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.

DIRECTED BY Peter Weir STARRING Russell Crowe, Paul Bettany, Billy Boyd Opened November 28, Cert 12A, 138 mins

It’s taken Peter Weir three years to bring novelist Patrick O’Brian’s seafaring heroes, Captain Jack Aubrey and Dr Stephen Maturin, to the screen. It’s a shame O’Brian died before he could see it, because Weir has made a scintillating action film with real intellectual ballast and a powerful emotional undertow. It skilfully evokes the Napoleonic-era comradeship between Russell Crowe’s Aubrey and naturalist and ship’s surgeon Maturin (Paul Bettany), but pulls off the even trickier feat of depicting the network of alliances and hierarchies vital to the functioning of the “wooden world” of Aubrey’s frigate, HMS Surprise.

O’Brian fanatics have grumbled about Weir’s decision to conflate two books into one story, but he reasoned that while Master And Commander introduced the main characters, The Far Side Of The World offered more cinematic scope. Shrewd thinking, since the tale of Aubrey’s pursuit of the French privateer, the Acheron, from the coast of Brazil to the Galapagos Islands is a journey on several levels. For Aubrey it’s his duty and an adventure, for his young officers it’s a daunting rite of passage, and for the lower ranks it’s a journey into the unknown where only God and the Cap’n can save them.

It can also be seen as a metaphorical voyage from superstition to enlightenment. Even as the analytical and forward-thinking Maturin is fascinated by the unknown species of the Galapagos in a foretaste of Darwin’s expedition 30 years later, the Surprise’s crew are gripped by a superstitious conviction that they’re doomed by a Jonah in their midst. Weir conveys the sense of a war spanning several oceans, while also suggesting a world poised on the fulcrum of scientific and philosophical change.

The depiction of life on ship is total and overwhelming, from wince-evoking battle scenes and a pulverising storm off Cape Horn to all-too-detailed nautical surgery. Weir found the perfect Aubrey in Russell Crowe, who handles the changes of pitch from rough bonhomie to the decisiveness of command with aplomb. Crowe genuinely looks as if he loves nothing better than shortening sail in a hurricane and shouting at the French. Bloody brilliant.

OPENS DECEMBER 12, CERT 15, 73 MINS

Think you know Dracula? Think again. It’s taken Winnipeg’s resident weirdo-genius Guy Maddin to bring Bram Stoker’s tale to the screen as you’ve never seen it before. His deadpan, surreal oddities have been striking a chord with adventurous audiences since Tales From The Gimli Hospital hit the cult circuit back in 1986, but it might just be this rather perverse project which sees him reach a wider audience. Essentially, it’s a highly-stylised adaptation of Mark Godden’s Royal Winnipeg Ballet production (lead dancer Johnny Chang makes for a charismatic Count). But it’s more than just a filmed performance; Maddin has combined Godden’s choreography and Mahler’s score with his unique cinematic vision to whip the whole thing up into a delirious fever-dream. Aesthetic pleasure aside, the film also grapples with some of the varied interpretations of the story, with sex, immigration and capitalism all getting a twirl. Beautiful, erotic and provocative.

OPENS DECEMBER 12, CERT TBC, 106 MINS

Themed multi-director anthologies are, by their nature, going to be a mixed bag. There’s not much that’s mixed about this collection of eight 10-minute meditations on time that-with one blazing exception-mainly manages to be a complete waste of it. It clearly wasn’t wise to allow such a vague brief to fall into the hands of Bernardo Bertolucci, Istv

OPENS DECEMBER 5, CERT 18, 100 MINS

The story behind this shoestring production is almost as interesting as the film itself. Former production designer Catherine Hardwicke stepped in to help when a friend’s 13-year-old daughter spiralled out of control into drugs, alcohol abuse and self-harm. She suggested that the girl write about her experiences in a screenplay. The result is a jaw-dropping horror-show of teenage girls at their cruellest and most manipulative. Not since Larry Clark’s Kids has anyone dared to show the youth of America in such candid detail. What makes it all the more remarkable is that Nikki Reed, the 13-year-old co-writer of the film, also co-stars alongside Evan Rachel Wood. A sultry, self-contained beauty, she plays the treacherous queen of the in-crowd rather than the autobiographical role, while Wood plays the innocent who plunges into a world of promiscuity and substance abuse. Holly Hunter is the still heart at the centre of the madness as the mother who can no longer reach her child. As good an argument as you’ll see for locking up your daughters.

OPENS DECEMBER 12, CERT 15, 106 MINS

In 1985, British mountaineers Joe Simpson and Simon Yates made a bold assault on the west face of Siula Grande in the Peruvian Andes. They became the first (and so far only) climbers to conquer it, but their triumph turned to purgatory as they tried to get down again. After Simpson broke his leg, Yates tried to lower him down the mountain by rope. They’d almost made it when Simpson slithered over a precipice, forcing Yates to cut the rope to save himself. Fantastically, Simpson survived and crawled back to base. The film, based on Simpson’s book and directed by One Day in September’s Kevin Macdonald, imparts some sense of the soaring menace of the mountains, and does a decent job of depicting the action, given that it lacked the budget of a Hollywood thrill-frenzy like Vertical Limit. The real-life Simpson and Yates narrate in straight-to-camera close-up, lending an edge of docu-realism, though they never quite penetrate to the emotional core of the story. In particular, Yates’ decision to cut the rope isn’t fully explored. Simpson didn’t blame him, but parts of the climbing fraternity did.