Reviews

DIRECTED BY Edward Zwick STARRING Tom Cruise, Ken Watanabe, Hiroyuki Sanada, Timothy Spall Opens January 9, Cert 15, 154 mins Very loosely based on the development of trade links between the US and Japan in the 1870s, signalling the end of Shogunate rule and the beginning of Japan's Meiji Restoration era, The Last Samurai details the exploits of fictional cavalry hero Captain Nathan Algren (Cruise). Dispirited by the violence he's inflicted on the Indian nation, Algren accepts a lucrative assignment to train Japanese riflemen.

To say this ultraviolent 1983 flick is Chuck Norris'best movie might smack of faint praise, but what's good is mostly down to David Carradine as his strutting, butt-kicking, cigar-sucking nemesis. It's a modern-day western, heavy on the spaghetti, with Norris'Texas ranger taking on Carradine's gun-runner and his army of disposable borderland Mexicans. Did Walter Hill watch this before making Extreme Prejudice?

A kind of Australian answer to Lock, Stock...without the masturbatory middle-class fascination with lowlife machismo, David Caesar's exuberant yarn about slot machine wars in 1960s Sydney is a riot of garish hues and lurid trouser suits. Toni Collette rises above a routine plot and meaty cast (Bryan Brown, Sam Neill) with her sassy gangster's moll routine.

Twentieth anniversary celebration by universally popular jazz trio

This is cooler than cool. Probably a guilty pleasure, as the movie appears to be a thinly-veiled remake of Flashdance starring Jessica Alba, but it swings like a narcissistic cat. Missy Elliott (who cameos in the film) lures us in with "Hurt Sumthin", and it just gets better from there. Tweet's "Thugman" is delicious, Nate Dogg's "Leave Her Alone" is beat-perfect, and Erick Sermon and Redman's "React" causes you to do just that.

Self-consciously awkward electronica from San Francisco

NYC's queens of kitsch mine classic-rock vault

Posthumous collection heavily skewed in favour of the '80s hits

Director Tim Burton's father-son fable is his best movie yet

Another reworking of the Betty Blue mythology, with the always watchable Valeria Golino as the Sicilian free spirit who is deemed nuts by her husband and run out of town for such sins as spontaneity and unconventionality. Sun-baked scenery and a lurch into magical realism at the end makes it more than the sum of its parts.