Co-written by Anita (Gentlemen Prefer Blondes) Loos, Cukor’s 1939 all-female classic is a goldmine of razor-sharp insults and catty put-downs. The fun’s fleshed out by the knowledge that, off-screen, Joan Crawford and Norma Shearer hated each other tooth and claw. Shearer forced Crawford to change her costume 16 times until it didn’t outshine hers, and in interviews Crawford hissed, “I love to play bitches—Norma really helped me with this.”

A gaggle of women-who-gossip score points off each other with fearful style. Shearer’s hubby’s cheating on her with a shopgirl, Crystal (Crawford), and she initiates a Reno divorce. Crystal, greedy, chats up cowboys in a filthy voice via her bath-side phone. Rosalind Russell, Joan Fontaine and Paulette Goddard chip in with zingers, and eventually revenge is sweet. Also bitter.

Not a man in sight, but the competition’s heated and no one here would ask for directions. One enormous roaring miaow, from “your skin makes the Rocky mountains look like chiffon” to “chin up, dear—both of them, “The Women is unscrupulous, wicked and acid. Next to this, Deadwood is a group hug where the chaps all show their sensitive side.

It’s not awful. That’s not faint praise—it’s shock. The signs were so bad for Taxi (a Luc Besson-produced thriller remade as a Queen Latifah comedy) that it’s a pleasant surprise when it turns out to be a mildly diverting buddy caper on a par with, ooh, Beverley Hills Cop II.

Latifah is an insanely aggressive taxi driver with a souped-up car who gets roped into helping a recently sacked idiot cop (Saturday Night Live C-lister Jimmy Fallon) to foil a series of bank robberies. Who are the robbers? Sharp-shooting Brazilian supermodel Gisele Bundchen and foxy friends, of course. They’ve got a souped-up car as well. Possibly you can guess what happens next. No point scrutinising this too closely—it’s genetically engineered to appeal to teenage boys, right down to the unnecessary stripping scenes. If you like stunt driving, wall-to-wall eye candy, happy endings and Latifah’s family-oriented brand of sass, give it a whirl. But see the original afterwards—it’s got 10 times the horsepower.

Hard nut Hamro (Uktamoi Miyasarova) returns to Tajikistan to care for his sick mother after a decade of bad behaviour in Moscow (“I messed up three guys” is all we’re told), only to walk into trouble and tough guys every bit as deadly as those he left behind in the big city. With studied calm, Djamshed Usmonov unfurls this quietly admirable tale of morality and maturity, shot in the director’s home village of Asht with members of his family playing many of the key roles (Miyasarova, for instance, is his brother). This naturalistic approach gives the film a familiar, quasi-documentary feel, while the theme of big decisions made by little people and the repercussions thereof recalls the work of Ken Loach, albeit with a more spiritual bent. Miyasarova is excellent as the menacing, conflicted Hamro, but it’s the wonderfully believable evocation of the bustle of daily life in this poor, forgotten but proud village that most resonates.

The makers of this are also responsible for four previous true-life serial-killer flicks. The justification seems to be that they are bloody chunks of pop culture, and The Hillside Strangler certainly loses itself in ’70s LA kitsch as cousins Ken Bianchi (C Thomas Howell) and Angelo Buono (Nick Turturro) set about murdering 15 women. Ken is classic psycho material, played with pasted-on charm by Howell; Angelo is a macho sleaze-hound. When their dabblings in the “whore business” are squashed by heavy duty pimps, they take out their frustrations cruising Hollywood, raping and strangling. Shot like a period exploitation movie by writer/director Chuck Parello, there’s a blunt nastiness to both killers and killings. But misogyny and titillation vacantly dominate. The wider themes addressed, say, in Spike Lee’s Summer Of Sam are absent. And serial killers being vile is hardly news, especially to the relatives of the 15 women casually exploited here. Reprehensible, really.

A crooner in the Sinatra school, Bobby Darin had ego and ambition enough to overcome his pudgy, square looks, and even garnered an Oscar nomination in his brief acting career (for 1963’s Captain Newman MD). He seems to have married Sandra Dee (Kate Bosworth) to prove, simply, that he could. Can’t imagine what star-director Kevin Spacey relates to here.

There are some heavy-hitters among the screenwriters?Paul Homicide Attanasio; Lorenzo Sleepers Carcaterra; James Bugsy Toback?and Beyond The Sea isn’t stupid, but it never makes a compelling case that Darin merits two hours of our rapt attention.

The movie delivers the greatest hits alongside domestic trials and tribulations, with a few fantasy sequenes thrown in, but Spacey’s direction is self-conscious, and no movie which shoves John Goodman, Bob Hoskins and Brenda Blethyn down our throats deserves much sympathy.

The mixed reception given to Birth at recent film festivals may have been unfairly distorted by weighty expectations. Glazer’s sensational 2000 debut Sexy Beast was one of the strongest British films of recent years, while anything Kidman touches these days is scrutinised as a star vehicle first and a work of cinema second. The mouthy young auteur’s second feature also arrives with a troubled history of reshoots and backstage battles, often early warnings of creative cop-out and committee-driven compromise.

But not so with Birth, which turns out to be a bold, haunting highbrow thriller with paranormal trimmings. Kidman plays Anna, a psychologically brittle Upper Manhattan widow who, on the eve of marrying her new suitor Joseph (Huston), is stalked by a 10-year-old (Bright) claiming to be the reincarnation of her late husband. He even knows enough intimate detail to prove it, plunging Anna into a vertiginous panic of impossible hopes and desires.

As co-writer and director, Glazer unwinds this bizarre premise for slow-burn suspense, but he recognises its humour, too. Joseph’s stuffed-shirt rivalry and Anna’s quasi-sexual feelings towards the young interloper are both presented as comically absurd. And yet profound emotions are never far away?one pivotal close-up on Kidman’s face, wracked with doubt and grief and terrible exhilaration, fills the screen for a cinematic eternity as it bores its way through the viewer’s skull. Fantastic.

Birth, above all, is an immensely beautiful work shot in wintry earth tones. The style is filtered through Glazer’s directorial influences without making them too blatant: Kubrick for the glacial pace and palatial elegance, Rosemary’s Baby for Kidman’s gamine crop and paranoid isolation, The Sixth Sense for Bright’s eerie calm and brooding secrecy.

But while the preposterous plot could easily have resolved itself in a schlocky Twilight Zone or X Files flourish, Glazer defies convention with a final twist that some will find disappointingly prosaic, others intriguingly open-ended. Crucially, though, the story’s ‘explanation’ is less important than its accumulated observations on grief and loss and the soul-gnawing human hunger to believe in a love that survives beyond death itself. Taken on these terms, Birth is a symphonic, engrossing, quietly devastating work.

The recent slew of documentaries and literature prompted by post-9/11 events and the excesses of the Bush administration has been bracing and heartening, but they’ve often taken a stylised, even heavy-handed approach that might alienate their target audience. There’s a feeling, for example, that Michael Moore’s overbearing presence tends to cast a shadow over the point he’s trying to make, that he pisses off even those who fundamentally agree with him.

Uncovered: The War On Iraq, a film by Robert Greenwald, who also made Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War On Journalism, is an altogether different proposition. No radical trimmings, no polemical posturing, no browbeating, no hip devices. Its contributors are establishment, or ex-establishment people?defence officials, foreign service experts, ambassadors. This film reeks of respectability, is absolutely unspun and is all the more convincing for that. For here, laid out plainly, logically and soberly, is the truth about the Iraq war. That there were no WMDs, that Saddam posed no threat to the outside world, that he had no links with Al-Qaeda, that indeed they were mutually hostile, that the Bush administration had earmarked Iraq for invasion as part of a crazed and declared neo-con plan for the “Americanisation” of the globe, and that they deliberatively contrived, spun and selectively edited intelligence concerning Iraq’s weapons capability when making their case to the public.

This is illustrated through archive footage of the various culprits?Bush, Rice, Rumsfeld, Powell, Wolfowitz, as well as some of their more moronic media cheerleaders. Their weasel words are neatly exposed. Not for nothing does one interviewee talk of the American nation being in the grip of a “historical and political lobotomy”.

Go see this film.

Joseph Ruben’s panning shots of New York’s rooftops are a subliminal nod to Rosemary’s Baby, but this workmanlike chiller doesn’t probe anywhere so dark. Softened by the relentless tinkling of James Horner’s piano, it has the safety catch on. Julianne Moore may have hoped for a role to match Kidman’s in The Others, but it’s Shyamalan-lite, not Polanski-pervy. She stresses out floridly, but isn’t helped by clumping co-star Dominic West, who does ‘alcoholic’ like he’s had too much toast. Moore believes her son’s died in a plane crash, but hubby Anthony Edwards and shrink Gary Sinise say it ain’t so. Is she going potty? Or just over-acting? When she meets an ex-hockey star (West) whose daughter’s missing presumed dead too, they pair up to investigate. Crack FBI agents, easily outrun by Julianne Moore and a lousy actor, give chase. Linus Roache creeps about, and Jools reckons alien abduction’s going down. That’s no more implausible than much of the plot. The special effect, when it comes, is a stunner. Slick hokum.

This sports comedy spiked with special-effects steroids became Hong Kong’s all-time box-office champ when it opened in 2001, a record that still stands even now as the film belatedly arrives here. It’s taken some knocks in the intervening years, though, having had almost a half-hour removed and suffering the major indignity of an English-language dub. Still, the original spirit of star-director Stephen Chow’s crowd-pleaser remains gloriously intact. Chow?a local legend in HK?plays Sing, a Shaolin disciple reduced to hawking the virtues of his kung fu lifestyle to passers-by on the street. Hooking up with former football ace “Golden Leg” (Ng Man Tat), the pair assemble a ragtag team of players with various Shaolin skills to take on the notorious Team Evil (who, for some reason, train underwater). Even those who hate football shouldn’t be put off; there’s little regular sports action?just increasingly spectacular CGI mayhem, with body collisions and the ball turning into a thermonuclear device. Highly entertaining.

Lenny (Jack Black) is the vegetarian, desperate-to-drop-out son of shark mob boss Don Lino (De Niro, brilliantly cast). When his far-tougher, fish-eating brother is accidentally killed, Lenny goes into hiding while a young fish named Oscar (Will Smith) takes the credit for “slaying” both sharks. Oscar is f

Fernando Eimbcke swept the board at the Mexican Film Festival with this gently melancholy, shrewdly funny debut. Don’t expect the flamboyance of Y Tu Mam

Twenty-year-old Lolita (Marilou Berry) wants to be a classical singer, to be slim and, most of all, she wants to win the approval of her father, Etienne (Jean-Pierre Bacri). A successful writer, Etienne has been fêted and fawned over for most of his adult life, to the extent that he no longer needs to be pleasant to those around him. His daughter is a disappointment to him because she’s dumpy, neurotic and so desperately needs his affection. Lolita can’t accept that any friendship she forms doesn’t have its roots in her father’s celebrity. Into this maelstrom of repressed tensions come Lolita’s singing teacher (Agnès Jaoui, who directed and co-wrote with Bacri), her writer husband and Sébastien, who falls for Lolita, only to discover that she can be as difficult as her father. Jaoui (The Taste Of Others) is not only a fine actress but clearly a very able ringmaster for this circus of monstrous egos and corrupted self-image. French cinema at its most sophisticated and rewarding.

Adapted by The Hours’ Michael Cunningham from his own novel, this examination of an ad hoc family is ambitious if occasionally dull. Damaged Bobby is adopted into Jonathan’s family in early-’70s Ohio; mutual adoration, and masturbation under the sheets, ensues. But when the adult Bobby (Colin Farrell) seeks out Jonathan (Dallas Roberts) in early-’80s New York, where he is living with frayed free spirit Clare (Robin Wright Penn), love becomes harder to fathom. Jonathan, gay and glumly promiscuous, is unobtainable to Clare, who falls for virginal Bobby instead. Soon all three are trying to raise a baby in an idyllic farmhouse, but old monogamous, motherly wants aren’t so easily out-run. Director Michael Mayer’s debut deals in hard emotions, which his cast hit head on. Sexuality is treated with sympathetic frankness, and love’s raw frustrations ring true. Only moments of feel-good smugness, and the turgid pace near the end, let it down.

Albert (Schwartzman) determines to deduce the meaning of a string of coincidences, and hires a pair of Existential Detectives (Hoffman, Tomlin). They snoop around his bathroom and his metaphysics, micro-analysing his life. His nemesis is golden boy Brad (Law), who’s scaling the ladder at superstore chain Huckabees, where his pin-up girlfriend Dawn (Watts) is spokesmodel. Albert finds a soulmate in earnest firefighter Tommy (Wahlberg), and this odd couple fall under the spell of the detectives’ rival, French philosopher Caterine (Huppert). Got that? Soon, Albert and Caterine are having sex in the mud, Brad is unravelling and Dawn is questioning her looks. Albert and Tommy almost find a kind of peace, embracing “pure being”.

Huckabees is like no other film you’ve seen. Russell, having broken big with Three Kings, delves back to the clever, dark zaniness of Spanking The Monkey and Flirting With Disaster in this… farce? Essay? Debate? Tragicomedy? Perhaps the wordiest movie released this year, it’s full of ideas, non sequiturs and puzzles, and insanely inspired. Many scenes will knock you sideways, and among a stellar cast Watts and Wahlberg, stretching themselves, are excellent. Law tries too hard; Hoffman and Tomlin good-naturedly send up their personae.

Whether it all hangs together to construct anything durable is yet another question. Though it starts like a runaway train and just gets faster, Huckabees at times trips over its own ambition. Do we care for these freaks? Many may lose patience, as with Soderbergh’s equally cerebral Schizopolis, and you wish maybe Charlie Kaufman had edited the confusing script, which is a forked path off Being John Malkovich remixed by Magritte.

It’s certainly mind-blowing, with some unforgettable trippy imagery. The interior of Albert’s head is a stew of envy, lust and fear. He and Tommy beat each other across the head with a spacehopper till they “stop thinking”. Shania Twain’s a running joke, till she cameos. Tippi Hedren swears. Points are made about petroleum, ecology and “cruelty and manipulation”. It’s a true one-off. But, like, what’s truth?

Fans of the book will be dying to know how Roger Michell handles the shock opening, and he sends this balloon up and away with tension, flair, colour and a sense of awe. Thereafter, a claustrophobic, twitchy domestic drama sets in, till the climax implodes with silly mad-stalker histrionics. A shame: for an hour the intricate (very French) direction and acting of Daniel Craig and Samantha Morton are totally absorbing. But the atmosphere’s derailed by the miscasting of Rhys lfans as a pitiful psychotic. You keep expecting him to bare his bum: scary, but not that scary.

Intellectuals Joe (Craig) and Claire (Morton) find faultlines in their relationship when Joe fails to save a man pulled to his death by a hot air balloon. Another witness, Jed (Ifans), begins to harangue Joe with visits and calls, until it’s clear he’s a dangerous obsessive. Surely contrary to McEwan’s intentions, it turns into Fatal Attraction without the laughs. Much analysis of What Love Means honours the novel, but the bubble pops.

Chris Roberts