OPENS APRIL 25, CERT 15, 106 MINS

Everything about this slice of uber-trash is insane. Remember John McNaughton’s Wild Things?so over-the-top that it was both atrocious and brilliant? Trapped is its mad twin, the one they lock in the attic. Anything casting Kevin Bacon and Courtney Love (neither of whom has ever consciously under-acted) as a pair of deranged kidnappers has to have loads going for it, however hysterically flawed.

In brief: Bacon grabs Charlize Theron while Love nabs Stuart Townsend; they delegate minding the kid to Pruitt Taylor Vince and demand money. Kev tries to take advantage of Charlize; she nearly castrates him with a scalpel she’s hidden down her butt-crack. Meanwhile Stuart, an anaesthesiologist, sends Courtney into a coma, which is a minor detour from the class-A drugs this ‘actress’ seems to be enjoying from the off. Eventually a plane chases a van, and Townsend cuts the engine so he can get a better signal on his mobile. With plot points like this, who needs logic?

Quite the most ludicrous hokum imaginable, and thus obscenely entertaining.

DIRECTED BY Juan Carlos Fresnadillo

STARRING Max Von Sydow, Leonardo Sbaraglia, Eusebio Poncela

Opens April 11, Cert 15, 108 Mins

Coming on like a cross between David Fincher’s The Game and M Night Shyamalan’s Unbreakable, the debut feature from writer/director Fresnadillo is a twisted, ingeniously constructed thriller. The basic premise is that luck is a commodity, a resource that’s more plentiful in some?say, survivors of plane crashes, natural disasters or wars?than others, and those blessed with such extraordinary levels of good fortune also have the ability to steal luck from others.

Meet Frederico (Poncela), an earthquake survivor who now works in a remote and highly illegal casino where he subtly divests punters of their winning streaks. Holocaust survivor Samuel Berg (Von Sydow) runs the casino?an ominous place which resembles an annexe to David Lynch’s Black Lodge in Twin Peaks. There, challengers take Samuel on at his chosen game?Russian Roulette with five bullets instead of one. Samuel always wins. So when Frederico falls foul of his boss and gets stripped of his gift, he knows he needs to find someone with the luck of the devil if he’s ever to get revenge on Samuel. Which is where Tomas (Sbaraglia) comes in?a petty criminal and the sole survivor of a horrific plane crash. But Tomas is being tailed by Sara?a policewoman who survived a car accident and is obsessed with uncovering the truth about Samuel’s gambling ring…

Fresnadillo constructs a precarious house of cards that stands or falls depending on the audience’s willingness to stick with the film throughout its various, convoluted plot twists. The central idea is a strong one, but it gets a little buried under layers of enigmatic plotting. Still, it’s an exceptionally handsome film, stylishly shot, with the game sequences in particular beautifully realised.

Like fellow Spaniard Alejandro Amen

Shot on the hoof in 10 days for less than $2 million, Phone Booth finds the irrepressible Joel Schumacher back on blistering form after the brain-dead Bad Company, turning this B-movie into a lean, tense thriller and providing a masterclass in guerrilla film-making along the way.

For the opening 10 minutes, we witness vile, self-obsessed publicist Stu (Farrell) striding through Times Square at full throttle, blackmailing, cajoling and flattering magazine editors on his mobile before heading to a particular phone booth where, at the same time every day, he calls one of his clients—an aspiring actress he’s desperately trying to fuck behind his wife’s back.

By this point, Stu’s proved himself to be such a smarmy, eminently punchable little shit that you’re on your knees praying for someone to take him out. Which is about when Stu takes a call from a man claiming to have a rifle trained on him, who’ll kill him if he hangs up the phone. When a bystander gets shot and Stu is implicated, half of New York’s finest plus attendant media vultures begin circling the booth, trying to get Stu to hang up and hand himself in…

Postponed in the US from its original November 2002 release after the sniper shootings around Washington, DC, Phone Booth is a sleek, supremely manipulative and highly effective movie. It’s to Schumacher’s credit he keeps the film’s length down to a minimum—there’s no back story, no sub-plots to string out this, the slightest of ideas. The cross-processed film stock (Soderbergh meets Fincher) contributes to the edgy atmosphere, while Schumacher’s restless, hand-held cameras and split-screen techniques constantly jack the pace up and gloss over the narrative flaws. Farrell—who worked with Schumacher previously on Tigerland—gives an impressively nervy performance, playing fast and loose with Stu’s moral standards, gradually winning the audience over as his life falls apart.

Hitchcock apparently once considered making a film set entirely in a phone booth. You can be sure it would have been a lot tricksier and more sadistic than this, but Schumacher has made a fine, fun popcorn movie all the same.

OPENS APRIL 18, CERT 12A, 45 MINS

Hungarian master Bela Tarr doesn’t like to rush things. His 1994 film, Satantango, runs over seven hours, its narrative patterns unfolding gracefully and gradually. At two-and-a-half hours, The Werckmeister Harmonies is a mere sketch by comparison, although the four years it took to make and the 15-minute opening shot are details that tell their own story.

Based on the novel, The Melancholy Of Resistance, by L

OPENS APRIL 4, CERT PG, 82 MINS

When the 1924 Boundary Commission and the Irish Free State agree the dividing line in Ireland, border posts and barbed wire are erected in the village of Puckoon, running through the middle of hen coops and even the pub, the Royal Drunkard.

Featuring a string of disjointed, farcical episodes and a prestige cast including Milo O’Shea and Elliott Gould, Puckoon matches the fractured absurdity of the situation the community finds itself in. Sean Hughes stars as the hapless Madigan, who spends most of his time quarrelling with Richard Attenborough’s all-powerful narrator over the direction of the tale, a joke stolen from an old Bugs Bunny/Daffy Duck cartoon.

Overloaded with tiresome Paddywhackery, riddled with woefully telegraphed slapstick, crammed with stereotypes like Griff Rhys-Jones’ harrumphing Army officer, Puckoon ought to prompt a review of Spike Milligan’s reputation. Stylistically, he did indeed revolutionise British comedy?but as Puckoon repeatedly illustrates, his actual humour could be cripplingly dire. Unless you find, say, a man mistaking a donkey for a large dog hilarious. It says something that Puckoon is a waste of Sean Hughes’ comic talents.

OPENS APRIL 4, CERT 15, 114 MINS

Up for another Danish Dogme film with lots of meaningful glances and amour fou? You should be?this is deeply moving and involving, with acting so fine it hurts. In lesser hands, the plot could’ve serviced Footballers’ Wives: Cecilie (Sonja Richter) and Joachim (Nikolaj Lie Kaas) are blissfully in love, everything ahead of them, when Joachim’s hit by a car and paralysed. The car driver’s husband is Joachim’s doctor, who, at the hospital, becomes Cecilie’s shoulder to cry on. Soon, they’re more than intimate, and these guilty lovers have to juggle responsibilities and passion.

What could’ve been a shaky-cam soap is beautifully observed by Leigh-influenced director Susanne Bier. It develops into a scorching study of fragile fate, asking how regular little people react when confronted with something as big as tragedy. It shows the characters flailing as life gets out of control, how the proximity of death and love is always liable to induce chaos. Yet its sense of the absurd, of the comic embarrassment underscoring melodrama, makes a thousand more po-faced weep-fests seem cheap.

Tender, tough and true.

OPENS APRIL 4, CERT 15, 135 MINS

Directed by Caroline Link and based on Stefanie Zweig’s autobiographical novel, Nowhere In Africa tells the story of a young, well-to-do German Jewish family forced to flee the Nazi regime in 1938 and resettle in rural Kenya. The story is told through the eyes of the vivacious Regina, who’s just five years old when they arrive in Africa. Initially, her mother Jettel is appalled at the shift in lifestyle she’s forced to undergo, from bourgeois Hausfrau to inexperienced farm hand. Husband Walter, meanwhile, is agonisingly aware of his deficiencies as a farm manager. Only Regina quickly adapts to local ways. For her parents, it’s a slower, though ultimately surer process.

Set against the magnificent backdrop of the parched, dusty Kenyan veldt, the epic, emotional sweep of Nowhere In Africa is so overwhelming that you waive its shortcomings?the simplistic portrayal of the local tribes people, the unresolved nature of Jettel and Walter’s marriage, the occasionally bland and obtrusive soundtrack. It’s a film that has you on the edge of tears throughout.

OPENS APRIL 18, CERT 15, 115 MINS

The Armenian Holocaust of 1915 remains one of the most shrouded and fiercely disputed incidents in 20th-century history. The Turkish authorities continue to deny it ever happened. Others claim that 1.3 million Armenians died in the genocide. These tragic events form the backdrop to Atom Egoyan’s new film.

Egoyan approaches his material in subtle and oblique fashion. Rather than simply make a movie about the Holocaust, he has structured his story as a film within a film. Charles Aznavour says a contemporary, Canadian-based director whose new movie is based on a book about the Holocaust. This is a family melodrama, a polemical essay, a celebration of the life and work of abstract expressionist Arshile Gorky (who was caught up in the bloodshed) and a would-be historical epic. By providing so many sub-plots and secondary characters, Egoyan risks losing sight of his own ostensible subject matter. However, even if it does pull in too many directions, Ararat has a passion and intensity sometimes missing from the director’s other work.

OPENS APRIL 4, CERT 12A, 114 MINS

It’s 1887, and China’s Imperial Seal has been stolen, its keeper slain in the process. The keeper’s son is Sheriff Chon Wang (Jackie Chan), who leaves the Wild West to track down the killer, pausing to pick up his disreputable sidekick Roy O’Bannon (Owen Wilson) before heading for foggy old London town.

Here the duo encounter Arthur Conan Doyle, Queen Victoria and the young Charlie Chaplin as they attempt to steal the Seal back from the evil Lord Rathbone (Aidan Gillen). He’s 10th in line to the throne, and is planning to assassinate his way to the top unless Wang can stop him. Meanwhile, the womanising O’Bannon has fallen for Wang’s sister (Fann Wong), which causes a rift between our heroes… On the downside, this is way too long, the CGI is rubbish and the plot wouldn’t tax the intelligence of a backward seven-year-old. On the other hand, the chop-socky fight sequences are dazzlingly inventive and often laugh-out-loud funny. There’s also something genuinely likeable about Wilson, and the script is just sharp enough to make this a buddy act to remember.

OPENS MARCH 28, CERT 15, 101 MINS

They may only have eight letters between them, but Jet Li and DMX are a force to be reckoned with in Andrzej Bartkowiak’s martial arts action caper. Okay, so they’re rather limited in the acting stakes?DMX growls every line in the same menacing monotone, while Li prefers not to speak at all?but the former’s bling-bling gangsta attitude and the latter’s awesome capacity to kick butt ensure that Cradle rocks.

By marrying the kinetic combat of Hong Kong cinema to the pulsating energy of US street culture, producer Joel Silver has fashioned an appealing hybrid (hip hop kung fu) that caters to more than one demographic. It’s also one tailor-made for his leading men’s strengths: Jet’s Chinese agent looks after the whupp-ass, while DMX’s jewel thief takes care of the hardware (tanks, missiles, fast cars and quad bikes). The fanciful plot involves a race to locate some futuristic weapon of mass destruction, with everything climaxing in mano a mano fisticuffs between Li and Mark Dacascos (Brotherhood Of The Wolf) inside a ring of fire. Video cultdom beckons.

OPENS APRIL 11, CERT 15, 77 MINS

Damien Odoul’s debut feature is a coming-of-age film with a difference. Shot in black and white, full of violent and surreal imagery, it has more in common with the movies of Bu

Starring all your favourite second bananas, plus George Clooney, this is a downbeat, low-budget, impeccably-scripted, superbly-acted, humanist tragicomedy from George Clooney and Steven Soderbergh’s Section 8 production company. Pull up a chair, this is a doozy.

Guzm

DIRECTED BY Lukas Moodysson

STARRING Oksana Akinshina, Artiom Bogucharskij, Pavel Ponomarev

Opens April 25, Cert 18, 109 mins

As harrowing and distressing as Lars Von Trier’s Breaking The Waves or Dancer In The Dark, but a better film, this establishes Moodysson as, quite possibly, the post-millennial Bergman. The elder Swede’s already described him as “a young master”. His lovely 2000 film Together shrugged and smiled sweetly when things got rough. This one just keeps on getting rougher: it’s uncompromising and unforgettable. Maid In Manhattan it’s not.

Sixteen-year-old Lilya (the astonishingly open, brittle and proud Akinshina) exists (rather than lives) in a drab suburb “somewhere in the former Soviet Union” (actually Estonia). The buildings can’t get it up to be grey; the trees don’t know what a leaf is. She and equally poor young friend Volodya (Bogucharskij) dream of America, of the luxuries enjoyed and symbolised by Britney Spears and Michael Jordan. When Lilya’s mum runs off with her new man, the girl’s forced to drop out of school, sniff glue, and fend for herself. Shafted by her wicked aunt, she has no food and no electricity?it’s only a matter of time before she’s reduced to acts of prostitution.

Hope?that cruel temptress?arrives in the form of Andrei (Ponomarev), a handsome charmer. Lilya’s spirits lift. He invites her to Sweden: a flat and a job await. Escape at last! Lilya marvels at the airport shops, the prettiest things she’s ever seen, the baubles for sale. But at the other end of the journey, a horrible destiny crushes her back down.

“It was meant to be a film about God’s benevolence,” Moodysson has said, “but reality reared its head and it became something else.” Reality kicks doggedly at the characters’ shins, but it’s their dreams (as with the girls in his debut, Fucking

OPENS APRIL 4, CERT 12A, 104 MINS

It looks like the most macho sporting arena in the world, but ultimately in the aggressive Hawaiian surf community it doesn’t matter if you’re a girl or a boy, just as long as you can keep your cool with 200 tonnes of water about to crash onto your head. Well that’s what Anne Marie (Kate Bosworth) hopes as she trains for the ultimate surfing competition. Recovering her nerve after an accident that nearly drowned her, Anne Marie has a lot to prove. But life gets complicated when a fling with a pro-footballer turns serious and she has to choose between the highlife and the 20ft-high waves waiting for her.

The grungy authenticity, not to mention the hardcore pre-teen partying, suggests a chick-flick seen through the eyes of someone like Larry Clark. And this uncompromising edge is what makes this slight film so enjoyable. That and some exhilarating surfing footage. When the camera gets inside the wave, it’s like being flushed down a U-bend. In a good way, naturally.

OPENS APRIL 25, CERT 15, 105 MINS

The subtitles of this Italian movie from Turkish-born director Ferzan Ozpetek translate its title as “Ignorant Fairies”, which gives pause as to whether that translator will ever work again. But it’s all uphill from there in a splendid, subtle, almost-love story which deals with grief and healing with deft courage and sharp comic poise.

In Rome, Antonia (Margherita Buy) is shattered when her husband of 15 years is killed. She finds he had a long-time lover, Michele, and tracks ‘her’ down. But Michele’s a ‘he’ (Stefano Accorsi). At first the mourning rivals snap at each other, but as Antonia’s drawn into the non-judgmental world of his gay community, curiosity leads to bonding. However, Ozpetek shies away from any obvious, idealised arc: there are scenes of emotional ambivalence which only, say, Moretti would risk. A strikingly sensitive film, in all the right ways. Buy is a presence of graceful strength, there’s not a false note throughout. Quality.

OPENED MARCH 28, CERT 15, 118 MINS

“I confess that I am very sensual, father.” Sniggering already? For some reason this Mexican melodrama was Oscar-nominated, but it straddles more lead-me-not-into-temptation clich

OPENED MARCH 28, CERT 12A, 135 MINS

The Earth’s molten core has stopped spinning, and this is a Bad Thing, with knock-on effects that will kill off humanity within a year. Enter a team of kamikaze scientists with an unlimited military budget who plan to drill through the Earth and kick-start the core again with a few nukes.

“This isn’t going to be subtle,” observes a character early on, and they’re not far wrong. What we’ve got here is kind of the ultimate disaster movie, like Armageddon with the gloves off and a ton of mad science on board. Aaron Eckhart is the sensitive-but-hunky geophysicist hero, Stanley Tucci the deeply vain government-sponsored ‘expert’, Delroy Lindo the inventor of their sub-surface vehicle and Hilary Swank the plucky astronaut who’s piloting the thing.

That it’s all utterly predictable is part of the appeal, a comforting familiarity amid all the destruction?some of which is impressive, some of which is sub-standard?and by and large it doesn’t disappoint. Turn off your brain and enjoy.

OPENS APRIL 4, CERT U, 96 MINS

Director Alexander Sokurov’s film is a feat of visual orchestration set in St Petersburg’s Hermitage Museum. Our guide is a film-maker who floats unseen around the former royal palace. As he drifts from room to room, he’s tossed backwards and forwards across history?now in the era of Peter The Great, now in 1919, now in the present day, now in the reign of Catherine The Great. Along the way, he picks up a fellow traveller, a prickly 19th-century French diplomat.

The events to which they bear invisible witness are generally inconsequential rather than pivotal, though one scene of aristocratic revellers pouring slowly down the staircases following the last, sumptuous ball of the Tsarist era is loaded with significance. The diplomat and film-maker’s bickering amounts to a querulous meditation on Russia’s pre-and post-Communist history.

Get this, however: Russian Ark was achieved in one unbroken steadicam shot. An unprecedented technical and artistic achievement.