OPENS JANUARY 9, CERT 15, 102 MINS

If nothing else, Black And White would be memorable for its portrayal of a young Rupert Murdoch, ambitious proprietor of the Adelaide News. The film explores the true story of Max Stuart, an Aboriginal convicted of the rape and murder of a nine-year-old white girl in 1959. Young solicitor David O’Sullivan (Robert Carlyle) is assigned to defend Stuart, and swiftly concludes that his client has been framed by the local police. But the complacent white judiciary have no doubt that Stuart is a murdering pervert, and O’Sullivan is scuppered until Murdoch adopts the case as a populist crusade.

What fascinates the film-makers is how the case aroused furious debate and exposed faultlines in the South Australian police and legal establishment. Charles Dance is supercilious as Crown Solicitor Roderic Chamberlain, and the English appeal judges are some of the ghastliest Poms on celluloid, but the plot grips tighter than the noose threatening to drop around Max Stuart’s neck. Never flashy, but absorbing.

OPENED DECEMBER 26, CERT 15, 153 MINS

Many were surprised when Anthony Minghella followed The English Patient, a visually dazzling epic of yearning love and churning war, with the creepy The Talented Mr Ripley. However, he’s now milking Miramax for another grand-scale yarn of hot-flush romance and Bosch-like violence. And he doesn’t stop at emulating his own Oscar-grabber. Here he’s shooting for the mommy of them all: Gone With The Wind.

The Civil War, the 1860s; immediately we’re thrown into the bearpit of Gettysburg. The bloody scenes here will draw comparisons to Saving Private Ryan’s opening. Southerner Inman (Jude Law) can’t take any more and deserts. His goal, we learn in flashbacks, is to return to his beloved Ada (Nicole Kidman) at her farm in Cold Mountain. As Inman makes his long, dangerous pilgrim’s progress, we see Ada’s life fall apart as dad Donald Sutherland dies and evil Ray Winstone closes in. Add comic/poignant turns from Philip Seymour Hoffman, Natalie Portman and one Jack White, great photography and astute humour, and this almost topples Tara. But not quite.

OPENS JANUARY 23, CERT 12, 101 MINS

During the Pol Pot-inspired genocide in Cambodia that killed an estimated two million people, S21 was a detention centre in Phnom Penh where 17,000 people were questioned, tortured and executed. Director Rithy Panh’s documentary (showing until February 1 at the NFT) brings two of the three surviving inmates face to face with their former captors. We hear how the guards, many of them barely out of their teens, tortured and murdered prisoners. The guards claim they were brainwashed and indoctrinated. Still, it’s apparent that in some dark corner of their souls they’d far rather leave untouched, they relished their duties. What’s even more bizarre?at least to Western eyes?is that the killers and their victims now live side by side. There have been no Nuremberg-style trials. As the guards wander round S21 and talk about their duties as if they’re reminiscing about some humdrum municipal job, Hannah Arendt’s famous remark about “the banality of evil” seems more pertinent than ever.

DIRECTED BY Christopher Guest

STARRING Christopher Guest, Michael McKean, Harry Shearer, Eugene Levy

Opens January 16, Cert 15, 91 minutes

Since 1984’s indestructible This Is Spinal Tap, Christopher Guest has turned his spoofumentary skills on regional theatre with Waiting For Guffman and the outlandish world of pedigree dog contests in Best In Show. This time, reunited with co-writer Eugene Levy, he takes aim at American ’60s folk music.

The movie bristles with assured comic performances from Guest’s repertory company of wise-asses, not least in the director’s reunion with his old Tap buddies Michael McKean and Harry Shearer as The Folksmen. Some great laughs are provided by dumb and raucous manager Mike LaFontaine (Fred Willard) and Jonathan Steinbloom (Bob Balaban), the latter organising a grand memorial concert for his late father, folk doyen Irving Steinbloom. The relationship between former folk-boom sweethearts Mitch & Mickey, with Mitch now reduced to a mumbling husk of a man by a string of nervous breakdowns and Mickey married to a catheter salesman obsessed with model trains, squirts a trace of pathos into the comic brew.

The problem for many audiences is likely to be the lack of recognition of the world being parodied. You’d imagine that any pastiche of American folk from this period would involve a few sly jabs in the direction of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan and Peter, Paul & Mary, but Guest has gone for the less durable likes of The New Christy Minstrels (presumably the models for the film’s idiotically colour-coordinated New Main Street Singers). Rock’n’roll fans will know that folk music was the stuff that got turned into folk-rock by Dylan and The Byrds, but there’s no sense of that wider musical world here, while The Folksmen’s unsingable dirge about the Spanish Civil War is the only glimpse of folk’s political pretensions.

It may be that Guest’s real affection for folk music has clipped his satirical claws. Best, then, to sit back and enjoy Tap-like moments, like the revelation that The Folksmen were once signed to a label too cheapskate to punch holes in the middle of their LPs, or savour the boneheaded incompetence of PR consultants Amber Cole and Wally Fenton. Some great laughs, though it’s less than a great movie.

DIRECTED BY Gus Van Sant

STARRING Alex Frost, Eric Deulen, Alicia Miles, Timothy Bottoms

Opens January 30, Cert 15, 88 mins

The late, great director Alan Clarke made a little-seen but highly regarded experimental film in 1989 about political violence in Northern Ireland. It was called Elephant, referring to a screamingly obvious problem that society blindly refuses to address. Gus Van Sant, no stranger to cinematic homage, lifted the title of this powerful teen drama directly from Clarke. The idea of an unspoken but urgent crisis is crucial here, too, although this time the topic is lethal shootings in US high schools. Inevitably, the shadow of Columbine looms large.

Very large, in fact. Elephant is almost a documentary recreation of the notorious 1999 massacre in Littleton, Colorado. As the action unfolds in a series of parallel plot lines, two heavily armed suburban fuck-ups (Frost and Deulen) mount a methodically planned assault on their school, randomly gunning down their classroom peers. The echoes of Columbine are precise and shameless. And although Van Sant relocates the story to his native Portland, Oregon, this could clearly be Anytown, USA.

Nobody could accuse Van Sant of sensationalising real-life tragedy, although he does aestheticise it. Shot in long takes, Elephant was financed by US cable channel HBO and made on a tight budget with an unknown cast of real schoolkids. In a style that initially feels mannered but soon becomes utterly hypnotic, we follow half a dozen main characters around the school in endless tracking shots, allowing tension to build with eerie detachment. Van Sant first tested this technique on last year’s lo-fi road movie Gerry, and there is even a sly reference to his previous film in one of the computer games that the killers play.

Most strikingly, this poetic Cannes Palme d’Or winner offers no explanation for the massacre. These teenage assassins may be sexually confused, poorly parented and alienated, but no more than their victims. With its serene, voyeuristic, eavesdropping style, Elephant demolishes the brittle certainties behind orthodox Hollywood heroism and shallow media moralising. It’s a bold, haunting and subversive work. It also puts Van Sant firmly back in indie auteur mode, even excusing the wretched Finding Forrester. Welcome home.

OPENS JANUARY 16, CERT 15, 127 MINS

Runaway Jury focuses less on the courtroom than on the black art of jury profiling. Gene Hackman, in thunderous form as the scruple-free Rankin Fitch, is hired to assist gun manufacturer Vicksburg Arms, which is accused of allowing its weapons to fall into murderous hands. Fitch subjects jurors to an arsenal of covert high-tech surveillance to winkle out their prejudices and identify blackmailable weaknesses. Acquittal would seem assured if John Cusack and girlfriend Rachel Weisz weren’t playing an even subtler game. Despite a squirmingly happy-clappy ending, the flick has enough twists to keep you gripped, and poses serious questions about legal ethics and the jury system. A tendency to deliver sermons about gun control is curtailed by excellent performances. Cusack’s gift for boyish naivet

OPENED JANUARY 2, CERT 12A, 86 MINS

Somewhere between A Matter Of Life And Death, The Sixth Sense and Truly Madly Deeply, without any of the romance, spookiness or wit of any of the above, lies Brit ghost story Kiss Of Life. Death doesn’t become Helen (Ingeborga Dapkunaite), a young mother in Peckham who dies and then mopes about the house, struggling to let go while her kids cope badly with the loss, barely helped by her addled old grandpa (David Warner). Meanwhile, Helen’s charity-worker husband John (Peter Mullan) makes his way home from a war-torn country, unaware his wife is dead.

One could ascribe the film’s faults to the fact that Katrin Cartlidge, who would have played Helen, died weeks before shooting began. But still, Dapkunaite’s Helen is too snivelly to be very sympathetic, and the script doesn’t offer much by way of emotional punch. Instead, we mostly get wintry moments of melancholy and the odd poignant scene, but not enough to make anyone really care about the characters or their troubles.

Directed by Peter Jackson

Starring Elijah Wood, Viggo Mortensen

Opened December 17, Cert 12A, 201 mins

Now war is declared and battle come down. Armies are mustered, siege weapons unveiled and war elephants saddled. The forces of good line up for a mighty ruck, the outcome of which will dictate the fate of mankind. Hold the line chaps, and watch out for those elephants.

The final part of Peter Jackson’s Tolkien trilogy is already assured a record-breaking box office haul. The trilogy stands as a considerable achievement; a lovingly crafted, exhilarating series which has made that most reviled of genres?fantasy?palatable to millions.

But, but, but…

There are problems here. The first hour seems overly familiar, echoing many of the set-ups from The Two Towers. We get plucky hobbits Frodo and Sam, plus the shifty Gollum, schlepping across wastelands towards Mordor to destroy the One Ring; we get the men of Rohan saddling up and Riding Out (there is much Riding Out done here); we get another city under siege from Orcs. Even Jackson’s reverse tracking shots of the massed hoards of darkness?so impressive in The Two Towers?become tiresome.

Come the second hour and the pace quickens?you steel the gaze as battle is joined. Orlando Bloom’s elf warrior Legolas taking down a war elephant in a two-minute set-piece is jaw-dropping, and, frankly, the sight of Viggo Mortensen’s king-to-be Aragorn charging headfirst into the Orc front line is as stirring as it gets. The siege of Gondor, the last outpost of mankind, is as brutal and bloody as the assault on Helm’s Deep in The Two Towers: pure eye-popping action cinema.

Even outside the battles, Jackson keeps the plot moving briskly along, only slowing for rather irritating soft-focus shots of Liv Tyler looking mimsy and a series of schmaltzy endings. There’s a nifty prequel explaining Gollum’s origins, and a nasty incident with a giant spider halfway through which provides this movie’s water cooler moment.

It may not beat The Two Towers for sheer spectacle and thrill, but this is still some feat. Pass the axe, someone.