OPENS JULY 2, CERT TBC, 85 MINS

Taipei, summer. It’s hot. Be-dimpled spiky-haired school stud Zhang Shihao (Bo-Lin Chen) has fallen for kooky but feisty Meng Kerou (Lun-Mei Guey). Only problem is Meng, who has ‘gender issues’, has fallen for girlfriend Lin Yuezhen (Shu-hui Liang). And to make matters worse, pretty but shy Lin is obsessed with Zhang!

The kind of flick that would be complete cheese if pumped out by a major studio somehow reaches near-transcendent heights in the hands of second-time director Chin-yen Yee. Yes, he frames gorgeously, shoots under metallic blue Taiwanese night skies, and isolates the protagonists almost entirely from the adult world (although these are chaste kids?lock-lipped kisses is as far as it goes). But, most importantly, he treats the subject of adolescent love with the deadly earnestness it deserves?some tense, taciturn scenes are reminiscent of Bergman, while the juvenile cast interact with impressively fraught intensity. The Taiwanese Teen Movie phenomenon starts here!

OPENS JULY 2, CERT 15, 103 MINS

Greg Kinnear and Rebecca Romijn-Stamos play Paul and Jessie Duncan, a professional urban couple with a seven-year-old son, Adam. When Adam dies in a car accident, kindly geneticist Dr Richard Wells (Robert De Niro) offers to retrieve Adam’s cells, clone him and return an identical foetus to Jessie’s womb. The only catch is, they’ll have to raise Adam in Dr Wells’ private rural community.

Cut to seven years later and everything is going swimmingly until Adam Mk II outlives the original, whereupon he becomes a very troubled kid?thousand yard stares, homicidal behaviour. Is Adam remembering his former life/death, or is something more sinister going on? Is Dr Wells all he seems? The answer is, of course, “no”, and what starts as a well-played psychological thriller/rumination on scientific ethics descends into the usual mix of jump-cuts, pyrotechnics and logic-defying plot twists. Good, unnerving fun for the first hour, though.

DIRECTED BY Takashi Shimizu

STARRING Megumi Okina, Takako Fuji, Yuya Ozeki

Opens July 2, Cert 15, 92 mins

Prepare yourself for a fresh batch of Japanese psychological horror movies being remade in Hollywood. This creepy Japanese film?the culmination of two earlier video releases in Japan?is from the same production stable as The Ring, and will soon receive a similar US makeover. In Japan, the sequel is already in the can.

Rika (Okina), a young social worker, is called out to the home of Sachie, an elderly woman who lives alone in a suburban home in Tokyo. While Sachie cowers in her bed, Rika breaks the cardinal rule?don’t explore a haunted house alone. Gradually, the ghostly presence lurking in the property reveals itself to be an oversized black cat and a mute young boy, Toshio?as potent an icon of the new wave of Japanese horror as The Ring’s Sadako?before a thick, black vapour swallows up Sachie altogether.

These mysterious, unexplained forces proceed to terrorise, possess and destroy a whole series of characters. The subsequent deaths of Sachie’s son and daughter-in-law spark off a police investigation that gradually reveals the grim legacy of the old woman’s home.

The vengeful ghost is a familiar figure in Japanese horror. Tracing the story backwards, through the numerous victims of the house, we discover the origin of the curse, tied to the brutal massage of an entire family who lived there. The grudge of the title is the curse now unleashed on those who come into direct contact with the house and its purposeful but angry spirit. The film’s confusing plot, swinging between past and present, detracts from the claustrophobia and mystery of the story, and the characters are muddled. Still, Ju-On: The Grudge hits all the right horror buttons?grim music, sinister child, mysterious house?to be determinedly creepy, even if its mechanisms of fear are repetitive. The image of the possessed, taciturn child is a powerful one, while the palette of cold blues and white is particularly effective. The Hollywood remake, though, will surely be less stark and more straightforward.

OPENS JULY 9, CERT 15, 95 MINS

Half the population of Iceland saw Fridrik Thor Fridriksson’s last film, Angels Of The Universe. Okay, so the Icelandic population’s small, but that gives you some indication of the esteem in which he’s held there. His main influence is Kurosawa. This, then, is no explosive thrill ride but melancholy art house cinema of the highest order.

Keith Carradine plays Simon, a man who’s spent too much time in US jails, taken too many blows and can’t face any more. He returns to Iceland, his ancestral homeland, to consider suicide. Then fate introduces him to free spirit Dua (Margr

OPENS JULY 30, NO CERT, 114 MINS

Coming-of-age sports movies tend to adhere to a formula and, in essence, this debut feature from computer-effects whiz Fumihiko Sori is no exception. Familiar setbacks and triumphs are all present and correct, but this adaptation of a five-volume manga delivers enough character quirks, visual flair and unique detail to make it the Japanese equivalent of a Wes Anderson film.

Friends since childhood, the wild, outgoing Peco (Y

OPENS JULY 2, CERT 15, 100 MINS

Chabrol seems to have a taste for morbid, murderous secrets that ruffle the comfort of bourgeois existence. But his latest, the tale of a wealthy Bordeaux family, seems rather prosaic next to the suffocating, gothic malevolence of predecessors like Merci Pour La Chocolat.

Fran

OPENS JULY 2, CERT 12A, 124 MINS

The smart feature debut from Faouzi Bensa