OPENS MARCH 19, CERT 12A, 105 MINS

David Starsky and Ken Hutchinson are back in a brilliantly inventive spoof-cum-homage from Old School director Todd Phillips. So we get Ben Stiller’s uptight, perma-curled Starsky and Owen Wilson’s laid-back Hutch jumping behind the wheel of the regulation white-striped scarlet Ford Torino in pursuit of cocaine dealer Vince Vaughn.

As with the TV show, plot doesn’t count for much?what matters is fast cars, hip threads and plenty of badass attitude. Everything about Starsky & Hutch screams 1975, from the wah-wah guitar riffs to the beige’n’brown set design and snappy wardrobe. Stiller and Wilson become the stunt-loving cop duo with ease, and stamp comic ownership on every frame, despite some stiff competition from Vaughn?sporting an hilariously camp droopy moustache?and a way cool Snoop Dogg, perfectly cast as (of course) Huggy Bear.

It all makes for a satisfying, entertaining ride. Phillips has made a fast-paced, laugh-out-loud, groovy movie that manages to both lampoon and celebrate its source material. Why aren’t all movies this much fun?

OPENS MARCH 26, CERT R18, 69 MINS

Ah, porn! We tend to think of it as pushing the envelope every year like, say, mobile phones or computer games with different (ahem) knobs on. But here comes The Good Old Naughty Days, a compilation of mostly French one-reel porn shorts made in the 1920s to illustrate just how wrong that assumption is. Although in black and white and featuring rather more cellulite than is fashionable now, these mini films prove the lexicon of on-screen shagging has barely changed in 80 years. S&M, gay sex, anal, fellatio, threesomes and foursomes, it’s all there folks, plus bestiality (with a sweet-looking pooch), which you’d never get away with these days. The only thing that’s really different from current porn is that the women don’t fake big noisy orgasms and mostly smile rather wanly while being pleasured. This is basically hardcore stuff?being shown in the UK only in appropriately licensed venues.

OPENS MARCH 12, CERT 15, 104 MINS

Parallel tales in different decades eventually connect with a live-wire jolt in this slow-burning curio, superbly acted by a starry cast. In modern Mississippi we meet Stephen (Joseph Fiennes) who, paroled after 15 years in jail, starts work at a diner terrorised by redneck regular Horace (Dennis Hopper). Thirty-three years earlier, Mary (Elisabeth Shue), the clever young wife of an inattentive husband, despairingly fucks their house-painter, giving birth to Leo eight months later, the night her husband and first child violently die. Raised loveless by his guilt-savaged mum, Leo cruises through the years towards Stephen’s intercut tale.

Debut Brit director Mehdi Norowzian lets the twin stories simmer in the Mississippi heat, and draws out perfect performances. Shue seizes the chance to equal her performance in Leaving Las Vegas as a mother whose heart is torn out by frustration and guilt, making her a tragic monster. Fiennes is almost retardedly repressed, while Hopper is at his most poisonous since Paris Trout. A fascinating fable.

OPENED FEBRUARY 27, CERT 12A, 90 MINS

Frequent Ben Stiller collaborator John Hamburg (he co-scripted Meet The Parents and Zoolander) assumes writing/directing duties for his pal’s latest, another in the genre of contemporary romantic farce that Stiller has made his own.

The wafer-thin plot has Ben starring as deeply cautious risk assessor Reuben Feffer, cuckolded on his honeymoon by new bride Lisa (Will & Grace’s Debra Messing) and forced to return to New York, where he enters into a relationship with free-spirited school pal Polly Prince (Jennifer Aniston). And that’s about it. Nothing exceptional happens but what does happen is very, very funny. Nobody portrays comic embarrassment better than Stiller, and Hamburg gives him free rein to indulge himself with numerous pratfalls and close encounters of the horrifically unhygienic kind. Aniston once again proves she’s a gifted, natural comedienne, old pros Philip Seymour Hoffman and Alec Baldwin lend solid support, and the deeply underrated Hank Azaria almost steals the film as Reuben’s priapic French scuba instructor nemesis. Gloriously juvenile fun.

The summer of 2004 promises to be all swords’n’sandals, but right now swords’n’sake is where it’s at. A multiple award-winner at last year’s Venice Film Festival, its UK release is well-timed, Kill Bill and The Last Samurai having whet our appetites for all things bushido. This beautiful, violent film not only equals the best of Takeshi’s output but, in terms of tone and composition, surpasses it. It’s his Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon?albeit with spurting arteries in place of mid-air ballet.

Although relatively unknown to western audiences, Zatoichi is one of Japan’s longest-running franchises, lasting from 1962 to 1989 through 26 films and a TV series, which made a pop-culture icon out of star Shintar

DIRECTED BY Jean Cocteau

STARRING Jean Marais, Maria Casar

OPENS MARCH 12, CERT 15, 218 MINS

The Last Emperor tells the story of Pu Yi, installed as Lord Of Ten Thousand Years in 1908 at age three, only for Imperial China to become a republic a few years later. His journey takes him from a cosseted adolescence, walled up in the Forbidden City, to a playboy existence in Tientsin, reinstatement as puppet emperor of Manchuria, then post-war incarceration and eventual rehabilitation as a gardener in Red China.

The story is largely told in colours?the fabulous maroons, golds and yellows of his childhood, the blue-washed near-monochrome of his detention. It’s rich in irony and poignancy. All the same, Pu Yi is too weak, self-centred and uncomprehending a character to fully engage. The attempts to intensify our sympathy for his fate are burdensome. Nearly four hours is, frankly, a bloody long time to wait for the guy to come to his moral senses. The relatively minimalist dialogue doesn’t help, either. Finally, you’re only grateful there’s no sequel.

OPENS MARCH 10, CERT PG, 105 MINS

The Rock’s grounding as a man in lycra pants swapping sweat with mullet-topped behemoths for the entertainment of WWF crowds has stood him in good stead. He has enough showmanship to win over a fractious audience with little more than a camply arched eyebrow, and he’s not afraid of making a tit of himself. This is an underrated trait in an action movie star, and one that injects immense appeal into this otherwise routine rumble in the jungle. The Rock plays a bounty hunter sent to retrieve a mobster’s troublesome son (Seann William Scott) from the Brazilian jungle. But the pair are soon caught up in a rebellion against the local despot (Christopher Walken, at his most entertainingly deranged). Avoiding guns?at least until the climax of the film?The Rock creates havoc in some impressively choreographed, imaginative fight scenes. He also collects recipes and gets his ass whupped by an eight-stone South American Indian. I can’t imagine that humourless lunk Vin Diesel doing anything like that.

OPENS MARCH 12, CERT 15, 130 MINS

Young writer-director Delphine Gleize is tipped to be one of the most important French film-makers of her generation. On the evidence of her debut, already a multiple award-winner, it’s easy to see why. She has vivid visual command: this complex story is marked by fresh, often startling imagery, from visceral bullfighting to grisly taxidermy to surreal flights of romanticism.

Set largely in Andalusia, it feels more Spanish than French. When a bull is killed (having gored a matador), its chopped-up pieces touch down in many different lives. A bone causes trauma for a little girl on Valium and a big dog; the eyes build a bridge for a philandering scientist and his pregnant wife; the horns effect a reunion of sorts for a creepy taxidermist and his family. Former Bu

OPENS MARCH 5, CERT 15, 86 MINS

More of the same from the producers of auto derbies like The Fast And The Furious, this time with bikes. The plot could fit on a postage stamp, involving the framing of biker hunk Cary (Martin Henderson) by snake-mean drug dealer Henry James (yep) for the murder of the brother of black biker lord Trey (Ice Cube), leading to a film-long chase through California’s desert back-roads.

It’s the feature film debut for Eminem video director Joseph Kahn, who injects enough gaudy touches and good-humoured fizz to keep your brain out of neutral. The cast wear Stones and Ramones T-shirts, and Cube shamelessly barks “Fuck tha police” down an uber-bling mobile magnetically attached to his headgear. Computer game CGI mixes with bruising bike-straddling stuntwork for a final dockside punch-up, while Henderson’s anaemic hero is compensated for by Monet Mazur’s knowing tough-chick girlfriend. As for the full-speed bike chase through a passenger train?please don’t try this at home.

OPENS MARCH 12, CERT 15, 87 MINS

A companion piece to In This World and Dirty Pretty Things, director Damjan Kozole tackles the issue of human smuggling, from the point of view of the traffickers rather than their human cargo. Its setting is Krsko, a grim municipality in Slovenia that’s stained toxic brown and plays home to the country’s only nuclear processing plant?a potent metaphor for the decaying infrastructures and crippled economies at the heart of the problem.

Former speedway champion Ludvik Zajc (Peter Musevski) is the town hero, now reduced to smuggling immigrants through to Italy and stoking his own faltering mythology by constantly recounting tales of past glories. Kozole does an impressive job of humanising reprehensible characters like Ludvik and his apprentice Rudi. And, more unexpectedly, the brusque friendship that develops between these two lonely deadbeats, in their twilight world of sodium-lit diners and cheap lives, proves to be genuinely affecting.

DIRECTED BY Kevin Costner

STARRING Robert Duvall, Kevin Costner, Annette Bening

Opens March 19, Cert 12A, 145 mins

Seven years after The Postman conclusively destroyed his golden-boy status in Hollywood, Kevin Costner has turned his back on post-apocalyptic blockbusters and returned to his prairie roots.

Open Range stars Duvall and Costner as Boss Spearman and Charley Waite, two “free grazers” in the 1880s, dedicated to raising their cattle on the American Midwest’s freely available grasslands. When bad weather forces them to make camp outside a frontier town, Boss and Charley find themselves on the wrong side of murderous cattle boss Denton Baxter (Michael Gambon) and his corrupt lackey Sheriff Poole (James Russo). As the conflict escalates, ex-Civil War assassin Charley is forced to embrace the lethal past he’s been running away from, setting the stage for a brutal showdown between our grizzled heroes and Baxter’s ruthless private army.

This is a deeply satisfying cowboy flick that recalls Anthony Mann classics like The Naked Spur and The Far Country, with a back-on-form Costner revelling in James Stewart’s signature role as an awkward, flawed western hero searching for redemption. Craig Storper’s screenplay (adapted from the novel by Lauran Paine) is a masterpiece of careful pacing, and Costner entices beautifully understated performances from his fellow leads. Duvall is outstanding as Boss, a world-weary man of principle who has no taste for the fatal conflict with Baxter but embraces it without hesitation because he knows it’s the right thing to do. Bening is equally convincing as Sue Barlow, Charley’s mature love interest, and Costner’s handling of their awkward, grown-up romance is quite beautiful.

All of these elements add up to a great period frontier drama, but what makes this an outstanding western are the opening cattle-droving scenes?the best depiction of jobbing cowboy life since Dick Richards’ underrated 1972 masterpiece The Culpepper Cattle Company?and the glorious climactic gun battle, which has to be seen/heard to be believed. It’s a masterpiece of slow, deliberate violent conflict that recalls Eastwood at his directorial best, and qualifies Open Range as not just a great movie but one of the great contemporary westerns.

DIRECTED BY Tom McCarthy

STARRING Peter Dinklage, Patricia Clarkson, Bobby Cannavale

Opens March 30, Cert 15, 90 mins

Finbar McBride (Dinklage) wants to be alone. Inheriting an abandoned train depot in rural New Jersey, Fin?a dwarf?assumes he can now live a quiet, stoical life of solitude, which would suit him fine. He’s a tad irritated to find local hot-dog salesman Joe (Cannavale) trying too hard to make friends, grieving artist Olivia (Clarkson) nearly running him over in her car every few seconds, and a cute librarian (Michelle Williams) coming on to him. Soon Fin’s the strong centre of a screwed-up community, whether he likes it or not. Gradually, he learns to love it.

Maybe the plot of McCarthy’s debut sounds a little sentimental or cutely Capra-esque, but this Sundance Audience Award winner defies expectations with spontaneous, tangential humour and the wit to be grumpy when it could be cloying. If it’s a fraction fairy-tale-like that everyone takes to Fin so swiftly, the film never plumps for easy options, with each character complex and believable. Clarkson, this year’s indie queen, gives Olivia a multi-layered personality?weak, strong, and all points in between.

As she and Fin get closer, she turns, shouting, “I’m not your girlfriend. I’m not your mother. You’re not a child.” Fin goes drinking, and for the first time makes an issue of his size, standing atop a bar and slurring that everyone should take a good long look.

You may remember Dinklage from Living In Oblivion or Human Nature. The fact of his size is brilliantly handled (or, more accurately, left alone) here. Of course, Fin’s physically small, and taunted by cries like, “Hey buddy, where’s Snow White?”, but his taciturn dignity becomes a source of energy and resilience for all the town’s “vulnerable people”. The film’s a benchmark for how not to be patronising, and if Fin’s success with the ladies is a mite implausible, he’s a convincing new kind of hero. These people aren’t idealised Spielberg saints or glamourised Tarantino sinners: they’re just real, rough-edged outsiders with a suppressed desire to connect. Deadpan, visually subtle and mutedly hungry, this is a beautiful film.

OPENS MARCH 12, CERT 15, 137 MINS

The year is 1885, and Cate Blanchett is hard-as-nails frontier widow Maggie, raising two young daughters in the American southwest. The arrival of Maggie’s estranged father, Samuel (Tommy Lee Jones), who’d abandoned his family 20 years earlier to live as a Native American, coincides with rogue Apaches slaughtering her farm hands and kidnapping her eldest daughter Lily (Evan Rachel Wood). Father and daughter attempt to put their differences aside and effect a rescue before her captors take her to Mexico.

As you’d expect from director Ron Howard, this is efficiently assembled and well-paced, but isn’t the dark, Fordian western he’d dearly love it to be, and the family therapy subtext is pure Oprah. The film’s strengths lie with the two leads: Blanchett is excellent as ever, mastering her frontierswoman accent with ease, while Jones’ role as a grizzled semi-shaman searching for redemption fits him like a glove. In the end, good, solid?if unsurprising?entertainment.

OPENS MARCH 19, CERT 12A, 88 MINS

Anyone coming to Grand Theft Parsons under the illusion it has been the intention of its makers to celebrate the life and pioneering music of one of rock’s lost visionaries is likely to be chewing holes in the wall by its end and demanding someone’s head on a pole. The film pays scant attention to anything to do with Gram, apart from his squalid death of a drugs overdose in September 1973 at the age of 26, and the much-celebrated hijacking of his body by friend and roadie Phil Kaufman, who?true to the terms of a drunken pact?cremated his corpse in the Joshua Tree desert. Jeremy Drysdale’s inept screenplay?which is not much concerned with factual accuracy?treats this episode as a lark, a limp attempt at gonzo comedy, with Jackass’ Johnny Knoxville hamming it up tiresomely as Kaufman. Grand Theft Parsons was apparently made for a pittance, and it shows: the film looks like it was shot through a plank, and has the visual flair of something made for radio. Truly wretched.

OPENS MARCH 5, CERT PG, 110 MINS

Shot under the brilliant blue skies of southern Italy, I’m Not Scared is both a gripping thriller and an unsettling story of children struggling to make sense of an ugly adult word. It’s set in the summer of 1978, when Italy was suffering an epidemic of child kidnappings. When 10-year-old Michele (Giuseppe Cristiano) is playing with friends in some abandoned farm buildings, he’s horrified to discover a boy chained up in a cellar. Overcoming his fear, he gradually befriends the captive. Meanwhile, his home life is in upheaval due to the return of his macho, bullying father after a long absence. He’s brought with him a menacing “friend”, Sergio, from the north. As police helicopters and TV broadcasts start to disrupt the rhythm of Michele’s blithe childhood days, he’s forced to make agonising decisions. Salvatores has conjured superb performances from his child-actors, and his use of landscape and wildlife amplifies his theme of a natural order under threat from brutal, conniving man.

OPENS MARCH 5, CERT 15, 76 MINS

Mullet-headed losers Terry and The Deaner (David Lawrence and Paul Spence) spend their days drinking, dreaming of stardom and waxing profound about their “outlaw” existence. An amateur producer (Gordon Skilling) is making a documentary on them, although we don’t learn why, and the mullet-heads cruise through the film without learning or doing much, despite The Deaner being diagnosed with testicular cancer.

After a brilliant opening of Spinal Tappish slapstick, Fubar settles into a laugh-free pace comparable to A Mighty Wind. Your enjoyment will depend on picking up on the acutely observed smalltown rock-isms, such as when the guys’ estranged buddy Tron (Andrew Sparacino) answers the question, “What did you guys do?” with, “It wasn’t so much what we did as the fact that we did it. Just living each day blind and going the distance,” intercut with footage of Dean and Terry falling about drunk, smashing up bus shelters and hitting each other with sticks.

OPENS MARCH 12, CERT PG, 94 MINS

Despite a hefty nod to Wings Of Desire, the latest from the Polish brothers (Twin Falls Idaho) succeeds in floating beautifully between fantasy and realism. Gently idiosyncratic, it’s a magical yet grounded fable played with deadpan excellence by a cool cast, especially James Woods (an exec-producer) and Nick Nolte.

In the mid-’50s, the small town of Northfork is to be flooded, to make way for “progress”. A team of trench-coated men led by Woods have to evacuate the last few inhabitants. Who are stoic. One’s even built an ark, and organised two wives. Others are less rational:in fact, they may not even exist. They’re a group of ancient roaming “angels”, and a sick young orphan, nursed by Nolte’s grizzled priest, who believes he’s one of them, with the feathery wings to prove it. The photography’s lovely, melancholy but uplifting, and in harmony with the out-there story, which skilfully avoids implosion. The Polishes pull off their unique vision of an enchanting end-of-the-world as you didn’t know it. Not far from heaven.