Sky

Sandra Bullock got little credit for branching out as a gum-chewing, neurotic hardcase in this clever Barbet Schroeder cop thriller. Two Dostoyevsky students commit the perfect murder as an intellectual challenge; it's up to boozy Bullock and sidekick Ben Chaplin to rattle their smugness. Schroeder ensures it has a dark heart.

With Mushroom having left the band and Daddy G taking a sabbatical from the studio to concentrate on family life, it falls to Robert Del Naja (3D) to carry forward Massive Attack into the beyond, in collaboration with Neil Davidge, the producer of their third album Mezzanine (1998). Without Mezzanine's layers of guitar, which left some Massive Attack lovers narrowing their eyes doubtfully, 100 Windows seems at first subdued. Much as shapes only gradually reveal themselves in an initially pitch black room, so it is with this album, which takes a few listens to become accustomed to.

Delbert Mann's earnest 1955 slice-of-life drama about an ordinary Bronx butcher (Ernest Borgnine) mustering the courage to find a girlfriend earned four Oscars—Best Picture plus one each for Borgnine, Mann and screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky, who later penned the far superior Network. It's decently acted and well-meaning but very slight, dated and a little condescending.

Debut from NY noisepop quartet

Disappointing biopic of legendary Mexican painter

DIRECTED BY Peter Mullan STARRING Nora-Jane Noone, Dorothy Duffy, Anne-Marie Duff Opens February 21, Cert 15, 119 mins The opening scene of Peter Mullan's award-winning social drama The Magdalene Sisters unfolds in a Dublin pub in 1964, where Guinness-stained granddads in cloth caps slap their thighs to fiddle-dee-diddle-dee music played by a lecherous priest who salivates suggestively over his bodhran while crucifixes are reflected in whisky glasses and a lusty Irish buck rapes his own cousin.

Jean Renoir's 1932 blueprint for Paul Mazursky's heavy-handed 1986 remake Down And Out In Beverly Hills stars Michel Simon as a Parisian tramp rescued from suicidal despair by kindly bookseller Charles Granval. Simon's ungrateful Boudu takes over Granval's house, wife and life, exposing his bourgeois complacency. Enduring, Chaplin-esque social satire. DVD EXTRAS: Introduction by Renoir, essay on the film, trailer for the Mazursky remake.

Soderbergh does sci-fi; Clooney does soul-searching

Auspicious, genre-defying debut from London-based polymath and sometime Telefunken/Hefner collaborator

Spiky, spunky Leeds singer-guitarist's debut, recorded in Austin with Spoon