OPENS SEPTEMBER 26, CERT 18, 98 MINS

David Mackenzie’s follow-up to The Last Great Wilderness is a largely faithful adaptation of Alexander Trocchi’s cult ’50s shot of Beat existentialism, Scottish-style. Bleak yet beautifully made, this brooding, narcotically slow take on guilt and sexual compulsion will stand, for those who get it, as one of the strongest British films of the year.

Ewan McGregor is better than he’s been in years as Joe, a drop-out with a past as murky as the canal he navigates. Not long after Joe and his boss Les (Peter Mullan) dredge the corpse of a young woman from the deep, Joe begins an affair with Les’ wife (Tilda Swinton), which flashbacks reveal is the latest in a series of loveless conquests. Ultimately, the fragmented story assembles into one slightly too-neat package, featuring Emily Mortimer as one of Joe’s previous lovers/victims. Despite its queasy eroticism, this is a film about (but not made with) misogyny, which makes it all the more uncomfortable to watch, despite the luminous, blue-and sepia-toned photography.

OPENS SEPTEMBER 19, CERT TBC, 115 MINS

An Altmanesque ensemble (and feel) enliven an atypical Merchant-Ivory production. Based on a novel by Diane Johnson, it’s an Americans-abroad fable that sets modern US and French mores on a collision course. Among a fine cast, Naomi Watts, Kate Hudson, Matthew Modine and Glenn Close are especially captivating.

Californian Isabel (Hudson) travels to Paris to visit pregnant sister Roxanne (a luminous Watts), whose French husband has walked out on her. “Le divorce” looms, with family fights and money disputes. Isabel herself falls for a Frenchman (the suave Thierry Lhermitte), the two clans battle over a priceless painting, and fret about Modine, a loose cannon prone to rage. The film’s climax atop the Eiffel Tower recalls The Third Man, but up till then it’s about small emotions writ large, cultural gaps magnified for comedy and pathos. Stephen Fry, Stockard Channing and Leslie Caron offer support. If you can stomach the way vast wealth is taken as standard, it’s sumptuously enjoyable.

OPENS SEPTEMBER 26, CERT 15, 109 MINS

The latest of many biopics about 19th-century Australian outlaw Ned Kelly (the 1970 version of the same name starring Mick Jagger being the best known), director Gregor Jordan’s version has moments both majestic and maladroit. On the plus side, Heath Ledger as the taciturn hero carries the film well, while Orlando Bloom provides attractive if one-note support as Kelly’s partner in crime, and Naomi Watts is the cursory love interest. The script economically focuses on the last years of Kelly’s career, from his final breech with the law after his mother’s arrest up to the fatal showdown in Glenrowan, complete with circus animals (a bizarre but accurate detail).

But it’s let down by its over-reverence (it’s far less anarchic than Jordan’s previous Buffalo Soldiers) and occasionally clunking sentimentality. Western fans will detect echoes of The Wild Bunch and The Long Riders, but at its best Ned Kelly offers a very Australian treatment of the most Australian of legends.

DIRECTED BY Jos

DIRECTED BY Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato

STARRING Macaulay Culkin, Seth Green, Chlo

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