DIRECTED BY Spike Lee

STARRING Edward Norton, Barry Pepper, Brian Cox, Philip Seymour Hoffman

Opens April 25, Cert 15, 135 mins

Montgomery Brogan (Norton) is a Brooklyn drug dealer facing a seven-year prison stretch. It’s his final day of freedom and he finds himself arguing with his widowed father, James (Cox), in a Staten Island bar. Monty needs a breather. He slips into the bathroom, where he sees the words “Fuck You” scrawled in lipstick on the mirror. And then it happens. Travis Bickle eat your heart out; Frank Sinatra, Woody Allen, Martin Scorsese and anyone who ever shadow-boxed with the ghosts of New York, shame on you. For here, 36 minutes into Spike Lee’s haunting adaptation of David Benioff’s crime novel, 25th Hour, Norton delivers a five-minute tour de force of fulminating aggression that savages New York and all of its denizens while somehow simultaneously celebrating their grand and grating diversity.

“Fuck you and this whole city and everyone in it,” he begins, raging into the mirror, exploding the memory of the deadbeat Travis Bickle and his plangent plea for a “real rain” to wash the city clean. “Fuck the Korean Grocers,” he rants, “fuck the Russians in Brighton Beach… the Bensonhurst Italians… the Upper East Side wives… ” And as he pounces on each target we cut to supersaturated images of the guilty parties, courtesy of Amores Perros cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto. And on it goes, “Fuck the cops… the priests… Osama Bin Laden… World Com…,” until finally, exhausted, Norton fixes himself with a crestfallen look. “No. Fuck YOU Montgomery Brogan. You had it all and you threw it away. You, dumb, fuck!”

Any other film-maker would’ve made this the cathartic apogee of their movie?”After one final day in the city with friends Frank (Pepper) and Jakob (Hoffman), former dealer Monty has a climactic epiphany.” But not Spike Lee. He’s got far too much to say to let this riff on Taxi Driver stand alone. So, after an opening scene involving a pre-busted Monty, an injured dog and an ominous invocation of Murphy’s Law, the movie clatters us with a breathtaking title sequence. As satisfying as any short film, and underscored by Terence Blanchard’s dense orchestral ache, the sequence is an elegant time-lapse homage to the Twin Towers Commemorative Lights. Here, the beams shooting up to eternity, mocking the transience of fallen brick and steel, have a powerful echo in the fate that ridicules Monty’s clunky human choices.

Elsewhere, the addition of 9/11 references, including ubiquitous flags, streetside memorials, and the excavated Trade Center site itself, only deepens the sense of grief and confusion that passes osmotically between protagonist and city. It also gives the film an unspeakable, mythic dimension, and helps it digest the twin notions of decision and destiny in Monty’s/New York’s/America’s fate. What did they do to deserve this?

It’s ironic, then, that the movie only wobbles when it returns from Lee’s loftier heights to its gritty roots in Benioff’s 24-hour crime story. The parade of bug-eyed Russian villains, the shoehorning of Monty’s biography into otherwise aimless exchanges, and the ostensibly critical question of who tipped off the Feds are far less engaging than watching Monty’s existential crisis unfold. “With your mind,” says James to his shattered son, “you could’ve been anything you wanted.” Instead, of his own free will, by choosing to become a dealer, he chose prison.

Monty’s dilemma is made painfully compelling by the subtlety of Norton’s performance. Yes, he’s got that familiar busy busy amphetamine rush of Rounders, The Score and Red Dragon, but there’s also a tremble of sadness and fear in his demeanour that makes him fascinating to watch (the film feels his loss whenever he’s off screen). Similarly, Pepper, so cruelly miscast in The Green Mile, is here an intimidating force, all angular cheekbones and vulpine smile, as Monty’s slippery investment banker buddy.

Finally, it should be no surprise that a movie defined by bravura sequences should close with, literally, a showstopper. Narrated in a caramel whisper by Cox, it’s a vivid vision of an alternative prison-free future for Monty, made all the more poignant by the reality that faces him. As a cinematic moment, it’s a tender evocation of all the contradictions and hypocrisies inherent in the notion of an ‘American Dream’, and it also singles out Spike Lee as one of the most intellectually alert and contemporary film-makers working in American film today.

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.