OPENS AUGUST 29, CERT 15, 92 MINS

Bruno (Daniel Auteuil), a communist journalist, is having a midlife crisis. He’s not sure he still believes in the cause he’s supported all his life, and is flailing between his wife (Emmanuelle Devos) and girlfriend (Ludivine Sagnier). Bouncing off a string of oddball characters, he’s lost his bearings. Delivering a message for his uncle, who’s fighting a re-election battle as communist mayor of a small Grenoble town, Bruno really loses his way, in deep fog, in a forest. He meets the mysterious, mercurial B

OPENS AUGUST 29, CERT 15, 89 MINS

An ex-con, Hamro (Maruf Pulodzoda), sporting a scowl that could shatter granite and fierce, wolfish eyes, returns to his Tajikistan village after 10 years in a Moscow jail. Convinced his mother is dying, he starts repairs to their dilapidated house. So begins an often grim look at life on the remote edges of the former Soviet empire. Money is tight here, and relief comes from a vodka bottle or the scratchy Bollywood movies shown at a ramshackle outdoor cinema. When Moscow gangsters arrive demanding money owed to them, things only get grimmer for Hamro.

Not that this is an excessively depressive movie. There are moments of deadpan humour and amusing cameos from the village eccentrics. As Hamro grows closer to his mother and long-lost son, his tough-guy exterior reveals a tender side, and what starts out as gloomy social realism turns into a fable about familial responsibility.

Built from small, sharply observed incidents rather than big dramatic showdowns, Angel… requires some patience. But the rewards are rich and touching.

OPENS AUGUST 22, CERT TBC, 90 MINS

If you like your drama pared to the bone, then this sparse tone poem about a Parisian one-night stand is for you. Quintessentially French, it might as well have been titled?in tribute to Claude Lelouch’s 1966 film?A Man And A Woman And A Peugeot.

The film opens with Laure (Val

OPENS AUGUST 8, CERT 12A, 90 MINS

Emanuele Crialese’s languid study of life on a remote fishing village on the sun-scorched island of Lampuseda, off the coast of Sicily, revolves around Pietro, a fisherman, Grazia, his emotionally troubled wife (Valeria Golino of Indian Runner, Frida and Rain Man fame) and their rough-housing but sensitive son Pasquale. The story, by writer-director Crialese, retells an old Lampuseda myth?that of a woman driven to desperate ends by local villagers. Suffice to say, the film operates as a slow-burning fable. With many scenes of men fishing out on boats, their sons helping out on shore and women packing fish in a cannery, comparisons with Visconti’s 1948 neo-realist fishing village classic La Terra Trema are inevitable. But, in truth, Respiro has more in common with Antonioni’s L’Avventura?there’s the same measured pacing, the same cascade of stunning images. At the heart of this striking, sumptuous film, though, is Golino’s mesmerising performance as a woman on the edge of a nervous breakdown.

OPENED AUGUST 1, CERT U, 74 MINS

A jerky, episodic, two-dimensional cartoon about a diminutive warrior and his isolated African village, Kirikou And The Sorceress seems hysterically quaint in a global animation market defined by ironic CGI behemoths from Disney and DreamWorks (Toy Story, Shrek and the up’n’coming Finding Nemo).

Still, French animator Michel Ocelot adapts this west African legend with seductive simplicity, illustrating the adventures of supernaturally gifted homunculus Kirikou (Theo Sebeko) and his skirmishes with the baby-killing, man-eating, water-stealing sorceress Karaba (Antoinette Kellermann) via a stark formal palette that’s somewhere between Namibian pictogram and Chris Ofili collage. And yet, for all its ostensible simplicity, this is a cartoon with a wealth of intriguing subtext, including the spectre of drought and casual infanticide, and the ubiquitous banality of death. Elsewhere, the tiny pre-pubescent protagonist is driven by his blatantly Oedipal desire for the scary, castrating, big-breasted Sorceress. The Disney remake should be just around the corner.

DIRECTED BY Jonathan Mostow

STARRING Arnold Schwarzenegger, Nick Stahl, Claire Danes, Kristanna Loken

Opened August 1, Cert 12A, 109 mins

So far, 2003 has been heaving with lacklustre sci-fi epics. Enter the joker in the mega-budget pack: Terminator 3, the sequel no one wanted to see, starring an ageing icon 10 years past his best and directed by someone nobody’s heard of. It could only end badly, right?

Wrong?T3 is the balls-out, gag-fuelled thrill ride of the summer, 109 minutes of outrageous apocalyptic carnage heaving with back-to-basics Arnie one-liners and franchise-undermining humour.

Eight years has elapsed since John Connor and his indefatigable robot nanny dodged Judgement Day. Since then, mommy Sarah Connor has died of leukaemia and Edward Furlong has morphed into In The Bedroom’s nervy but heroic Nick Stahl. Stahl’s Connor lives on the streets, trying to avoid another visit from his machine opponents. But 20 minutes in, they’ve tracked him down and he’s on the run from the new, improved, deliciously female T-X (Loken)?just as deadly as Robert Patrick’s T-1000, with the added ability of being able to control machines. Connor hooks up with old flame Kate (Danes) and yet another copy of Arnie’s good ol’ T-800 (sent back once again to save Connor’s arse) before trying to escape T-X and prevent the US military from launching Skynet and bringing about armageddon.

U-571’s Jonathan Mostow (whose 1997 suspense debut, Breakdown, is an Uncut favourite) turns out to be an inspired choice for director. The film matches its predecessors in terms of relentless pacing and full-on action sequences, but it’s devoid of James Cameron’s pompous, epic touch, replacing portentous myth-building ruminations on the relationship of man to machine with sly, sight gags and sardonic dialogue. And Arnold seems to be thoroughly enjoying himself, back in his signature role after nearly a decade of howlers. It’s easy to write him off as a relic of the ’80s action hero genre, but seeing him here in leather and shades reminds you of how iconic the Terminator is, even now.

Against the odds, this is 100 per cent rollercoaster fun.

DIRECTED BY James Foley

STARRING Ed Burns, Dustin Hoffman, Rachel Weisz, Andy Garcia

Opens August 22, Cert 15, 98 mins

If the notion of (yet) another bunch of fast-talking eccentric conmen pulling off a daring heist with a twist doesn’t fill you with thrills, be assured this more than makes up in pizzazz what the concept might lack in originality. The inconsistent but sometimes spot-on Foley’s drawn the best from some great actors, and Doug Jung’s debut script is a peach, if peaches were funny and cool. Everyone involved’s having a blast, in a thinking person’s blast kind of way, and it comes across. Confidence swaggers through every second, with just cause.

The opening sequence is a gem. Smooth grifter Jake (Burns) and his crew are enacting a quite ingenious con: we whoop along with them when it’s over. The catch is they only now realise they’ve ripped off creepy crime lord Winston King (aka “The King”), who’s played by Hoffman as an hilariously camp yet violent sleazeball. Auditioning strippers for his club, he explodes, “If you’re gonna eat each other, do it tastefully!” More significantly, he’s soon sizing Jake up: “Hmm, you’re good, I can’t tell when you’re lying. But I’m getting there.” It’s Hoffman’s most Ratso-like role for an eternity, and he rocks.

Set a challenge by The King, the likeable Jake enlists vampish pickpocket Lily (Weisz) to his gang, but is less keen on The King’s henchmen tagging along. Corrupt cops and a mysterious “agent” (Garcia) also scramble the suspenseful equation, as the mission to put the sting on a big-time bank unfolds. Suffice to say there are many, many double-crosses, twists, cons and counter-cons, and a complex flashback structure in there just to keep you on your toes. Better, the jokes are plentiful and slightly mad. “The gig is up,” sighs one crew member. “It’s jig, guy,” corrects another. “It’s the jig that you say is up.” Like Ocean’s Eleven with added irony, Confidence, admittedly a good-looking film, relies on the noun of its title to charm and engage. The final flurry of twists may be a dozen too many for some, but by then you’re happily prepared to let it slide. You trust it: ergo, it works. Often dazzling.

OPENS AUGUST 8, CERT 12A, 140 MINS

You wouldn’t expect a movie based on a theme park attraction to be the summer’s surprise blockbuster hit, but producer Jerry Bruckheimer and Mouse Hunt director Gore Verbinski have delivered a multiplex gem, thanks largely to Johnny Depp’s inspired performance as pirate captain Jack Sparrow, blatantly?and hilariously?impersonating Keith Richards circa 1972.

Sparrow is hired by a dashing but sensitive blacksmith (Orlando Bloom) to rescue his girlfriend (Keira Knightley) from the clutches of evil pirate Captain Barbarossa (Geoffrey Rush), whose taken her prisoner aboard his ship, The Black Pearl.

The Black Pearl is Sparrow’s old ship, and Barbarossa has doomed its crew to damnation as zombies by stealing cursed Aztec gold. Sparrow, naturally, wants revenge. The bad news is that, at 140 minutes, this is way too long and drags in the middle. The good news is that when it’s under full sail, it’ll swash yer buckle.

OPENS AUGUST 22, CERT U, 124 MINS

Charlie Chaplin’s 1940 Hitler satire The Great Dictator follows an amnesiac Jewish barber (Chaplin, speaking on film for the first time, with shamefully bland range) from his persecution by the stormtroopers of Adenoid Hynkel (Chaplin too), leader of Tomania, to his part in the eventual triumph of pacifism during a climactic Hynkel rally. It’s an excruciating viewing experience.

Over-long and over-indulgent, everything here is overkill. Chaplin’s oft-seen and oft-praised impersonation of Hitler’s guttural delivery is funny in nostalgic bites, but after the fourth lengthy set-piece comedy rant it becomes ineffably grating. His penchant for irrelevant clownish shtick here slips into extraordinary tedium and his clarion call for a utopian world of brotherly love reeks of vanity and hypocrisy (Chaplin, after all, was an arch bully and on-set tyrant). And finally, politically, there’s nothing here that wasn’t said or done with immeasurably more wit and invention seven years earlier by the Marx Brothers in Duck Soup.

OPENS AUGUST 8, CERT 12, 158 MINS

Biopics of great artists have a way of turning into ripe melodramas about tormented geniuses. And they don’t get much more tormented than ear-trimming depressive Vincent Van Gogh, the subject of Maurice Pialat’s 1991 film. But what makes this movie so engaging is its subdued, almost matter-of-fact approach to the Dutch painter’s life. Pialat, who died in 2002, brings a keen eye for detail and remarkable spontaneity to his account of the three months before Van Gogh’s suicide, spent in the quiet village of Auvers-Sur-Oise.

More concerned with his complicated personal life than his contribution to art history, the film delicately follows Van Gogh’s romance with the teenage daughter of one of his rich admirers and his fractious relationship with his more conventional brother, Th

OPENS AUGUST 15, CERT 15, 94 MINS

Unusual this; a mob story told from a female point of view. Dusky beauty Angela (Donatella Finocchiaro), with her perfect vermilion manicure and Ava Gardner eyebrows, manages a shoe store in Palermo that doubles as a front for her husband Saro’s heroin business. When Saro hires smouldering hunk Masino (rising star Andrea Di Stefano), the mutual attraction between them develops into an affair. But the police are listening in, recording the lovers’ phone calls, and when they arrest Saro and his gang, Angela is forced to choose between giving evidence in exchange for the tapes’ destruction or keeping mum about her husband’s business?but at what price?

It’s pasta plain girly melodrama, really. But writer/director Roberta Torre has a delicate, playful touch, employing handheld moves and assorted tricks, showing a native’s feel for Sicily’s peeling buildings and stark light. Finocchiaro, a professional lawyer making her film debut here, has an old-fashioned bombshell sexiness and expressive features that speak volumes for her character. Not a full-blown hankie wetter, but an honest piece of work.

OPENS AUGUST 22, CERT 15, 102 MINS

An uptight, emotionally constrained English lady crime-writer and a sexually aggressive Proven