DIRECTED BY

Andrew Lau, Alan Mak

OPENED JANUARY 16, CERT 12A, 118 MINS

Ben Affleck is the lantern-jawed, perma-tanned preppie genius Michael Jennings, a “reverse engineer” who regularly has his memory wiped when performing confidential assignments.

After completing a job for billionaire Jimmy Rethrick (Aaron Eckhart), Jennings wakes to find three years of his life deleted and a Jiffy bag full of random objects waiting for him, instead of the expected $90m cheque. The FBI and Rethrick’s head of security (Colm Feore) appear to want him incarcerated/dead, so our sharp-suited hero is forced to go on the run while trying to figure out what the fuck’s going on.

It’s all a bit North By Northwest meets Total Recall, with the emphasis firmly on teen-friendly action rather than operatic violence. Affleck’s okay, the pace never lets up and there’s all the usual John Woo motifs: heavily choreographed action, soaring doves and a climactic two-man guns-to-the-throat stand-off. Hardly a work of genius, but it’ll do until Woo finds himself a Hollywood project that can match Face/Off.

OPENS FEBRUARY 20, CERT 15, 81 MINS

An overwrought directorial debut from quirky comedy writer Peter Hedges (What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, About A Boy). Katie Holmes pseudo-slums it in neo-punk pigtails and goth mascara as the eponymous April Burns, the bad-apple daughter in skidsville Manhattan aiming to appease her stiff suburban family with a Thanksgiving meal. Only problem is… her oven’s busted, her effete neighbour kidnaps her turkey, her doughnut-addicted mother is dying of cancer, her brother’s a pothead, her sister’s hysterical, her granny’s senile and her boyfriend just might be a double-dealing gangsta.

Which would be pure comedy bonanza if this was a gag-a-minute Ivan Reitman comedy, but here, amid the shaky grey pixels, rough sound and worthy pretensions (a wordless freeze-frame sequence), it all seems a bit fake. Added to which is the ending, crashing unceremoniously into view on 81 minutes, resolving all plot-lines with a syrupy musical montage.

OPENS FEBRUARY 13, CERT 15, 115 MINS

The Last Kiss is writer/director Gabriele Muccino’s exploration of a group of young men poised on the precipice of marriage, parenthood and maturity. His male protagonists battle the inevitable, with the browbeaten Adriano planning to escape from a permanent marital doghouse by driving off with his mates Alberto (compulsive shagger) and Paolo (tormented by unrequited love). Muccino zooms in on Carlo (Stefano Accorsi) and Giulia (Giovanna Mezzogiorno), living together with a baby on the way. It should be a perfect match, but Carlo’s fling with a teenage blonde lights the blue touchpaper, and Giulia sprays on the kerosene. Mezzogiorno takes the honours, closely followed by Stefania Sandrelli as her mother, but a story as familiar as this needs more twists than Muccino offers. And while the male leads are supposed to be a bunch of wimps, did they have to be as insipid as this? On celluloid as in life, the women win by a knockout.

DIRECTED BY Bernardo Bertolucci

STARRING Michael Pitt, Eva Green, Louis Garrel

Opens February 6, Cert 18, 115 mins

Film buffs have never looked less sexy than they do in Bertolucci’s curiously distant rendering of Paris in May 1968. True, the film buffs in question spend most of their time lounging naked, playing psycho-sexual mind games and rutting feverishly. And yes, all three stars (Pitt, Garrel and, in particular, Green) are undeniably easy on the eye?something Bertolucci is at pains to stress with lots of salivating camera lingering on flesh. But there’s something off-putting about the way the three characters brandish their knowledge of arcane film trivia like membership to a Masonic cult. No one likes a know-it-all, even a lithe-limbed, sexually adventurous one.

The backdrop of the May ’68 unrest is just that?a kind of revolutionary wallpaper that is distinct from the central story. Apart from an abrupt concluding scene, the only time the dissent on the streets encroaches into the lives of the three protagonists is when they meet for the first time, protesting at the sacking of Henri Langlois, the director of the Cin

DIRECTED BY

OPENS FEBRUARY 27, CERT 12, 119 MINS

The pupils don’t all stand on their desks at the climax, but near enough. Mike Newell’s tale of pioneering ’50s feminists?and how spiritually wonderful Julia Roberts is?is Dead Poets Society with a gender switch. A great cast (Kirsten Dunst, Julia Stiles, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Marcia Gay Harden) support La Julia like trusty table legs. Only less wooden.

Californian teacher Katherine (Roberts) arrives at a posh New England women’s college to teach art history. Her forward-thinking ways first bamboozle then annoy the students and staff. They’ve been taught to believe marriage is all; that their destiny is dishwashing. Gradually, though, Jools and her ‘but-is-it-art?’ discussions convert them to a liberated world view, as Dunst discovers that men are bad, Stiles clarifies that some aren’t, and Gyllenhaal advocates promiscuity.

This is a Rolls-Royce vehicle for a major star. If rose-tinted, it’s intelligent and well performed by the generation hungry to supplant Julia.

OPENS FEBRUARY 13, CERT 15, 90 MINS

The premise is hardly promising: two tough Argentinean lesbians kidnap a dowdy lingerie store worker, steal a taxi and head south for some crrrazy adventures with a mad maiden aunt. And yet, Suddenly, the slow-burning debut from Diego Lerman, is all about undercutting expectations. So criminal sapphic hipsters Mao (Carla Crespo) and Lenin (Veronica Hassan), with echoes of Baise-Moi, kidnap tubby Marcia (Tatiana Saphir) at knifepoint and demand: “Let’s go fuck! I wanna eat your pussy!” But the bravado quickly subsides, and the movie instead focuses on the shifting power relationships between the three women. Similarly, the inky, saturated look has a hidden logic, moving from the Godardian cool of early scenes in Buenos Aires to a fuzzy, dreamlike resolution in the countryside. The cast acquit themselves amiably, with Hassan in particular simmering in a role that’s practically mute for the first half of the film and then, as the title suggests, suddenly reveals hidden depths, particularly in the poignant closing scene.

OPENS FEBRUARY 13, CERT 15, 100 MINS

Set in a gloomy, Gotham-esque New York, People I Know depicts a day in the life of Eli Wurman, a veteran of the publicity game whose saggy eyes, low-level drug habit and distressed vocal cords suggest a man who hasn’t had a decent night’s sleep in years. Down on his career luck, Wurman still finds time to organise a benefit do for wrongly imprisoned African immigrants. However, it’s when his last remaining client, Cary Launer (Ryan O’ Neal), asks him discreetly to bail out his girlfriend who’s in jail on drugs charges that he finds himself suddenly mired in sleaze and intrigue, and has to summon all his reserves of guile from decades in the PR game.

Notable for a scene involving the Twin Towers perceived through a drugs haze, hastily excised following 9/11, People I Know is otherwise unexceptional. Although ambitious and ruminative, it crams too much into its 24-hour time scale?politics, tawdry celebrity, intrigue, romance?leaving you feeling as beleaguered and disoriented as Pacino’s character himself.

OPENS FEBRUARY 27, CERT PG, 82 MINS

It’s a cheap trick: take one cute, precocious child and inflict them on a crotchety, cantankerous elderly person and watch as mutual lessons are learned (the mawkish Kolya and the more successful Central Station are recent examples). But this Argentinean picture is so appealing, it’s difficult to resist.

The main reason for its success lies with the casting. Newcomer Rodrigo Noya is adorable as the eight-year-old Valentin, gripped by the twin obsessions of space travel (one of the film’s most touching scenes shows Valentin in a homemade space suit) and family. Sadly, he has no contact with his mother, only sporadic visits from his aggressive father, and lives with his perpetually carping grandmother (Carmen Maura). But the enterprising Valentin sets about creating a family from his wine-sodden musician neighbour and one of his father’s girlfriends. The story is based on director Alejandro Agresti’s own childhood, and he takes the role of his own abusive father, providing a darkly fascinating subtext.

OPENED JANUARY 30, CERT 15, 119 MINS

You’d imagine it’d take something special to lure Mike Figgis back from erotic experimentalism to a standard genre piece. Yet it’s hard to fathom why this hackneyed hokum pulled him in. Worse still, his odd arty flourishes only spoil any momentum it gathers on its own terms.

We’ve been here before, but…city slickers Dennis Quaid and Sharon Stone and kids leave New York to live in a huge dilapidated mansion upstate. Like, have they never seen a horror movie?? It’s not long before previous owner Stephen Dorff is muscling in, eyeing up Sharon and daughter, and filling the place with snakes. Dennis tries to do a Dustin-in-Straw Dogs, but the locals rally around their local psycho. After what seems like years, we get a showdown. In a rainstorm.

It’s much too long, it rips off Cape Fear (a factor emphasised by the presence of Juliette Lewis as trailer-trash temptation), and Dorff is so obviously a nutter from the off that there’s no suspense. Quaid and Stone are great, but they can’t warm up this puny potboiler.

DIRECTED BY Richard Linklater

STARRING Jack Black, Joan Cusack, Mike White

Opens February 6, Cert PG, 109 mins

Jack Black is American comedy’s equivalent of a smart bomb?a loud, hairy, heat-seeking missile of explosive punker attitood. In School Of Rock he plays Dewey Finn, a penniless failed rocker who impersonates his strait-laced flatmate to scam a teaching job at a snobby private school. But since music is Finn’s only passion, he’s soon defying his uptight principal (Cusack) by teaching a class of emotionally repressed kids to rock out. Do they learn self-esteem through the redemptive power of rock’n’roll? Take a guess.

Written by Mike White, who also co-stars, School Of Rock revs up a hackneyed Follow Your Dream plot with livewire comic anarchy. Black’s stoner anti-hero is the film’s salvation, a hyperactive Tasmanian Devil not unlike his sarcastic record-store clerk in High Fidelity. Director Richard Linklater wisely gives Black free reign to riff away with all the untamed mania of a young John Belushi.

It’s lightweight but likeable, despite its uncomfortable parallels with Dead Poets Society. A smarter director?John Waters, say, or Spike Jonze?might have quietly subverted the script’s sentimental message instead of playing it straight. And the notion that classic rock can transform your soul and defeat The Man is very Rolling Stone magazine circa 1967, but faintly quaint in 2004.

These minor niggles aside, however, Linklater’s latest is a full-on family comedy fired by a genuine love of rock’n’roll. Thanks to Black’s screen-filling charisma and a soundtrack that includes The Clash, the Ramones and AC/DC, most of its flaws are forgivable. In its own modest way, in fact, it rocks.

DIRECTED BY

OPENS FEBRUARY 6, CERT 12A, 128 MINS

Jack Nicholson plays Harry, a 63-year-old millionaire infamous for seducing young women, who has a heart attack bedding his latest flame (Amanda Peet). He and her uptight mother Erica (Diane Keaton) make love as he recuperates, while his young doctor (Keanu Reeves) romances Erica as well.

Looking more sexily comfortable in his skin than for decades, Jack recalls the weathered masculinity of late Gable and Bogart. But while he gives his side of the screen a gritty glow, the usually effortless Keaton (Jack’s partner from Reds) is an unwatchable tangle of self-conscious twitches. Like the movie as a whole, she’s a victim of writer/director Nancy Meyers’inane view of the sexes, where women are touchy-feely neurotics incapable of comprehending men, making this a chick-flick in the most insulting sense. The film’s setting amid the showbiz elite also drains sympathy. Glib, smug and glossy, it’s still worth sneaking into for Jack’s latest life lesson.

OPENS FEBRUARY 20, CERT 15, 92 MINS

If you like escapism from your cinematic treats, stop reading now. The new film from Patrice Ch

OPENS FEBRUARY 13, CERT 12A, 90 MINS

The first feature film made in Afghanistan since the fall of the Taliban, Osama is an impassioned account of the oppression and injustice meted out by the regime. And while the film owes an obvious stylistic debt to the work of Iranian directors such as Kiarostami, Makhmalbaf and Panahi, the story is unmistakably Afghani.

A mother is sent home from her hospital job, leaving three generations of women without support. She disguises her 12-year-old daughter as a boy and sends her out to work. Her stint as breadwinner is brief, as she’s soon rounded up with other boys to attend a madrassa. Things go from bad to worse, reaching a harrowing conclusion to compete with the fates of any of the women in Panahi’s The Circle for unstinting hopelessness. The amateur cast is convincing, particularly the daughter, Marina Golbahari, whose huge, frightened eyes director Siddiq Barmak uses to reflect the precarious existence on the streets of Kabul under the Taliban.

OPENS FEBRUARY 13, CERT 15, 104 MINS

This is not quite Ishtar, but it falls through every trapdoor with a po-face, both incomprehensible and unintentionally funny. After the Dogme discipline of Festen, Thomas Vinterberg wanted “to say yes to everything”, but desire can’t give this ludicrously pretentious fable wings.

John (Joaquin Phoenix) arrives in a futuristic New York, where “people are dying of lack of love”, to ask estranged wife Elena (Claire Danes) to sign divorce papers. She’s a world-famous ice skater, and security around her is tight. Too tight: she asks John to help her flee “the corporation”, who are grooming captive young girls as her lookalike replacements. Africa’s frozen over, and gravity’s gone wonky. With us so far? Douglas Henshall’s her deceitful brother, and these three run from the metropolis into the snow. It all ends badly, with Sean Penn giving absurd, potty voiceover flurries from a crashing aeroplane.

It’s even dafter than it sounds. For all the art deco interiors and echoes of Hitchcock and Wenders, it’s a mess. The pity of it is: you can almost see what he thinks he’s doing.