DIRECTED BY Ron Shelton

STARRING Kurt Russell, Scott Speedman, Brendan Gleeson, Ving Rhames

Opens May 2, Cert 15, 118 mins

From a story by James Ellroy, and scripted by Training Day’s David Ayer, Dark Blue is dark stuff indeed. Set against the background of the Rodney King beatings and subsequent LA riots in 1992, the film is a frank depiction of the casual brutality and corruption among the LAPD during that turbulent time. The movie takes the lid off the force. “Is it possible to have a secret in the Department?” asks a police wife. Everybody has something on someone else and will use it, kill witnesses, take someone out as a favour for upstairs.

At the centre of this sty is Detective Eldon Perry (Russell), who does the dirty work for Special Investigations Squad supremo Jack Van Meter (Gleeson). As the film opens, Perry is breaking in his new partner, Van Meter’s nephew, Bobby Keough (Speedman). Perry-charming, roguish?shows Bobby how to break the rules to get the job done, literally how to get away with murder. The plot hangs around the robbery of a South Central grocery store, organised by Van Meter. The thugs who carried out the robbery fucked up and left four people dead, so Van Meter sends in Perry and Keough for damage limitation. But Perry and Keough are being watched by assistant police chief Holland (Rhames), who wants to bring down Van Meter. Everything comes to a head as Los Angeles erupts into violence. The acting is uniformly good here. Gleeson, in particular, is fine, switching believably from blarney bonhomie to threats. But this is Russell’s film through and through. It’s easily his best work for a decade. Perry may appear a back-slapping good ol’ boy, the last cowboy left in LA, but his principles are completely compromised, and beneath his swaggering exterior he knows it. As a result, he’s consumed by a ferocious self-loathing?you can see it in the creased lines on his face and the bottles which collect on the floor of his motel room. He yearns for redemption. Shelton?a cracking director of sports movies like Bull Durham and White Men Can’t Jump?handles the material solidly, but lacks flair. The indictment of the LAPD is true to Ellroy, but the movie fails to stir much indignation.

DIRECTED BY Arthur Penn

STARRING Marlon Brando, Jack Nicholson, Harry Dean Stanton

Opens May 23, Cert 15, 126 mins

The story is, on paper at least, the stuff of traditional westerns. Regulator Robert E Lee Clayton (Brando) is hired to take down Tom Logan (Nicholson) and his band of cattle thieves (Stanton, Randy Quaid and Frederic Forrest). Inevitably, it was originally viewed as Brando versus Nicholson?as if teaming the two great actors of American cinema was some kind of OK Corral in itself, but it resulted in a disappointingly bloodless encounter. Brando himself is wildly, wilfully eccentric?a riot of accents and costumes, including, famously, a dress and bonnet?while Nicholson, one year after winning his Oscar for One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, gives a restrained, sturdy performance as the rustler who wants to settle down.

But watching this fine, crisp new print, you realise that the most substantial element of the film is novelist Thomas McGuane’s brilliant script. A brief scene in which one of the rustlers is hospitably fed, furtively serviced and killed, transcends its place in the plot through the sheer quality of the writing. His host talks of Thomas Jefferson, his wife is bored, you glimpse the dynamic of the family, the scene building towards it inevitable conclusion. Later, Harry Dean (with a haircut and hat which make him look like he’s just stepped out of a Frederic Remington painting) delivers a monologue about the killing of the dog which McGuane invests with quiet devastation.

Of course, these were richer times for writers. Meanwhile, Penn directs indulgently, giving everybody time to establish their little patch in Montana. The much anticipated big bout, mano a mano, was never on the cards, though. Nicholson confronts the defenceless, fat Brando in his tub, covered in bubble bath, and can’t bring himself to kill him. Both are too supine. That’s their big scene together, and it dribbles away. Nicholson’s love affair with the rancher’s daughter, Kathleen Lloyd, on the other hand, is gloriously and even-handedly erotic, her desperate to lose her virginity, him lecherous yet infinitely considerate.

One of the great ’70s westerns?occasionally bizarre, frequently brilliant. Damn good to have it back.

OPENED APRIL 18, CERT U, 59 MINS

A known technophile, Cameron gets his mitts on the very latest kit for this 3D IMAX mini feature, and shows just how eye-popping this technology can be. Effectively a supplement to Titanic, the film?which will run at UK IMAX cinemas across the summer?sees Cameron and the affable Bill Paxton sailing to the North Atlantic with a cadre of scientists. Descending in mini submarines armed with camera-equipped robots to explore what remains of the luxury liner, Cameron and co compare the rusting but still elegant hulk with computer simulations and footage from his more famous film. The ‘ghosts’ of the title are costumed extras playing crew and passengers, superimposed on the ship’s remains. The 3D IMAX technology makes you feel as if you’re actually aboard the ship, and one of the biggest thrills is simply a mechanical claw looming at the camera, as if about to pinch your nose. All in all, a film that points the way forward to the IMAX movies to come.

OPENS MAY 9, CERT 15, 90 MINS

Todd Phillips directed the dumb-but-fun Road Trip but this is better, flinging grown men into the standard frat-com mix of beer bongs, hooters and revenge on the dean.

Careerist Luke Wilson walks in on a gang-bang starring his wife, and moves out, winding up in the grounds of the local college. This inspires best mate Vince Vaughn (playing the same as in Swingers and Made) to set up their own fraternity. Sounds lame, and with early scenes involving breezeblocks tied to the knackers, Old School is at first nothing more than Animal House with hair loss.

But as the mayhem goes on, it highlights the sadness in being a thirty something suddenly mugged by divorce and thrown back to square one?essentially a freshman with a beer gut. New face Will Ferrell comes to the fore here. All the bad things happen to him but he takes it on the chin in the hangdog style that until now was copyright of Bill Macy. For bringing Nick Hornby-style pathos to a tired genre, this is well worth bunking off for.

OPENS MAY 2, CERT 18, 125 MINS

Handily broken down into a formula which comprises ’51 per cent action, 49 per cent romance’, this 1999 production made history in South Korea by breaking the box-office record set by Titanic. With anxiety about North Korea currently running at a new high, the film’s release here couldn’t be more timely, even if what’s on show is a fairly routine political action-thriller. A long-dormant North Korean female assassin (Kim Yun-Jin) comes out of hiding to spearhead a move to thwart potential rapprochement between North and South, hijacking a lethal weapon called CTX and plotting to use it at a football match between the two regions. Once a pair of intelligence agents set off in pursuit, the film becomes virtually one long, flamboyant action set-piece, although the romantic plot that underpins the story does provide respite. It’s all efficiently relentless but not particularly inspired; considering the pace at which the Asian action genre evolves, dedicated fans will find it very tame.

OPENS MAY 18, CERT 15, 93 MINS

Ham actor Anthony O’Malley (Michael Caine) is starring in a truly awful production of Richard III in Dublin and drinking with one-time gangster Barreller (Michael Gambon) in his spare time. Learning of a scenario where Party A owes Party B money?but where the Parties have never met?O’Malley persuades his prot

OPENS MAY 16, CERT 12A, 102 MINS

Set following the Roundheads’ victory in the English Civil War, To Kill A King centres on the under-regarded figure of Sir Thomas Fairfax (Dougray Scott), the brilliant general of the parliamentary army to whom Oliver Cromwell (Tim Roth) was deputy. But as Cromwell rises to pre-eminence, dissolving parliament and pressing for the execution of Charles I (Rupert Everett?no, don’t laugh, he’s rather good), Fairfax finds himself, as an aristocrat, torn between loyalty to the republican cause and his own class.

To Kill A King is handsomely produced, and Roth is initially excellent as the dimly fearsome Cromwell. But the dialogue’s rather stiff?you fear someone’s going to start dropping in the odd “verily” any minute. The story of Cromwell’s ascension is bowdlerised, and Roth ends up caricaturing him as a Napoleonic figure, while too much Mills And Boon-style sympathy is asked of us for Lord and Lady Fairfax. To Kill A King is, literally, a tad too cavalier with historical truth.