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.

OPENS FEBRUARY 20, CERT 18, 99 MINS

Whereas Son Fr