OPENS NOVEMBER 28, CERT 12A, 99 MINS

It sounds like the first line of a national-stereotype joke: a young Finnish sniper, a weary Russian soldier and a Lapp woman are thrown together in a remote corner of Lapland just as WWII is winding down. The punchline is that none of them speak a word of the others’ languages, yet somehow they forge a precarious harmony that transcends cultures and nations as they attempt to survive the coming winter.

Writer-director Aleksandr Rogozhkin’s nimble script generates honest comedy out of the trio’s mutual misunderstandings. Occasionally the peace fractures and the Russian tries to kill the “fascist” Finn (actually a peace-loving conscript left to die by his own army). Somehow he’s always saved by the Lapp’s feminine intervention, which reveals its mystical powers at the end. Despite it being a three-hander set almost entirely in the Lapp’s aboriginal compound beside a stunning lake, Rogozhkin generates taut drama simply out of the combustible characters themselves. Also, watch closely and you’ll learn how to make handy things with twigs and cured reindeer hides.

OPENS NOVEMBER 14, CERT 15, 111 MINS

This has had more than its share of notoriety thanks to the graphic sex scenes between sixtyish Anne Reid and Daniel Craig. But this has obscured Kureishi’s real interests?the unfairness of age, and the evils family can visit on one another.

When her husband dies on a trip to see their children, something snaps in May (Reid), and she insists on staying with them. She’s treated as an emotional (and eventually literal) punchbag by her resentful daughter, who obsessively chases strapping builder Darren (Craig). The discovery of May’s tea-and-blowjob sessions with the pliant Darren blows the family apart.

Reid’s shags are more appealing than anything Clint or Connery have managed lately, shattering gender prejudices. But the real shock is in the stale poisons her family have stored: director Roger Michell makes May’s first visit to her son’s home more hostile than the punch her daughter later unloads. It’s just a shame such energy doesn’t sustain longueurs elsewhere.

OPENS NOVEMBER 21, CERT 15, 108 MINS

You’d think a film in which two of the finest actors working today?Harvey Keitel and Lars von Trier regular Stellan Skarsg

OPENS NOVEMBER 7, CERT 15, 90 MINS

Miranda isn’t sure what it wants to be, but has an interesting time failing to make up its mind. Sort of a romantic comedy thriller (but then again nothing of the sort), it casts John Simm as a nerdy librarian who falls for mysterious femme fatale Christina Ricci, who may or may not be called Miranda. She’s a con artist mixed up with svengali John Hurt (who wants to keep her) and sleazeball multi-millionaire Kyle MacLachlan (who wants to bed her), but our boy’s too out of his depth to suss much of this. His innocence is what attracts her. Eventually, the worm turns, in a mix-and-match plot which judders awkwardly.

Yet the romance between Simm and Ricci is beautifully written (by Rob Young), with some insightful, funny lines, and director Marc Munden allows the two leads as much time as they like to deliver them. The resulting gauche pauses will scupper any chance of a wide audience, but let’s be grateful for a home-grown (clearly low-budget) film which places its faith in script, acting and a certain wobbly grace. Strange, clumsy, and weirdly truthful.

DIRECTED BY John Crowley

STARRING Colin Farrell, Kelly Macdonald, Cillian Murphy

Opens November 28, Cert 18, 106 mins

Like amores perros without the dogs or Trainspotting without the heroin, Intermission is a dazzling trip through a city’s ripped backsides. First-time director Crowley and debuting screenwriter Mark O’Rowe have strong theatrical backgrounds, but there’s no staginess apparent in their freewheeling format. Shot on DV and setting a frantic pace from its first jaw-dropping scene, this pulls Irish cinema kicking and screaming into the 21st century. Farrell takes top billing as a feral, shaven-headed petty criminal, out to recruit a team to stage one last job that will allow him to fund his dream of settling down. But in this ensemble piece the attention is equally divided across a wide-ranging ensemble cast. There’s Macdonald, who shacks up with a sleazy bank manager when she splits with her boyfriend, the immature and inarticulate supermarket shelf-stacker Cillian Murphy. Macdonald’s fantastically grumpy sister (Shirley Henderson) makes clear her contempt for her sibling’s behaviour, but hides a dark secret of her own. Then there’s the bank manager’s wife out for revenge, and the arrogant paraplegic barfly who gives forth on the advantages of immobility while cadging drinks off anyone who will listen. And so on. Together, they’re an expansive collection of individuals, each seeking some sort of completion.

O’Rowe’s ear for the one-liners and tart colloquialisms of his native city ensures the script has zest and sizzle. Crowley’s ability to interweave the story lines and present an unromantic in-your-face look at modern Ireland is impressive. But what really makes Intermission is Colm Meaney’s performance as Jerry, the maverick detective with his eyes set on Farrell but with a loathing of criminal lowlifes in general that gnaws at him like a cancer. Jerry also has an interest in Celtic mysticism and a naive documentary maker on hand to take note of his hardboiled philosophy. The most driven character in a film where simmering desperation is the order of the day, Jerry is enough to make Intermission a must see. But elsewhere the engaging story lines and intriguing characters provide a compelling blend of grim fun and unvarnished realism.

OPENS NOVEMBER 14, CERT 15, 90 MINS

Not even deserving a same-breath mention with Kathryn Bigelow’s Near Dark, which it desperately tries to evoke, this British-made horror film starts out suggestive and unsettling but quickly goes haywire. Director Marcus Adams (Long Time Dead) does a good job of establishing the eerie, lonely atmosphere of late-night motorways and service-stations?which is where we meet single mum Madeleine Stowe and pissed-off daughter Mischa Barton. They make the mistake of picking up hitchhiker Bijou Phillips (face it, you’re better off picking up a guy with a hook for a hand than Bijou Phillips), which leads to Barton being kidnapped by a camper van-driving vampire cult and Stowe setting off in hot pursuit. Adams, however, falls asleep at the wheel and collides with an entirely different film, one in which Jonathan Rhys-Meyers hosts a sexy dance party in a lorry, an enigmatic character called the Recovery Man (Norman Reedus) does stuff that makes no sense, and Stowe blows things up in a laboratory. Very silly and not a bit scary?see the first half-hour perhaps, but then imagine the rest for yourself.

DIRECTED BY Nick Broomfield

STARRING Aileen Wuornos, Nick Broomfield

Opens November 21, Cert 15, 89 mins

After the relative frivolity of Kurt And Courtney and Biggie And Tupac, documentary maker Nick Broomfield revisits the territory of his 1992 film about Aileen Wuornos, a lesbian hitchhiker prostitute convicted for the murder of six semi-truck drivers. Ten years on, Wuornos is due to be executed, and Broomfield is among a number of witnesses recalled to Florida, subpoenaed for a final court hearing.

In the first film, a sympathetic Broomfield found Wuornos to be a hapless victim not just of her upbringing but also of a hopeless, dope-smoking defence attorney and a police force riddled with opportunists who conspired to sell the movie rights to Wuornos’ life story. Wuornos had passionately screeched her innocence and Broomfield, looking at the track record of sexual offences of her first victim, was inclined to agree with her claims that in this instance, at least, she murdered in self-defence.

In 2002, however, Wuornos seems determined to be executed?with Florida’s oily governor, Jeb Bush, offering no objections?and in interviews with Broomfield retracts her original claims of innocence, supposedly to square things with her Maker. It soon emerges that, years on, Death Row has robbed Wuornos of her marbles?in her contradictory, paranoid rants she charges the police with letting her get away with her murders so as to up her value as a serial killer when selling the rights to her story. Aileen?Life And Death Of A Serial Killer is one of Broomfield’s more sober outings and it carries an explicit anti-death penalty message endorsed by Amnesty International. But, Broomfield being Broomfield, his hand-held camera and disingenuously bumbling interview approach don’t do his subject any favours, exposing her as a sad grotesque, diminishing sympathy for her terrible plight and unbelievably abusive upbringing. So spectacularly far gone is she by the end that you almost feel her life isn’t worth preserving. There also hovers the awkward question of whether Broomfield himself is guilty of exploiting Wuornos for his own cinematic ends. But his tireless legwork in search of the raw truth pays off?this is human nature in extremis up close, messy and ignoble: Broomfield’s grim forte.

OPENS NOVEMBER 7, CERT 15, 105 MINS

This semi-autobiographical tale by Jim Sheridan (co-written with his daughters) tells of a young Irish family relocating to New York in search of a new life?but the tragedy from which they flee still looms large in their lives. Paddy Considine is superb as the father who’s suppressed his grief over the death of his son to such an extent that he can barely feel anything; Samantha Morton plays his young wife, trying hard to shut off her pain for the sake of her two surviving children. And real-life sisters Sarah and Emma Bolger steal the film from under the noses of the more experienced actors as they set about charming the junkies and hoodlums in the Hell’s Kitchen apartment building the family settle in. Djimon Hounsou’s role as African aristocrat, conceptual artist and AIDS sufferer is perhaps a Manhattan clich

OPENS NOVEMBER 7, CERT 15, 92 MINS

Banned by the authorities in Beijing, this unsympathetic look at the shadier side of the mining industry provides a damning insight into the poverty and corruption rife in Chinese society.

Song and Tang are itinerant miners who make their living in northern China by luring ‘relatives’ to work in illegal mines, murdering them, then faking mine collapses and extorting money from the owners. Having dispatched one victim, they set their sights on Yuan, a 16-year-old peasant searching for work. The conmen take him under their wing and find him work in the mines?but when Song decides to make a man of Yuan before his murder, the crooks’ relationship begins to deteriorate dramatically.

Director Li Yang spent 50 hours filming in the illegal mines that dot China, adding a palpable edge to proceedings. The semi-documentary style highlights further the very real tragedy Yang is out to expose?in 2001, a major accident involving a collapsed mine in Nante in the Guangxi province resulted in the death of more than 40 miners. Tragic indeed.

OPENS NOVEMBER 7, CERT U, 138 MINS

Adapted from Erich Maria Remarque’s novel of life in the German trenches during WWI, this 1930 talkie, highly controversial upon its release and unsurprisingly banned in Hitler’s Germany, has lost none of its slow-burn power.

Lewis Milestone’s classic is effectively a series of vignettes detailing the disillusionment and degradation of a group of teenage Germans as they’re lured into fighting for the Fatherland by their jingoistic high-school teacher; battered by their sadistic training sergeant and then cast adrift amid the brutal horrors of the front line.

Bleak and unnerving, this movie is conspicuously devoid of those gung-ho moments that undermine even the most accomplished anti-war flicks. Milestone’s vision of the front is laced with terror, stupidity, drudgery, misery and painful, lingering death. It resonates with a sense of contempt for battle that has never been captured before or since.

OPENS NOVEMBER 28, CERT 18, 98 MINS

When a deal goes bloodily (but not too bloodily) pear-shaped in Kiev, two American mafiosi, Settimo (Dan Hedaya) and mouthy young gun Gino (Danny Nucci), head for the UK. They plan to lay low in Glasgow in the ice-cream parlour-cum-fish and chip shop run by Roberto (Gerald Lepkowski), the hard-working, mild-mannered cousin they’ve never met. While the wiseguys behave in fish-out-of-water style, antagonism grows between Roberto and Gino over Alice (Shirley Henderson), the fish-fryer Roberto can’t admit he loves. But, when some Scousers hired by the Russian mob come to flush the visitors out, and loan sharks try to muscle in on Roberto’s business, the relatives unite. Director Don Coutts’ culture-clash comedy tries to find a middle ground between Local Hero and The Sopranos (Vincent “Big Pussy” Pastore has a small role), but ultimately it’s as damp as a Glasgow autumn. The saving grace is the chance to see the great Hedaya in something like a lead role for a change.

OPENS NOVEMBER 7, CERT 15, 90 MINS

The brief is simple, if a bit arcane:veteran Danish documentarian J