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.

OPENS APRIL 9, CERT 12A, 136 MINS

“Based on a true story,” Hidalgo tells the tale of half-Indian Pony Express rider Frank T Hopkins (Viggo Mortensen), who salves the pain of witnessing the infamous Wounded Knee massacre by signing up for Saudi Arabia’s legendary “Ocean of Fire” horse marathon, in which he and horse Hidalgo trek 3000 miles across the unforgiving desert. Along the way, Hopkins rubs shoulders with a beautiful desert princess (Zuleikha Robinson), a wily old sheik (Omar Sharif, hamming it up nicely) and a scheming English toff (Louise Lombard). It’s very expensively mounted and 100 per cent untrue.

Sure, Hopkins existed, but the rest is bullshit?he never set foot in Saudi Arabia, and you won’t find the “Ocean of Fire” in the history books. This wouldn’t matter if the flick was good, but it’s not. It’s emotionally fraudulent, poorly constructed nonsense. The anti-Seabiscuit, if you will. Hidalgo squeaks one star for a great Malcolm McDowell cameo and Mortensen’s undoubted star power, but even Viggo’s laser-eyed charisma can’t rescue this overlong pile of steaming Turkish Delight-laced horseshit.