DIRECTED BY Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini STARRING Paul Giamatti, Hope Davis, James Urbaniak Opens January 2, Cert-15, 105 mins

OK, so take a deep breath. American Splendor is an underground comic book begun in 1976 by Cleveland native Harvey Pekar. Largely autobiographical, it chronicles the minutiae of Pekar’s life as a lowly hospital filing clerk. It’s funny and sad and helped define comics as a narrative art form beyond the capes and cowls of costumed superheroes.

Along the way, it’s won a ton of awards, while Pekar himself became something of a celebrity, hailed in some quarters as a missing link between Theodore Dreisler and Lenny Bruce and clocking up a number of guest appearances on the David Letterman show. This is a film about Pekar, in which both Pekar himself and an actor playing Pekar (Paul Giamatti) appear. It shares the same metafictional mayhem as Spike Jonze’s Adaptation and the hip geek charm of another great comic book adaptation, Ghost World. You’ll love it.

For those unfamiliar with the glum world of Pekar, American Splendor can initially seem jarring as it hops about from grimy garage sale to shady apartment to anodyne office while Giamatti’s snarling Pekar fulminates bitterly against the idiocies of life around him. But soon, somehow, thanks to the work of co-directors Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini, the movie begins to take on a mesmerising rhythm of its own. For a start, Pekar himself and various other real people (including the scene-stealing Toby “The Nerd” Radloff) are introduced during interstitial Q&A sessions.

The boundaries of comic book and movie start to overlap. Pekar’s rage acquires a level of existential nobility, especially when he’s hit with cancer?he finds himself alone on a blank white page, asking, “Who is Harvey Pekar?”

Though American Splendor has much in common with Dan Clowes’ Ghost World and the work of comic giant Robert Crumb (who illustrated early editions of Splendor and appears here via James Urbaniak’s meticulous performance), it also reveals an affinity with mainstream comics. Here Pekar is the superhero with an iconic outfit of faded jeans and crumpled shirt, and with superpowers of social observation. He springs from one episodic adventure to the next (a nervy first date, a trip to the bakers), and all the while is shadowed by his arch-nemesis, Death. For this is a film that’s bookended by two cancer scares, a film where Pekar consistently frets about his “legacy”, and where his climactic superhero battle takes the form of a woozy chemotherapy montage.

And yet, despite the ostensibly harsh outlook, American Splendor is never bleak. Giamatti helps by adding an eccentric clownish touch to Pekar?the scene where, with voice temporarily lost, he begs his wife not to leave, half-hissing, “Just listen to what I have to say!” is a standout?and the parade of oddball supporting characters certainly raises the quirk quotient. Pekar, too, has an ear for the poetry of everyday speech that’s almost sublime?he remembers waking up alone at night “and feeling a body next to me, like an amputee feels a phantom limb”.

But ultimately the grim reality that Pekar so proudly espouses is bizarrely uplifting because Pekar himself, like a blue-collar Woody Allen, is funny. And when he declares, near the end, that all he’s hoping for is “a window of good health between retiring and dying”, it’s hard not to laugh out loud.

OPENS DECEMBER 12, CERT 15, 83 MINS

Dead end takes a simple Twilight Zone premise and milks it for maximum psycho-nightmare tension. Ray Wise and Lin Shaye play all-American parents who decide to try a new cross-country route during the long drive to visit the in-laws for Christmas. But their diversion somehow flips them over into a desolate and deserted dream landscape where Very Bad Things are lurking?most of them skeletons from the family closet.

This assured directorial debut from French screenwriters Jean-Baptiste Andrea and Fabrice Canepa is full of cinematic echoes, from Spielberg’s Duel to The Hitcher and beyond. Wise is well chosen for the lingering memory of his role as Laura Palmer’s incestuous killer dad in Twin Peaks, while Shaye hints at the deep madness behind a matriarchal homemaker who simply wants a “normal” family life. As secrets spill, so the visceral gore and black humour escalate. Dead End has had little advance hype or festival exposure, but it’s jammed with nerve-jarring twists that totally rock. A future cult classic in the making.

DIRECTED BY Lone Scherfig

STARRING Jamie Sives, Adrian Rawlins, Shirley Henderson

Opens December 5, Cert 15, 109 mins

What’d happen if the makers of the better Danish Dogme films elected to helm a ‘normal’ film?a romantic black comedy?set in Glasgow? Unexpectedly, something cool, considered and charming. “I wanted to play on a bigger piano and strike the keys harder than before,” the Italian For Beginners director Lone Scherfig has said, and, co-writing with the man behind Mifune (Anders Thomas Jensen), she’s conjured up a strange, mischievous magic. It’s both very British, and not.

It doesn’t start promisingly (and that’s assuming you get past the title). It seems small-scale, low-key, mumbly. Yet once its wit and honesty hook you, you feel for these oddly realistic characters, their lives of quiet desperation punctuated by loud acts of folly or flashes of mad inspiration. Wilbur (Sives) is indeed suicidal: his umpteenth attempt at topping himself (despite his innate way with the ladies) is foiled by his more down-to-earth brother Harbour (Rawlins). “It gets more humiliating every time I survive,” grimaces Wilbur. The brothers inherit a run-down second-hand bookshop from their deceased father. Harbour thinks they should make a go of it.

Wilbur doesn’t see much point in making a go of anything. Asked about his frequent near-death experiences, he sighs, “Blackness. Utter silence. It’s probably like being in Wales.” When Harbour meets single mum Alice (Henderson), a Jules Et Jim scenario develops. Just when matters seem, if not rosy, then becalmed, Harbour’s hit by a blow which forces the indulgent Wilbur to prioritise, and Alice has to make tough choices.

It’s not as grim as this sounds. A whiskey-supping psychologist offers wry advice, the erotic art of ear-licking is explored, and Julia Davis (Jam, Big Train) is garishly funny as a nurse with the hots for Wilbur. The jokes are eyebrow-raising: when a little kid asks if he can hold his hand, Wilbur snaps, “No, fuck off, nancy boy.” Maybe it’s in the timing.

Perhaps it’s the sort of non-judgmental film you don’t at first want to like: no glamour, flawed losers who are like people we know, no promise that all’s golden. But in its irreverence, pain and underplayed poeticism, it matures into a film worth loving. Life-affirming.

OPENS DECEMBER 12, CERT 12A, 117 MINS

After misfiring spectacularly with the erotic thriller Killing Me Softly, director Chen Kaige returns to more familiar territory for this sly critique on the clash between traditional and modern ways of life in contemporary Chinese society. Liu Cheng is a kind-hearted but buffoonish peasant whose son, Xiaochun, is something of a musical prodigy. They make the journey from the sticks to Beijing, so Xiaochun can benefit from the tutelage of a prestigious music academy. But once there, they learn that success is as much about razzle-dazzle and cut-throat marketing as it is about natural talent.

Representing the modern, consumerist China is Lili, an exuberant prostitute who lives in the same building as Xiaochun. She’s the opposite of everything he comes to despise in his browbeaten father, and he, in turn, is prepared to go to any lengths to impress her. The symbolism of China whoring itself for Western trinkets isn’t hard to miss, but there’s enough heart and warmth in the slow-burning film to avoid didacticism.

OPENS DECEMBER 19, CERT 12A, 102 MINS

It’s now 10 years since the end of apartheid in South Africa. US documentary maker Lee Hirsch has spent all that time living in Jo’burg making Amandla!, a stirring, emphatic film that chronicles the evils of white supremacy in South Africa and celebrates the role music played in the struggle for liberation. The likes of Hugh Masekela, Miriam Makeba and Abdullah Ibrahim-all of whom spent more than 30 years in exile-movingly describe how music was a weapon in the fight for freedom, and a means of expression that united an oppressed nation (“Amandla” means “power” in the Xhosa language). Their contributions are intercut with archive footage of the Sharpeville massacre, the infamous pass laws and many of the other indignities heaped daily upon black South Africans. It’s both an inspiring and painful documentary that packs more of a dramatic and emotional punch than many Hollywood features and, deservedly, has won itself a brace of prestigious festival awards.

OPENS DECEMBER 26, CERT 12A, 114 MINS

Matt Whitlock (Denzel Washington), respected police chief of a small Florida town, has one secret sin: his affair with Anne (Sanaa Lathan), wife of local bar-owner Chris (Dean Cain). But when Anne declares she has cancer a pile of police-impounded drug cash could pay to cure, Matt ‘borrows’ the money. By nightfall Chris’ bar is incinerated, he and Anne apparently inside, the money gone. Among the officers investigating the fire is Matt’s wife Alex (Eva Mendes), who he’s in the process of divorcing. It’s all he can do to keep one step ahead of her and avoid falling under suspicion.

After One False Move, Devil In A Blue Dress and High Crimes, director Carl Franklin here confirms his mastery of the crime movie, helped by a cast digging deep to find their characters’ fatal flaws. Watching Washington’s hubristic good man cornered in his own police station, a comfortable private kingdom now crawling with clues to his downfall, as twist after twist ties a noose round his neck, is painfully tense. Except for the formulaic climax, it’s a smart, suspenseful thriller.

OPENS DECEMBER 19, CERT PG, 133 MINS

As a child growing up in poverty, Japanese film-maker Kenji Mizoguchi saw his sister sold as a geisha. The tragedy dominated his career-his movies often concentrated on women crushed under the weight of society-and resonated most strongly in this late masterpiece from 1952.

We first see Oharu (Kinuyo Tanaka) as an ageing prostitute in 17th-century Japan, before the film becomes a reverie on how she got there. Born in the imperial palace, the young Oharu falls for a servant, a man considered beneath her class. He’s beheaded, and she’s banished. So begins Oharu’s long, painful slide into degradation.

It’s full-blown tragedy, driven by anger at the injustices of Japanese society. Mizoguchi’s serene visual style is at its most acute here, the film a series of meticulous compositions through which he tracks Oharu’s descent in long, serpentine movements. Close-ups are rare; the camera keeps a discreet distance, yet, paradoxically, this only seems to draw us further in. Exquisite.

OPENED NOVEMBER 28, CERT 12A, 95 MINS

Nicholas Ray’s Bigger Than Life (1956) is less well known than his Rebel Without A Cause, although it deals with similar themes, and drives deeper into the nightmare of suburban America. Ray’s skills with colour, setting and performance are dazzling, and James Mason, who produced, has never been better as the overworked teacher who cracks up on a new drug, cortisone.

The story came from a real case which Ray persuaded 20th Century Fox to buy the rights to. But this is no documentary. It builds to a peak of horror with Mason preparing to sacrifice his little son, accompanied by mad fairground music from the TV. We’re given hints of his arrogance long before cortisone turns him into a megalomaniac. Buying his wife a dress they can’t afford, he insists upon the brightest colour available. At a PTA meeting, only an incipient fascist endorses his views on education. Bearing down upon his son’s homework, he casts the shadow of a gorilla on the wall. Ray’s indictment of middle-class America comes over more as a melodrama, but there’s no doubting his genius.

OPENS DECEMBER 5, CERT 18, 83 MINS

Using footage culled from 100 years of moving images, Bodysong, brainchild of writer/director Simon Pummell, attempts to depict the life cycle on screen. There’s no dialogue, no subtitles?simply an epic segue of images of childbirth, bonding, sex, rites of passage and violence. The film stands or falls by the quality of the footage, but it’s a tribute to the researchers that apart from a couple of famous sequences, including the demonstrator obstructing the tank in Tiananmen Square, these images are as unfamiliar as they are striking. Taken from home movies, research institutions and old Path

DIRECTED BY Neil LaBute

STARRING Rachel Weisz, Paul Rudd, Gretchen Mol, Frederick Weller

Opened November 28, Cert 15, 96 mins

We feared the classic career arc: having blazed into the secret backrooms of our brains with the fearlessly candid In The Company Of Men and Your Friends And Neighbours, Neil LaBute had gone soft. Nurse Betty was ‘just’ funny; Possession was a timid attempt at highbrow literary credentials. But this is everything he does well, done brilliantly.

Inspired when asked if females could ever behave as appallingly as his ‘typical’ males, LaBute composed his answer. This was first a stage play in London and New York in 2001: he’s moved the story and cast outdoors, substituted an Elvis Costello soundtrack for Smashing Pumpkins, and made a lean, spare, furiously focused film which rips the enamel from your teeth. With noble exceptions like Secretary and Roger Dodger, there hasn’t been a movie to get you arguing about relationships and morals like this since, well, In The Company Of Men. It’s funny, sick, but healthily cynical. Blistering lines abound; the cast-well-rehearsed from the theatre runs-are perfect in every syllable and gesture.

In an American college town, geeky Adam (Rudd) can’t believe his luck when he’s picked up by rebellious punk-aesthete Evelyn (Weisz). As she subtly, irrevocably changes him, physically and emotionally, his friends Philip (Weller) and Jenny (Mol) reassess their own rapport and history with him. Lines are crossed, but while heads and hearts reel, Evelyn manipulates a shocking climactic revelation of her own. Kisses and words will be insignificant; to her, art is more important than seduction or connection. Art’s all that matters. So what if some people’s notion of ‘truth’ gets trampled upon?

You’ll have your own opinions as to the rights and wrongs. LaBute throws difficult, dirty questions in our faces again, for a purpose. Throwaway lines come back to haunt the characters; tiny actions and small decisions reverberate. There are delicate moments (“Moralists have no place in an art gallery” is almost a LaBute manifesto), and grandstanding ones (“The only thing that’d help him”, sneers Evelyn, “is a fucking knife through the throat”). Weisz, who co-produced, is extraordinarily edgy throughout, and Rudd’s comic vulnerability is gauged to implode.

Cruel, but essential. A hell of a thing.

OPENS DECEMBER 5, CERT 18, 110 MINS

Tattoo is a lot like Seven. Very similar in style and mood (dark and downbeat, but in a cool way). Rings a few bells plot-wise (methodical serial killer establishes a baroque pattern of murders). Central characters?world-weary detective and brash young recruit?seem familiar, although Morgan Freeman and Brad Pitt are replaced in their respective roles by German actors Christian Redl and August Diehl. Derivative though it is, director Robert Schwentke just about keeps things grisly and flashy enough to stop you from sitting there checking off further comparisons. When bodies start turning up flayed and mutilated, the resulting investigation takes Redl and Diehl deep into the Berlin underworld, where they uncover an illicit trade in tattooed skin. The outcome is never in doubt once an obvious suspect arrives on the scene, although it hardly matters; the film’s main concern is the extensive catalogue of gory details and fetish objects that it pores over lovingly, with Schwentke’s shock tactics becoming increasingly outr

DIRECTED BY Larry and Andy Wachowski STARRING Keanu Reeves, Carrie-Anne Moss, Hugo Weaving, Laurence Fishburne Opened November 5, Cert 15, 129 mins

Splitting action films in half?that was a revolution we could have done without, wasn’t it? Between The Matrix Reloaded and this is buried one tight, kick-ass sequel?but instead we were given two, padded out with hours of vapid dialogue and pointless characters. Good news for the studio coffers, bad news for the honourable profession of blockbusting.

None of which matters if you’re 15, of course. Johnny Target Audience is prepared to wade through any amount of bollocks to get to a giant punch-up between metal squids and soldiers in exoskeletons, and Revolutions doesn’t disappoint on that count. We join the action with Neo (Reeves) suspended between dimensions due to some impenetrably complicated business involving the sinister Merovingian. Once that’s sorted (via a 100-way Mexican standoff in a fetish club), he’s back to save the world. Two worlds, in fact: inside the Matrix, Agent Smith (Weaving) is ‘assimilating’ folks at a terrifying rate, and in the real world the machines are minutes away from pounding the human outpost of Zion to a pulp. And the Zion scenes are what makes the movie.

See, once humanity’s raggle-taggle defenders start locking and loading their robot war suits and welding together last-ditch defences over a pounding score, the heart starts racing for the first time since part one. Do-or-die war scenes are so much easier to follow than cod-Buddhist guff, after all. The momentum continues with Neo’s fight against Agent Smith. It starts like a kung-fu duel and rapidly goes nuclear. The Wachowskis always said they wanted The Matrix to be the first believable superhero film, and with this scene they nail it.

As stylists, the Wachowskis are peerless. As screenwriters and storytellers, they’re wretched. So the special effects bar just raised another notch. And the intellect bar just sank one lower. No revolution for us, then.