OPENS SEPTEMBER 12, CERT 15, 121 MINS

Whatever happened to TV’s gag-spouting smirk-fiend David Addison? You won’t find him anywhere near Bruce Willis’ latest vehicle, which stars the former Moonlighting jester as a ferociously silent US commando and completes his transformation into the Aldo Ray of contemporary combat cinema.

Willis stars as LtWaters, commander of a Navy Seals unit flown into Nigeria to rescue four US nationals led by Dr Lena Hendricks (Monica Bellucci, all pout and cleavage). After witnessing the Nigerian rebels’ genocidal mania, Waters abandons his mission and leads Hendricks’ ailing patients toward safety at the Cameroon border.

Tears Of The Sun is a routine war pic, flashily directed by Antoine Fuqua and beautifully shot by Mauro Fiore. Bellucci is laughably glamorous, but this flick is all about Willis, deadly convincing as the conflicted lieutenant. No other contemporary screen actor can match his ability to convey so much raw emotion by saying so little?this is a five-star performance in a three-star movie.

OPENS SEPTEMBER 5, CERT U, 89 MINS

The team of French natural historians and film-makers who got down and dirty with meadow insects to make Microcosmos looked to the skies for their next project. It took four years to gather the footage for this remarkable film, which charts the awe-inspiring journeys of migrating birds the world over. From etiolated cranes, stalking with exaggerated elegance, to bolshy, thuggish geese that still find the energy, even after several thousand miles of flight, to squabble in mid-air?the team of cameramen actually manage to get within the flocks, flying eye to eye with the birds.

The means of capturing such extraordinarily intimate moments came from the use of a variety of new technology?compact cameras on remote controlled model gliders, model helicopters, hot air balloons and an ultra-light aircraft developed for the film. It’s as much for people interested in the technology of animal photography as it is for bird lovers. But whether or not you have a vested interest in the subject matter, there’s something humbling about these encounters with birds and their incredible journeys.

OPENS SEPTEMBER 5, CERT U, 77 MINS

Endlessly inventive, stunningly rendered and deliciously dark and twisted, this French/Canadian/Belgian animation is probably the most rewarding experience you’ll have in a cinema all year. Forget the usual preconceptions of cartoons as kiddy-oriented brain-fudge-the macabre sophistication of this remarkable film is pitched well above the head of the average pre-teen.

Central to the film is Madame Souza, an indomitable little old Portuguese woman. She is grandmother to Champion, an aspiring Tour De France cyclist with massively distorted thighs and a body sculpted by years spent crouched, mantis-like, over a racing cycle. When Champion is abducted during the race, Madame Souza and Bruno, her chronically obese dog, set out to rescue him. The search takes her to the city of Belleville?New York re-imagined as a French-speaking metropolis?where she meets the Triplets of Belleville, a former music hall trio from the 1930s.

Part celebration, part parody of all things Gallic, the film manages to cram more bizarre and hilarious ideas into its all-too-brief running time than most pictures twice its length. And on the evidence of this wonderful little movie, director Sylvain Chomet clearly possesses a cinematic voice as distinctive and idiosyncratically French as that of Jeunet and Caro.

OPENS SEPTEMBER 26, CERT PG, 90 MINS

Traudl Junge succumbed to cancer only hours after this movie’s Berlin premiere, and her account of life as Hitler’s secretary from 1942 till his suicide, after almost 60 years of shamed silence, tumbles out in a desperate rush before she goes to her grave. Merely fixing their camera on her face, Andr

OPENS SEPTEMBER 12, CERT 12A, 97 MINS

For anyone under the illusion that Iranian cinema is only about lost children and oppressed women, Jafar Panahi’s potent new film will be a sharp corrective. The in-your-face opening scene captures a hulking stranger (later revealed to be lead character Hussein, played by Hossein Emadeddin) in the act of holding up a jewellery store. The robbery goes wrong, and Hussein shoots both proprietor and himself. From here Panahi backtracks to explore what led to this fatal action, following his character around a Tehran that’s socially divided between the haves and the have-nots. Firmly in the latter camp, the increasingly disaffected Hussein is something of a Travis Bickle figure; pushed into life’s margins once too often, he finally takes action.

This trenchant, tragic drama was inspired by a news story related to Panahi by fellow film-maker Abbas Kiarostami, and the director brings it to life with the same urban immediacy and vivid, pointed objectivity that marked his previous film, The Circle. Powerful, relevant and 100 per cent human.

OPENS SEPTEMBER 5, CERT 15, 98 MINS

The second film from Argentinean director Pablo Trapero, this more than lives up to the promise of his first, the festival favourite Crane World. It explores similar themes: inarticulate, provincial men are forced by circumstance to move to the city, innocents abroad flung into a harsh environment. In this film, the protagonist is Zapa, a locksmith from the countryside who is arrested when his boss persuades him to crack a safe. His well-connected uncle gets him off the charge on the condition that he moves to Buenos Aires to join the police force, the notorious bonaerense.

Completely naturalistic in tone, this handsomely photographed film eschews traditional devices like suspense and tension-building. Instead the moments of crushing boredom on the job are given equal emphasis as sharp, sudden shocks of brutal cruelty and police corruption, and unexpectedly torrid sex scenes. The picture is no less rewarding for its episodic structure. In fact, it serves to emphasise the inevitability of Zapf’s assimilation into the darker side of city policing, and the exchange of one corrupt employer for another.

OPENS SEPTEMBER 12, CERT 15, 96 MINS

The debut feature from 26-year-old J

DIRECTED BY F Gary Gray

STARRING Mark Wahlberg, Charlize Theron, Edward Norton, Donald Sutherland

Opens September 19, Cert 12A, 110 mins

First things first: this is not a remake of everyone’s favourite career-defining Michael Caine flick. Apart from a brief in-jokey DVD clip of Caine as Charlie Croker and the climactic appearance of a trio of modern Mini Coopers, it has absolutely nothing to do with the Troy Kennedy Martin-scripted original. Most of it doesn’t even take place in Italy.

So what is this curious heist flick?other than the waste of a rights payment for the title? Two hours of amiable, undemanding, brain-dead fun, that’s what.

The unfailingly plank-like Marky Mark plays 2003’s Charlie Croker, gifted prot

OPENS SEPTEMBER 5, CERT 15, 96 MINS

The second feature by the director of promising sci-fi picture Cube seems to delight in confounding expectations and undermining conventions?it takes a while to realise that the picture is not just a stylish thriller set in the world of corporate espionage, but also one of the most original and brain-bending sci-fi films for a long time.

Jeremy Northam plays Morgan Sullivan, an unemployed, disillusioned accountant recruited by a multinational to perform low-level industrial espionage. But then the headaches and hallucinations start. And an exotic beauty called Rita seems to think his life is in danger.

There are similarities to Minority Report, though Cypher is the equal of that film on a fraction of the budget and with virtually no special effects. But Memento is the movie with which this has most in common?a man cut loose from his own identity, searching for a version of the truth. Expect a series of switchbacks and U-turns rather than a nice easy ride.

OPENS SEPTEMBER 12, CERT PG, 95 MINS

A chronological compilation drawn from six one-hour films by the late Desmond Wilcox, The Boy David Story concerns David Lopez, abandoned by his Campa Indian parents as a baby when he contracted a rare, hideous disease that destroyed the centre of his face. Rescued by a Swiss charity worker from a Peruvian hospital, Lopez was taken into care by plastic surgeon Ian Jackson and his wife Marjorie, who later adopted him. Today, following 95 operations, David Lopez is David Jackson, a 28-year-old graphic designer in LA.

This movie retraces his journey, the harrowing surgery he’s undergone and the struggles of his adoptive parents to acquire him a US visa in the face of Peruvian bureaucracy and callousness on the part of the American authorities, who at one point were determined to deport him. The Boy David Story is very sentimental?complete with a soundtrack comprising John Williams-style guitars and wistful pan-pipes?but, inevitably, deeply moving. The Boy done great.

OPENS SEPTEMBER 19, CERT 15, 88 MINS

A favourite at Cannes and Sundance, Peter Sollett’s low-budget debut is an intermittently charming look at growing up poor and Latino on New York’s Lower East Side. But for all the cheeky bravado of the mainly amateur cast, it remains cute’n’cosy, like Larry Clark without the edge.

Victor (Victor Rasuk) is 17 and lives in a tiny apartment with his younger brother, stroppy sister and old-fashioned granny. He fancies himself rotten, and struts around the local pool checking out the chicas. The apple of his eye is “Juicy” Judy (Judy Marte), a kind of Latino J-Lo meets Chlo

OPENS SEPTEMBER 12, CERT 15, 98 MINS

Following an upsurge in terrorism and violent crime, Florida’s Governor Tyler (Roy Scheider) decides to greenlight a new TV concept dreamt up by producer Marty Rockman (Springer). Capital criminal cases are tried on TV, with viewers acting as jury. If the defendant is found guilty, the execution will be televised on pay-per-view.

Armand Assante plays the liberal lawyer who mystifyingly goes along with this farce as counsel for the defence, only to suspect evidence is being doctored to ensure a ratings-grabbing outcome.

Could it happen? Of course it fucking couldn’t, as this grossly implausible movie incontrovertibly demonstrates. Citizen Verdict would have worked better as a black comedy, but writer/director Philippe Martinez opts for the melodramatic high ground instead. The d

OPENS SEPTEMBER 12, CERT U, 122 MINS

Ten-year-old Chihiro and her parents are driving in their Audi to their new home in a new city. An ill-advised detour leads the family down a tunnel to a ghost town where a mysterious banquet waits. As her parents stuff themselves with so much food that they turn into pigs, a terrified Chihiro is forced to survive on her wits in a fantastical world of ghouls, talking frogs, wicked grandmothers and grotesque gods.

The word “indescribable” is the last refuge of the punch-drunk hack, but Spirited Away lets its fingers run so deftly across the keys of dream, fantasy and memory that it’s as much as you can do to keep from drowning (a fate that keeps rearing up in Chihiro’s subconscious as she soars on the back of a flying river-dragon or travels across beautiful landscapes on a magic train). The film manages to quote from every myth you’ve ever known, from Alice In Wonderland to Cinderella and presumably their Japanese equivalents, but?thanks to cunning graphics and cartwheeling imaginative twists?it’s ultimately like nothing you’ve ever seen.