marcel Oph

OPENED APRIL 23, CERT 15, 112 MINS

Almod

DIRECTED BY Pedro Almod

DIRECTED BY Mike Hodges

STARRING Clive Owen, Malcolm McDowell, Charlotte Rampling

Opened April 30, Cert 15, 104 mins

This is Mike Hodges’ first gangster movie since 1971’s Get Carter, that milestone Brit-flick whose screenplay has become as familiar as the Dead Parrot Sketch. I’ll Sleep… is slower and broodier, and lacks the vicious graveyard humour of its predecessor, yet like Carter it pivots around the story of a gangster travelling across country to revenge his dead brother.

Clive Owen is Will Graham, a London crime boss who’s retired to rural Wales following a mental breakdown. When his brother Davey (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers), an apprentice hoodlum, commits suicide, Will throws off the squalor of his life in the country and returns to London and his carefully preserved hard-man paraphernalia to find out why.

The sequence where down-at-heel Will locks himself in a hotel room, then emerges pressed, shaved and hard as gunmetal, is the film’s definitive moment. Hodges has devised a promising set-up for a gripping revenge drama, and secured a superb cast, with the shadowy and intense Owen comfortably holding his own alongside veterans like McDowell and Rampling.

Yet while the location sequences in Brixton and Clapham reek of incipient violence, Hodges and screenwriter Trevor Preston appear to have been trying to create a myth or a fable as much as a realistic drama, which is where the problems begin. “I have often thought of I’ll Sleep… as a Samurai film,” Hodges has commented. “As with Jack Carter, Will Graham can’t escape his past.”

It’s a plausible notion, and Owen’s haunted stare frequently suggests a man driven by a fate he can’t control, but too often it looks as if they’ve peopled the movie with static archetypes and left the audience to fill in the gaps where the plot was supposed to go. We can probably manage to sketch in the past love affair between Will and restaurant owner Helen (a somewhat monotone Rampling), but the vile act of brutality from McDowell’s sinister businessman Boad which triggers Will’s vengeful comeback arrives without context or motivation. Likewise, the film’s ending abruptly saws off a major Owen/Rampling plot strand and leaves it hanging in mid-air, as if a couple of scenes went missing in the final edit.

I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead contains some potentially lethal ingredients, but somebody left this cake out in the rain.

OPENS MAY 7, CERT 18, 104 MINS

This is the true story of a multiple slaying at 8763 Wonderland Avenue, LA in 1981. Porn star John Holmes (Val Kilmer) was a coke buddy of the victims and?according to this script?had recently abetted them in an armed raid on dealer Eddie Nash (Eric Bogosian). Nash beat a confession out of Holmes, leading to their murders. If this sounds familiar?porn star, coke, guns, disaster?it’s because Boogie Nights also featured a sequence based on these facts. Remember when Mark Wahlberg, Thomas Jane and John Reilly try to rip off a crack-smoking Alfred Molina? That was the Wonderland story, told with more drama and style than director James Cox manages here.

The cast and story are first-rate. The problem is the structure?a series of subjective flashbacks?which allows no time to develop Kilmer’s character. He just seems like a whining, feckless cokehead. And we’ve got enough of those without mythologising one who died in 1988?no matter how well-hung he was.

OPENS MAY 7, CERT 15, 115 MINS

A documentary on the troubled history of the Basque region of Spain?where the armed separatists ETA are in conflict with the Madrid government?the film sparked controversy last year in Spain, with boycotts from some of the groups featured.

Much of this will be lost on non-Spanish viewers. Director Julio Medem charts the conflict through talking-head interviews with politicians, journalists and academics?an approach that presumes a lot of pre-existing knowledge of Basque history. There are interesting details, and the testimonies of the ETA victims are moving. But it’s hard to keep up with the babble of acronyms standing for political parties, and you’re left frustrated by the way the interviewees contradict one another (the film has been accused of being pro-ETA through its suggestion that the government are just as bad as the terrorists). An established arthouse name, Medem’s formal approach is typically distinctive. Still, a straightforward documentary would probably have been more illuminating.

OPENS MAY 7, CERT 15, 99 MINS

Canadian maverick Guy Maddin follows Dracula: Pages From A Virgin’s Diary with another genre-bending monochrome fantasy from a nutty premise. It’ll be compared to lo-fi Lynch or Burton, but for all its flaws and confusions it’s dizzyingly unique, and as barmy as Bu

OPENS MAY 14, CERT 18, 90 MINS

Based on Jon King’s best-selling novel, this highly convincing expos

OPENED APRIL 30, CERT 15, 96 MINS

Depp here extends his run of eccentric, quizzical scene-stealers as Mort Rainey. He’s a reclusive, best-selling author holed up in an isolated cabin, wrestling with writer’s block and a messy divorce. Step forward hillbilly stalker John Shooter (John Turturro), claiming Rainey has plagiarised his story and demanding satisfaction?shoving a screwdriver through Rainey’s dog, burning down his house, and targeting his wife to make his point until Rainey, too, loses the plot.

Another King “writer’s nightmare” (see also Misery, The Dark Half), Secret Window also explores the trauma of divorce as Rainey sits mumbling bitterly outside his old home, bellowing at his wife’s new lover (Dark Half star Timothy Hutton), slowly falling apart at the seams. Director David Koepp, who delivered uneasy chills in Stir of Echoes, botches the shocks here, but lets you feel the paranoid loneliness of Rainey’s cabin and, with his committed cast, creates a minor but satisfying gothic psychodrama.