OPENS AUGUST 29, CERT 12A, 116 MINS

Ron Shelton’s break from macho-undercutting sports films continues with his second LAPD movie in three months. But where the James Ellroy-inspired Dark Blue exposed LA’s infamous cops, this is more traditional Shelton fare: an easygoing study of male friendship, as Harrison Ford’s ageing detective and callow partner Josh Hartnett investigate the shooting of a rap group.

Shelton is fascinated by LA, roaming through sleepy canals, piers and ranches, turning the hidden corners of the film industry’s home. Ford and Hartnett have been seduced by LA’s double life: investigating killings while fielding calls about Ford’s faltering property investments, and Hartnett’s acting auditions. Entering LA’s rap industry to find a label boss implicated in his stars’ slaying, meanwhile, recalls Suge Knight’s alleged muddying of showbiz and gun-play.

Shapeless and over-obvious compared to Shelton’s best work, this feels like an experiment before he works out what to really do next.

DIRECTED BY Ang Lee

STARRING Eric Bana, Jennifer Connelly, Nick Nolte

Opened July 18, Cert 12A, 137 mins

On the face of it, Ang Lee?director of sensitive, tasteful films like Sense And Sensibility and The Ice Storm?isn’t the first name that springs to mind when considering who could successfully bring to life Marvel Comics’ rampaging, 20-foot-tall green monster. But, surprisingly, Hulk works?just.

After a ’60s-set prologue, where we learn the Hulk is the product of genetic experiments conducted by Bruce Banner’s deranged scientist father David, Lee jumps forward to the present to find Bruce has followed in his father’s footsteps and is now working alongside former beau Betty (Connelly) at a secret research facility. Both have issues with their parents?Bruce holds his long-absent father responsible for his mother’s death, while Betty has a dysfunctional relationship with her own dad, General “Thunderbolt” Ross (Sam Elliott), the man who, 30 years back, tried to shut down David Banner’s experiments. Bruce is a bundle of barely repressed rage and frustration and, after exposure to gamma radiation, this deep-seated fury finds shape and form as the Hulk.

Bana, who impressed as the cheery psychopath in Chopper, pinpoints Banner’s sense of simmering anger and emotional confusion. But Banner isn’t quite as interesting as his alter ego. Nor is he quite as entertaining as Nolte, playing David Banner, who returns to check in with his son, eager to see the experiments he began 30 years previously through to their sinister conclusion. Nolte hams it up as Banner Snr, a ragged loon raging away like a cross between King Lear and Baron Frankenstein.

The Hulk itself doesn’t appear until nearly an hour into the movie, and it’s only in the final showdown against the might of the US military when the creature’s full powers get unleashed. The CGI is impressive?watching the Hulk trash a squadron of helicopters is a real delight. But the build-up is slow, as Lee attempts to inject psychological gravitas to the story before bowing to the inevitable multiplex spectacle. Lee’s Hulk movie tries too hard to bring highbrow ideals to a comic-book movie.

OPENS AUGUST 22, CERT 15, 102 MINS

The Lotto ads and tired TV shows may give Connolly the air of a sell-out these days, but when he stars in a film, he’s memorably fierce. As the hot-blooded but comically baffled Steve (a lawyer turned fisherman in Australia who, when a lightning strike on his boat is deemed an Act of God by his insurance company, chooses to sue God instead), Connolly’s working-class rage burns the screen.

Around him and Judy Davis?the media pundit who backs then beds him?screenwriter Don Watson explores the suit’s implications, for God and man, with rare intelligence. Steve brings Australia’s religious leaders and insurance companies into the dock, facing down their oily lawyer to prove Acts of God are a con. But the media that loves then tramples him, and the financial pressures that cripple his court case, are further evidence of balanced big ideas in a human-scale comedy, let down only by last-reel soppiness

OPENED AUGUST 1, CERT PG, 119 MINS

It’s hard not to like Yasujiro Ozu. His films are infuriatingly samey, his heroes interchangeable, his shot selection rigid and schematic, and his narratives hewn from the same melodramatic family turf. But damn, if he isn’t good at it.

Here, in 1959’s Floating Weeds (a remake of his own 1934 flick, The Story Of Floating Weeds), he plants us in a tiny fishing village in southern Japan during a heatwave. Enter ageing travelling thespian Komajuro (Ganjiro Nakamura) and his troupe of demoralised kabuki performers (‘Floating Weeds’ is a Japanese term for itinerant actors). The village’s sleepy equilibrium is instantly ruptured, and when Komajuro’s mistress Sumiko (Machiko Kyo) discovers that Komajuro’s ex-girlfriend and love-child run a local saki bar, she forces a world of harsh hidden truths to the surface. And, as with all Ozu films, this is just the start. For Floating Weeds unfolds with sumptuous cinematography, relentless low-angle camera work and artfully arranged character positions. All you can do is sit back and submit.

OPENED AUGUST 1, CERT 18, 96 MINS

There seemed to be a fascination with Dublin’s criminal underworld during the 1990s?to date, two films have been made about the notorious Martin Cahill, aka The General, a peripheral character in this film. And this is the third movie to be inspired by the story of crusading Irish journalist Veronica Guerin, after a made-for-TV drama and the worthy and best-forgotten Joan Allen vehicle When The Sky Falls. So despite being a superior film to most of the others (The General excepted), Joel Schumacher’s competent drama suffers from source material that’s been picked over too many times already. Cate Blanchett gives a strong lead performance although, to be fair, she has a better script to work with than Joan Allen did. The Guerin that we see in this version is a less varnished character?an absentee mother, a journalist with a half-baked grasp of grammar and a rash, foolhardy woman. And for this flawed complexity, she’s far more likeable than Allen’s saintly incarnation, and probably closer to the truth.

OPENS AUGUST 15, CERT 15, 105 MINS

A Terrific study of masculinity under fire, this is an impressive calling card for debuting writer/director Dylan Kidd. Thirty something copywriter Roger (Campbell Scott) reckons he’s irresistible to women, but he seems to be losing the knack. We meet him as his sexual relationship with his boss (Isabella Rossellini) hits the skids. This is the moment his nephew Nick (Jesse Eisenberg) chooses to turn up at his office unannounced, requesting help in the business of losing his virginity.

Roger’s idea of charm school is to list the ways of looking at girls’ breasts without them noticing, and a field test in a bar involves chatting up two girls (Elizabeth Berkley and Jennifer Beals) and immediately prying into their sex lives. Strangely, this works for the nephew, who gets his first snog, but Roger isn’t satisfied and drags the boy first to a works party and then to a brothel, with mixed results. Initially Roger comes across as arrogant and obnoxious, but by the end you realise he’s tired, hitting the end of his bachelor years just as the nephew hits the beginning.

Scott?who’s skirted the fringes of stardom since Singles and Mrs Parker And The Vicious Circle?gives an electric performance as the verbose, ageing Lothario. Kidd, meanwhile, has written a script that’s both achingly funny and deeply touching. Definitely a name to watch.

OPENS AUGUST 8, CERT 12, 86 MINS

I first saw Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday in the ’70s, when our French teacher, looking to ingratiate himself with us, took us to a screening, assuring us we’d be rolling in the aisles. We did not laugh once. A semi-visible Jacques Tati (star and director) loped around a holiday resort getting into scrapes. Hardly any dialogue. A running gag about a door that went “spoink”. We made paper aeroplanes and went back home to The Goodies.

More fool us. The secret of Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday, a near-silent masterpiece, is to reconfigure both your laugh muscles and your expectations. Jacques Tati is often tritely cited as a precursor to Mr Bean, but there’s way more to him than that. This is a plotless anthology of incidents, visual gags, recurring motifs and eccentric characters. It’s a sort of ‘ambient’ comedy, a strangely pleasurable mixture of the warmly familiar and the ingeniously unexpected, a wonderful piece of deliberately malfunctioning cinematic clockwork. Relax into it and you’ll love it.

OPENS AUGUST 29, CERT 15, 92 MINS

Bruno (Daniel Auteuil), a communist journalist, is having a midlife crisis. He’s not sure he still believes in the cause he’s supported all his life, and is flailing between his wife (Emmanuelle Devos) and girlfriend (Ludivine Sagnier). Bouncing off a string of oddball characters, he’s lost his bearings. Delivering a message for his uncle, who’s fighting a re-election battle as communist mayor of a small Grenoble town, Bruno really loses his way, in deep fog, in a forest. He meets the mysterious, mercurial B

OPENS AUGUST 29, CERT 15, 89 MINS

An ex-con, Hamro (Maruf Pulodzoda), sporting a scowl that could shatter granite and fierce, wolfish eyes, returns to his Tajikistan village after 10 years in a Moscow jail. Convinced his mother is dying, he starts repairs to their dilapidated house. So begins an often grim look at life on the remote edges of the former Soviet empire. Money is tight here, and relief comes from a vodka bottle or the scratchy Bollywood movies shown at a ramshackle outdoor cinema. When Moscow gangsters arrive demanding money owed to them, things only get grimmer for Hamro.

Not that this is an excessively depressive movie. There are moments of deadpan humour and amusing cameos from the village eccentrics. As Hamro grows closer to his mother and long-lost son, his tough-guy exterior reveals a tender side, and what starts out as gloomy social realism turns into a fable about familial responsibility.

Built from small, sharply observed incidents rather than big dramatic showdowns, Angel… requires some patience. But the rewards are rich and touching.

OPENS AUGUST 22, CERT TBC, 90 MINS

If you like your drama pared to the bone, then this sparse tone poem about a Parisian one-night stand is for you. Quintessentially French, it might as well have been titled?in tribute to Claude Lelouch’s 1966 film?A Man And A Woman And A Peugeot.

The film opens with Laure (Val

OPENS AUGUST 8, CERT 12A, 90 MINS

Emanuele Crialese’s languid study of life on a remote fishing village on the sun-scorched island of Lampuseda, off the coast of Sicily, revolves around Pietro, a fisherman, Grazia, his emotionally troubled wife (Valeria Golino of Indian Runner, Frida and Rain Man fame) and their rough-housing but sensitive son Pasquale. The story, by writer-director Crialese, retells an old Lampuseda myth?that of a woman driven to desperate ends by local villagers. Suffice to say, the film operates as a slow-burning fable. With many scenes of men fishing out on boats, their sons helping out on shore and women packing fish in a cannery, comparisons with Visconti’s 1948 neo-realist fishing village classic La Terra Trema are inevitable. But, in truth, Respiro has more in common with Antonioni’s L’Avventura?there’s the same measured pacing, the same cascade of stunning images. At the heart of this striking, sumptuous film, though, is Golino’s mesmerising performance as a woman on the edge of a nervous breakdown.

OPENED AUGUST 1, CERT U, 74 MINS

A jerky, episodic, two-dimensional cartoon about a diminutive warrior and his isolated African village, Kirikou And The Sorceress seems hysterically quaint in a global animation market defined by ironic CGI behemoths from Disney and DreamWorks (Toy Story, Shrek and the up’n’coming Finding Nemo).

Still, French animator Michel Ocelot adapts this west African legend with seductive simplicity, illustrating the adventures of supernaturally gifted homunculus Kirikou (Theo Sebeko) and his skirmishes with the baby-killing, man-eating, water-stealing sorceress Karaba (Antoinette Kellermann) via a stark formal palette that’s somewhere between Namibian pictogram and Chris Ofili collage. And yet, for all its ostensible simplicity, this is a cartoon with a wealth of intriguing subtext, including the spectre of drought and casual infanticide, and the ubiquitous banality of death. Elsewhere, the tiny pre-pubescent protagonist is driven by his blatantly Oedipal desire for the scary, castrating, big-breasted Sorceress. The Disney remake should be just around the corner.