DIRECTED BY Steven Shainberg

STARRING Maggie Gyllenhaal, James Spader, Jeremy Davies, Lesley Ann Warren

Opens May 16, Cert 18, 104 mins

When secretary won a special jury prize at Sundance for originality, the award probably wasn’t intended to be an arch stroke of understatement, but once you see this subversive, challenging and audacious film, you’ll think so. To call it ‘original’ is like saying sandbags don’t dance too well. Shainberg’s truly, tellingly odd tale of mind games and sex games, elaborated from a story by cult American writer Mary Gaitskill’s book Bad Behaviour, recalls the impact sex, lies and videotape made for Soderbergh in ’89. It probes into unnerving areas of the psyche and libido which indie auteurs have, for the most part, sadly shied away from since then. It’s an heir to Bu

OPENED APRIL 25, CERT 15, 134 MINS

Lawrence Kasdan here treats King’s most disappointing recent effort as holy writ, following King’s blunder at bloating a dark, simple story with unnecessary subplots.

In some ways a knock-off of King’s earlier IT, Dreamcatcher follows four friends bonded in childhood by a good act, which leaves them with a psychic link, and the power as adults to stop the monstrous Mr Grey infecting Earth with his alien spoor. As with the book, it’s the first third of Dreamcatcher that works, as the friends reunite in the blizzard-hit Maine woods, where a scabby, foul stranger asks them for hospitality. There’s mystery to these scenes, a sense of something unknowably bad brewing. And Kasdan aces King with his visualising of the parasitic alien “Shit-weasels”?a gross mix of snaking dicks, teeth-lined fannies and slimy turds?that erupt from the stranger’s bowels. Kasdan keeps things moving after that with slick scene-shifting screen-wipes nodding to his work on The Empire Strikes Back, but is finally beaten by the book’s baggy end.

OPENS MAY 16, CERT 15, 119 MINS

Although hardly a work of cinematic flair or imagination, Denzel Washington’s directorial debut gets by on such dependable virtues as sincerity, skill and a simple belief in humanity. It’s the real-life drama of Antwone Fisher, who survived an abusive childhood to join the Navy, come to terms with his past and, ultimately, write a film about it. Derek Luke plays Fisher as a troubled cadet in his mid-’20s, full of rage and confusion and repeatedly getting into scrapes with colleagues. Gradually, under the guidance of a strong but sympathetic Navy psychiatrist (Washington), both Fisher and the film reveal their secrets. As a director, Washington keeps the narrative clear and the pace steady, letting the story generate its own power and allowing young newcomer Luke plenty of room. Sure, the film can be cloying (there’s certainly a lot of hugging and healing) and a little too neat, but it works in exactly the way you sense was intended. In this case, that feels like enough.

OPENS MAY 16, CERT PG, 106 MINS

The latest in a long line of movies to use food as a metaphor, this German romantic comedy is set mainly in the restaurant kitchen of monumentally uptight Martha (Martina Gedeck). She’s a talented chef who finds a fulfilment in culinary creation that she rarely achieves through relationships. But the death of her sister brings two new people into her life?her heartbroken little niece and Mario, the ebullient Italian chef brought in to help her run the restaurant. Lessons in life and love follow. The warmth and charm of the film overshadow the clich

DIRECTED BY Takeshi Kitano

STARRING Miho Kanno, Hidetoshi Nishijima, Tatsuya Mihashi

Opens May 30, Cert 12, 113 mins

Based on the elaborate, expressive puppetry of Bunraku, a 300-year-old Japanese art from, this latest from Takeshi Kitano is an ambitious work featuring three interconnected stories. The first involves Matsumoto (Nishijima) and Sawako (Kanno), a couple known as the “bound beggars” who wander shabbily and aimlessly through a park, attached to each other by a long red cord. They present a bewildering, enigmatic, even laughable spectacle. But through heartbreaking flashbacks, we learn how this pair were once happy and well-heeled young lovers until Matsumoto was forced by his parents into a marriage of convenience with a young heiress. We’re then taken through the strange but logical sequence of events which lead inexorably to their present situation.

The second story involves a yakuza boss who, near the end of his life, finds himself pining for a girl he used to meet on a park bench for lunch each Saturday, whom he abandoned when he joined the mob. He returns to the park, 30 years on. There on the bench sits an eerily well-preserved middle-aged woman.

The third (and weakest) tale is of an insipid teen-pop starlet who loses her looks in a car accident but not the attentions of a stalker, who goes to extreme lengths to ingratiate himself with her.

These last two tales done with, Takeshi returns to his first couple and their seemingly futile meanderings through the seasons of the year. They exchange no words?reducing the film, effectively, to silent cinema. There is, we understand, nothing left for them to say to one another. Yet Takeshi gives us every reason to remain riveted to the pair, as slowly they wend towards the film’s striking, wintry conclusion.

Dolls hasn’t been greeted with universal praise. Some have accused Takeshi of self-indulgence, of mistaking cinematic longueurs for some sort of poetic intensity. But this is more than a series of gorgeously shot tableaux?the feelings Dolls evokes go way beyond the sentimental.

A deeply touching movie.

DIRECTED BY Steven Soderbergh

STARRING Julia Roberts, Catherine Keener, David Duchovny, David Hyde Pierce, Nicky Katt

Opens May 23, Cert 15, 111 mins

Carl loves Lee but Lee wants Calvin but Calvin’s really Nicholas who loves Catherine who’s really Francesca. Lee’s sister Linda is lusted after by Gus who’s producing the movie Calvin and Francesca are in, which is being directed by David Fincher and stars Brad Pitt, and everyone’s about to meet at his birthday party in Beverly Hills. Except for Hitler, who’s in a stage play, cracking jokes and wondering whether breakdancing Nazis are in bad taste.

So okay, it isn’t Ocean’s Eleven. But although Full Frontal took a panning in the States, you’d have to have found Solaris incomprehensible to be baffled by it. We’ve played into its critics’ hands with that opening paragraph, but a synopsis of most Altman films would read just as insanely. And boy is Soderbergh showing off his cinephile credentials here, as if embarrassed by his commercial clout.

The role model is Truffaut’s Day For Night, with undisguised comic references to Fellini’s 8

OPENS MAY 9, CERT 12, 110 MINS

Set during the ’70s in one of Mao’s “re-education” camps, director Dai Sijie’s film follows the fortunes of two teenagers, Luo and Ma, both from an educated background, whose middle-class parents have been branded bourgeois and degenerate. They manage to evade the worst excesses of the autocratic camp chief by taking advantage of his politically myopic, anti-bourgeois outlook?they play him a Mozart violin piece, explaining that it is a contemporary folk tune in praise of Karl Marx. By such means, they keep alive their clandestine interest in Western culture. Both fall in love with the granddaughter of the village tailor, introducing her to the joys of Balzac.

Filmed in the vertiginous beauty of the Sichuan Province, Balzac… would be a depressing account of the egregious dogma of Maoism if it weren’t amply redeemed by an indomitable spirit of humour and resourcefulness.

DIRECTED BY David Mackenzie

STARRING Alastair Mackenzie, Jonathan Phillips, David Hayman

Opens May 9, Cert 15, 92 mins

Jarvis Cocker lends his voice and music to actor-turned-director David Mackenzie’s compelling Scottish psycho-thriller, a revengedriven Dogma-style road movie which redeems its rough-as-fuck feel with punky, offbeat energy. But Jarvis is just a fringe presence in Mackenzie’s genre-hopping feature debut, playing the remote and unseen pop star who has stolen the wife of anti-hero Charlie?as portrayed by Alastair Mackenzie, Monarch Of The Glen star and the director’s brother. Heading for the adulterous pair’s highland love nest with arson on his mind, the vengeful Charlie picks up Vince (Phillips), a troubled gigolo on the run from underworld heavies. But the fugitive duo’s problems really start when they break down in the wintry Scottish outback, seeking refuge in a retreat for mental patients run by the disturbingly genial Rory (Hayman).

Shot guerrilla-style on grainy digital video, Mackenzie’s feature debut is not without flaws?some of the acting is wooden and the plot full of hackneyed contrivances. But the flinty grandeur of off-season Scotland is evoked without resort to tourist-brochure clich

OPENS MAY 2, CERT 12A, 90 MINS

Damien O’Donnell took his time choosing a follow-up to his hit debut, East Is East. And this gentle, small-scale drama may come as something of a surprise to anyone expecting more broad, bawdy comedy. In many ways, it doesn’t feel like a British film?thematically, it’s not dissimilar to David Lynch’s The Straight Story, but the tone of this slow-burning, quirky character study is at times closer to contemporary Japanese cinema, such as Takeshi Kitano’s Hana Bi. Contextually, however, it’s English through and through.

Darts fan Colin (Michael Sheen) is content to have never left his small Midlands town. His modest ambitions were mostly fulfilled when he married childhood sweetheart Sandra. But when she runs off to Blackpool with the captain of the darts team, Colin pursues her through the countryside on his Honda moped, meeting assorted travellers along the way. His voyage of self-discovery is beautifully illustrated by Alwin Kuchler’s superb cinematography in what is a genuinely heart-warming film.