DIRECTED BY Andrew Jarecki

Opens April 9, Cert 15, 107 mins

Are we striding into the golden dawn of documentary film-making? Movie-goers have flocked to see Bowling For Columbine and Spellbound. Charlize Theron’s remarkable portrayal of serial killer Aileen Wuornos in Monster finds its documentary echo in Nick Broomfield’s account of the real-life Wuornos’ last days in Aileen: The Life And Death Of A Serial Killer. As veteran documentarist DA Pennebaker told me recently: “Ideas are the most powerful weapons around. The documentary film is a fantastic way to express an idea, because it doesn’t necessarily come from a large corporate entity, it comes from a single person’s view. It can take hold so fast and can’t be controlled the way movies can be controlled, by how much money you spend on advertising and what theatres you put them in.”

Surfing the crest of the docu-wave comes Andrew Jarecki’s Capturing The Friedmans, an astounding glimpse into the black hole where the American Dream used to live. Jarecki, having grown tired of being a dot-com millionaire, thought his first feature film was going to be a documentary about clowns who entertain children at birthday parties. Over a period of months he got to know David Friedman, New York’s most successful exponent of cap-and-bells tomfoolery. As well as finding him to be trembling with pent-up rage behind his professionally hilarious fa

OPENS APRIL 2, CERT 15, 97 MINS

Castletown, Ireland, 1939:fleeing the Spanish civil war, William Franklin (Aidan Quinn) is appointed the first lay teacher of St Jude’s, a school for ‘wayward’ boys. Franklin’s flashbacks of a Spanish Royalist death squad soon merge with the fascistic system of punishment and abuse run by school prefect Brother John (lain Glen). Scripted by Patrick Galvin from his novel of the same name, itself based on a true story, this is a daunting portrayal of child cruelty within the Irish Catholic church. Director Aisling Walsh depicts St Jude’s as an obvious but shrewdly drawn metaphor for the gathering international fight against fascism. Franklin’s teaching methods?based on trust?bring him into direct conflict with Glen, as does his past in Spain. Quinn convinces as a good man wrestling demons and Glen’s impressive as a petty tyrant fuelled by hate. Not as devastating a condemnation of authoritarian Catholicism as Peter Mullan’s The Magdalene Sisters, but still a thoughtful rendering of a harrowing tale.

OPENS APRIL 2, CERT 15,99 MINS

Halle Berry plays a prison psychologist whose most interesting patient (Pen

OPENS APRIL 9, CERT 15, 97 MINS

Based on memoirs written by the two subjects themselves, Blind Flight unfolds what happened during the four-and-a-half years that Northern Ireland-reared schoolteacher Brian Keenan (Ian Hart) and English reporter John McCarthy (Linus Roache) were held as prisoners by a Lebanese terrorist cell. That means not a whole helluva lot happens at all, apart from the two men, initially wary of each other, becoming the closest of friends, enduring psychological and physical torture by their captors before being released. But don’t expect The Shawshank Redemption meets Midnight Express, because Blind Flight is a much quieter, sober-sided affair. Ultimately, its message is one of forgiveness and a tribute to the endurance of the human spirit?all the usual humanist guff you’d find on a Sunday night on BBC1. But both leads give fine performances here?Hart and Roache have played opposite each other before and have great on-screen chemistry. Good supporting turns also help make this a consistently watchable if never more than middling experience.

DIRECTED BY Hector Babenco

STARRING Luiz Carlos Vasconcelos, Milton Gon

DiRECTED BY Mel Gibson

STARRING James Caviezel, Maia Morgenstern, Monica Bellucci

Opened March 26, Cert 18, 126 mins

If you enjoyed the finale of Braveheart, where Mel Gibson was hanged, drawn and quartered in lascivious close-up, then this is the movie for you. This time it’s worse and lasts for two hours, as we’re dragged through Christ’s final hours of torture and crucifixion.

Gibson apparently wanted to “just tell the truth” about the death of Christ, but Mel’s the last guy you’d go to for authenticity (Braveheart? The Patriot? Hello?). Unquestionably, Gibson has forced a rethink about traditional anodyne images of the crucifixion and supplants them with eye-watering cruelty, but ultimately his movie is no more ‘realistic’ than Finding Nemo.

While the scourging of Jesus is presented as a blood-spraying, flesh-spattering atrocity exhibition lingered over in appalling detail, elsewhere Gibson doesn’t mind inventing walk-on cameos for Satan or hallucinogenic visions for Judas. “Reality”, it seems, is merely a tactical terror-weapon.

The visceral force of the blood-letting will knock you off balance, but if you can manage to engage your critical faculties you’ll find that behind it lies film-making of pedestrian banality. Flashbacks of Christ’s life are delivered in facile slow-motion, lit like a Lexus commercial and drenched in treacly orchestral music. The movie’s most heartstring-tugging moment is when Mary runs to comfort her son as he drags his cross towards Calvary, remembering how she used to cosset him as a child, but the episode is pure sentimental invention.

The focus of the film is so narrow and offers so little insight into Christ’s life and teachings that the characters can’t be more than cartoons of Love, Betrayal, Pity or whatever (with the exception of Pontius Pilate, portrayed as a dithering Lib-Dem). Jews are up in arms about the Fagin-like Pharisees, though nobody seems to have noticed the way King Herod’s court is a bestiary of eye-rolling cretins while the criminal Barabbas is caricatured as a dribbling, one-eyed Hulk. Meanwhile, Romans might feel aggrieved at being represented as subhuman sadists.

Unbelievably, some clerics are recommending this as instructive family viewing, which suggests that we atheists were right all along.

OPENS APRIL 16, CERT PG, 87 MINS

With chaos again engulfing Haiti, The Agronomist takes on genuine topicality. On a break from his high-profile Hollywood work, director Jonathan Demme paints a moving and defiantly partisan portrait of Haitian activist Jean Dominique, an outspoken critic of his nation’s rulers past and present. Director and star were friends for years, and this documentary was underway well before Dominique was assassinated four years ago.

The dry title belies the charisma of the subject. Dominique campaigned passionately for Haiti’s rural poor, using his radio station to attack the corruption of successive leaders, including the recently ousted Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Forces close to Aristide, Demme implies, were implicated in the murder. Dominique’s widow now defies death threats to continue her late husband’s work. Although mired in Haiti’s murderously complex political history, at heart this is a human drama, the tale of a courageous rebel who loved his wife and country enough to die for both.

They do everything else with sickening panache, but the French have never got to grips with the slasher flick, which makes this back-to-basics horror as unexpected as it is violent. A sexy teen (C

DIRECTED BY Errol Morris

Opens April 2, Cert PG, 106 mins

As a WWII pilot, then later as Secretary of Defence under both Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, Robert McNamara was privy to three of the most pivotal and terrible events of the past 60 years?the bombing of Hiroshima, the Cuban missile crisis and the Vietnam war. Although he sacrificed a potentially lucrative career in the private sector to work for Kennedy, he is regarded by many as a cold, charmless technocrat who applied the pragmatic values of big business to global politics. Here, Errol Morris (Fast, Cheap & Out Of Control, Mr Death) has succeeded in persuading McNamara, now in his late eighties but still gimlet-eyed, to put his side of the story, interspersed with documentary audio and visual footage.

Morris films his subject with a device called the Interrotron, enabling McNamara to stare directly to camera as he fields Morris’ questions, which are mostly edited out. This enables McNamara to appear as if he’s delivering a lecture

OPENS APRIL 9, CERT PG, 93 MINS

At first, it doesn’t look good. It opens in high-art film style, with a man (Nezam Manouchehri) driving a car through a desert with his sleeping wife (Leila Hatami). And driving. And driving. But don’t go to sleep just yet, because this turns into quite an absorbing, pellucid little drama that gets better as it goes along, building to a proper emotional climax, albeit an understated, oblique one typical of Iranian cinema.

When the man’s motor breaks down, he’s forced to seek help in a nearby town that’s populated with old women, children and a schoolteacher (Mehran Rajabi), who fortunately also happens to know a bit about cars. He and the husband go off for a spare part, leaving the beautiful but slightly neurotic wife in charge of the schoolkids for the day, and by slow degrees both children and the haunted visitor from the city establish a touching rapport. Underneath the surface, though, there’s a surrealist turbulence stirring up the waters, and a powerful tragic undertow. Stunning cinematography and a restrained score help cast a mesmerising spell.

OPENS APRIL 30, CERT 15, 122 MINS

On June 12, 2000, “Sandro”, a former street kid and escaped convict, hijacked a bus in Rio, taking its mostly female passengers hostage. TV cameras were on the spot almost immediately and the entire siege was broadcast live to a rapt audience. Apparently high on cocaine, Sandra jabbered menacing threats to negotiators and brandished a gun, recklessly jutting his head out the bus window. The SWAT team, though, were under instructions not to shoot him because the sight of his spattered brains might upset viewers.

Film-maker Jos

OPENS APRIL 9, CERT 18, 105 MINS

The controversy that greeted (read: promoted) Irr

DIRECTED BY Michel Gondry

STARRING Jim Carrey, Kate Winslet, Kirsten Dunst, Mark Ruffalo

Opens April 23, Cert 15, 108 mins

An intellectually rigorous, wildly entertaining pile-up between Alice In Wonderland, Groundhog Day and Memento, this Charlie Kaufman script is as breathlessly challenging as his previous pearls. If Gondry?best known for Bj

DIRECTED BY Patty Jenkins

STARRING Charlize Theron, Christina Ricci

Opens April 2, Cert 15, 109 mins

Apparently, this writer wasn’t the only one who spent the first few minutes of Monster wondering when Charlize Theron was going to make an appearance on screen. Her physical transformation into the role of Aileen Wuornos, serial killer in the making, must be the most drastic since De Niro’s bloated gross-out in Raging Bull. With disfiguring dentures, 30 pounds of flab and a complexion like decaying gorgonzola, there isn’t a trace of the glamorous, blonde Charlize we’ve come to know and not take much notice of. Theron’s track record hasn’t suggested bold artistic ambition, but as the Oscar voters recognised, there’s a desperate intensity about her performance here that hints at a giant hinterland waiting to be discovered.

Wuornos, a homeless prostitute, was convicted in 1992 for killing six men, and had become a national cause c

OPENS APRIL 30, CERT 15, 139 MINS

This is Ashton Kutcher’s stab at changing his image. Half-baked ideas about chaos theory, developmental psychology and genetics loom large when Kutcher’s college student Evan discovers that he can travel back to his troubled past by reading his old diary. This allows him to fiddle with history to sweeten his future and that of his childhood friends. And what a childhood it is: death, home-made bombs, a loopy father, and a nasty experience playing make-believe with a friend’s dad and his video camera.

Kutcher and the film’s writer/directors Eric Bress and J Mackye Gruber (the team behind Final Destination 2) were obviously hoping that the film’s scientific mysticism would achieve the Donnie Darko effect, but it begs too many questions to be taken seriously. Kutcher can’t cope with tragedy, either; the more taut the drama, the less credible he becomes. Were The Butterfly Effect less vain, less pretentious, all this wouldn’t matter so much. It’s really just Back To The Future without the laughs.

OPENS APRIL 16, CERT U, 106 MINS

Another triumph from precocious Iranian cine-savant Samira Makhmalbaf (The Apple, Blackboards). This time arid, rubble-strewn, post-Taliban Afghanistan is the suitably dramatic (and ultimately cinematic) setting. There our feisty neo-feminist student protagonist Nogreh (Agheleh Reszaie?a non-professional, like the rest of the cast) hopes to become president of the new Republic while her infant nephew slowly dies of starvation, her ramshackle neighbourhood gradually fills with bedraggled, malnourished refugees and her fundamentalist father loudly bemoans the everyday blasphemies he sees around him?like music and women. Which, when combined with Makhmalbaf’s gripping neo-realist style and her eye for composition (a crowd of women in blue burqas moving slowly, like a river) is all genuinely compelling in an ‘oh isn’t life awful when the West has bombed you out of existence and you’re a strong woman in a man’s world and everyone’s going to die because of political ignorance’ kind of way. But it’s also kind of obvious, too.

OPENS APRIL 23, CERT PG, 106 MINS

One of those ‘sweet’ British ‘issue’ movies (see East Is East, Billy Elliot) which feeds a valid point to the great unwashed by piling treacle on top of syrup, this inexplicably-titled comedy drama from Paul Morrison is hard to dislike. You know it’s lame, and about as grittily real as The Full Monty, but it does its warm-glow thing with professional panache.

Eleven-year-old David (Sam Smith) is a cricket-loving Jewish boy in ’60s south London. Trouble is, he’s crap at cricket. When a Jamaican family, their dad being Delroy Lindo, move in next door, there’s snidey racism from other neighbours. But Delroy builds a cricket net in his back garden, and teaches David to be the next WG Grace. His mum, Emily Woof, swoons for super-Del’s charms; even his dad comes round. Other locals, slow to realise this is a revisionist feelgood flick, set fire to the Jamaicans’ house, but everyone’s seen the light and discovered the joys of calypso and swing by the rose-tinted ending. It’ll bowl audiences over, thanks to its spin.

OPENS APRIL 9, CERT 18, TBC MINS

Expanded from a two-minute fantasy sequence in Spaced, this is Simon Pegg and director Edgar Wright’s way of combining all their comedy obsessions (zombies, pubs, suburbia and soft rock) into one proper film. The result? A snappy gorefest with hit potential.

Pegg is Shaun, a loafer on the verge of 30 who cocks up at work, forgets Mother’s Day and gets dumped by his girlfriend all on the same day. None of which seems so bad the next morning, when London is over-run with zombies. With his flatmate (Spaced co-star Nick Frost) he learns how to decapitate them using spades or Dire Straits records and sets out to rescue Mum from zombie stepdad (Bill Nighy), find his ex and lead them all to the safety of the pub. Having raced through a hundred sight gags, witty bickering and a grisly dismemberment, events are wrapped up in an allegory?zombies are always allegorical?about friendship and ‘surviving’ relationship damage. Sounds twee, but it puts enough meat on the film’s rotting bones to make it a real date movie, as well as a corpse-defiling laugh.