DIRECTED by Spike Jonze

STARRING Nicolas Cage, Meryl Streep, Chris Cooper

Opens February 28, Cert 15, 120 mins

Provocative, ambitious and radically original, this latest cinematic headfuck from Being John Malkovich creators Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman is a wild ride?it’s scathing Hollywood satire, mind-boggling meta-fiction, and a fiendishly clever reflection on the perils of adapting someone else’s work all rolled into one breathless and confounding experience. It’s already been hailed as some kind of film-making miracle in the States, and now it’s your turn to fall for its bewildering brilliance and kooky, chaotic charm.

OK. From the top. We find screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (Cage) mooching around the set of Being John Malkovich. Kaufman is a mess, a bundle of neuroses and anxieties. He’s struggling with his next job?adapting The Orchid Thief, a biography of orchid obsessive John Laroche (Cooper) by New Yorker staff writer Susan Orlean (Streep). The book’s penetrating, meditative?”great, sprawling New Yorker stuff”. Charlie loves it. But it lacks the structure, character arcs and dramatic tension that constitute conventional cinematic staples. “I don’t want to ruin it by making it a Hollywood thing… I don’t want to cram in sex, car chases or guns,” he explains to his producer.

Charlie’s problems are compounded by his twin brother Donald (Cage again). Donald is Charlie’s polar opposite?laid back, uncomplicated, confident, he’s even seeing a make-up assistant from Being John Malkovich who Charlie’s been unable to work up the courage to ask on a date. To make matters even worse, Donald’s recently taken a screenwriting course and has begun to churn out precisely the kind of trashy, Hollywood potboilers Charlie despises. And as Charlie’s writer’s block grows deeper, Donald’s script (“It’s Psycho meets Silence Of The Lambs”) gets hailed by Charlie’s agent as “the best spec I’ve read all year”. Ouch.

Added to this is the fact that Charlie, who’s already fallen for Orlean’s prose, is gradually becoming obsessed with the author herself, to the extent where he spies on her and follows her down to Florida for a meeting with Laroche.

At which point everything goes seven shades of weird. But we’ll come back to that later.

Let’s work out what’s real first. The facts are that, yes, a New Yorker journalist called Susan Orlean did write a book called The Orchid Thief, based on the life of John Laroche. Yes, it’s true that Charlie Kaufman was hired to adapt it for the big screen. Yes, it’s true that Charlie subsequently developed writer’s block, at which point he hit on the idea of putting himself into the screenplay to try and work it out of his system. Anything else?even down to the existence of bro Donald?is the work of Charlie’s imagination. The film becomes a story about creating a story, meta-fiction taken to an extraordinary level. And Kaufman’s ingenuity knows no bounds; his script dazzles. He balances the ‘real’ sequences with Orlean and Laroche perfectly against the crazy outpourings of his imagination and, finally, brilliantly merges fact with fiction to create the kind of third act pay-off that’s audacious and inspired, a scathing satire on Hollywood at its most wretched.

But this isn’t smug, post-ironic posturing. Just as you cared about the characters in Being John Malkovich (particularly the plight of big John himself) so you feel for Charlie as he seethes, struggles and rages. Cage is remarkable here as the brothers Kaufman?this is a return to the quirky, kooky performances he gave in Raising Arizona or Moonstruck, before big budgets and banality set in. Streep and Cooper provide the film’s emotional core in the sequences adapted from The Orchid Thief?Streep turns in her best performance for years, her initial quiet composure giving way to something deeper and more primal, while Cooper burns up the screen as the unpredictable, near-psychotic Laroche. There are fine cameos, too, from Brian Cox, Maggie Gyllenhaal and Tilda Swinton?plus blink-and-you’ll-miss-’em turns from Malkovich, John Cusack and Catherine Keener, which only seem to blur the lines between fact and fiction further. Hell, you’ll love it all.

A unique piece of cinema. The orchid stays in the picture.

OPENED JANUARY 31, CERT 18, 102 MINS

Director Joe Carnahan’s follow-up to his micro-budget debut Blood, Guts, Bullets & Octane throws you right into the thick of things, with a breathless handheld camera following undercover cop Tellis (Jason Patric) as he chases a drug dealer. This nerve-jangling prologue ends in a tragedy that sees our man suspended from duty and the audience plunged into a world of cop-movie clich

OPENS FEBRUARY 28, CERT 15, 118 MINS

A project that has, in the past, been linked with both Madonna and Jennifer Lopez finally makes it to the screen thanks to star and producer Salma Hayek. Her commitment should be applauded even if the film itself fails to live up to expectations?the story of iconic painter Frida Kahlo has been too neatly arranged within a conventional ‘movie-biopic’ frame to do justice to her painful, tumultuous life and vivid art. Superficially at least, there’s enough incident to keep it compelling; after a deathbed prologue, director Julie Taymor whisks us through the main events in Kahlo’s life?her near-fatal accident aboard a tram, a marriage to womanising muralist Diego Rivera (Alfred Molina), her friendship with Trotsky (Geoffrey Rush) and her development as a painter. Hayek gives it her all but doesn’t go very deep, while Taymor loads the picture with CGI effects, a Brothers Quay-created interlude and star cameos. Sadly, such decorations are no substitute for a genuinely creative imagining of what it must have felt like to be?or even be with?Frida Kahlo.

OPENS FEBRUARY 28, CERT 15, 108 MINS

Neil Jordan’s updated and “re-conceived” (well, at least he didn’t “re-imagine”) Melville’s ’50s classic Bob Le Flambeur. He’s made a bit of a hash of it, and this version’s title, plot and ending have been changed repeatedly. As one-last-heist romps go, it’s tortuously hard to follow, and the Euro-stew cast struggle with a flailing fleet of accents.

Making it watchable is another no-prisoners performance from Nick Nolte as anti-hero Bob. An American gambler-crook who’s wound up in the south of France with no money and a heroin habit, Bob’s offered a job ripping off a casino which owns priceless paintings. Asked if he’s tempted, he snarls, “I’m out of dope. I’m out of luck. I’m tempted.” He goes cold turkey, painfully.

The convoluted scam laboriously develops, with minor characters weaving in and out. Ocean’s Eleven it isn’t. Newcomer Nutsa Kukhanidze exudes presence as the girl Bob takes a shine to, though frankly she could be his granddaughter. It’s Nolte at his gnarliest, though: a grizzly bear in a glittering cage.

DIRECTED BY Gore Verbinski

STARRING Naomi Watts, Martin Henderson

Opens February 21, Cert 15, 115 mins

In this remake of the cult Japanese horror film Ringu, Naomi Watts plays a hard-bitten investigative journalist and professional cynic who sets out to debunk the myth of a mysterious video tape that kills all who watch it exactly seven days afterwards. Rather recklessly, she watches it herself?it’s the kind of thing a first-year film student with an obsession with Un Chien Andalou might come up with. Pretentious, yes, but it hardly appears to be fatal. Then she begins to have doubts. This remake trades the woolly, esoteric logic of the Japanese version for a more forensic, analytical approach that serves the material well. Watts pairs up with her ex-husband, but instead of the moody psychic prone to visions in the Japanese version, he’s a no-nonsense documentary photographer. The pair of them rely on facts?it’s a desperate race against time to find the hard evidence that might save them both, not to mention their young son, who accidentally watches the tape. This remake also manages to include more detail to explain the provenance of the mysterious, vengeful spirit that inhabits the tape. As a result, the pacing?a series of mini-crescendos?is closer to that of a conventional US horror than the slow-burning discomfort of Japanese supernatural thrillers. And while sections of the film?the opening sequence for example?are virtually a shot-for-shot remake, there are some memorable additions to the story, particularly a disturbing scene where a horse goes suddenly and fatally berserk on a car ferry.

Hollywood remakes of foreign language films, particularly those with a large existing cult fan base, rarely ever live up to the original in the eyes of the people who saw them the first time around. So this remake probably won’t evoke the same sense of dread as the original, but it’s so competently and intelligently executed that it’s well worth watching anyway. Just don’t wait for the video release, unless you have nerves of steel.

DIRECTED BY Brett Morgan and Nanette Burstein

OPENS FEBRUARY 28, CERT 18, 85 MINS

Self-harm is the new rock’n’roll. Twenty-five years ago, kids shocked their mums by getting safety pin piercings because Sid Vicious did it. Nowadays, they set themselves on fire because Johnny Knoxville does it. That’s progress of a sort. And this, whether Mummy likes it or not, is one of the funniest films ever made.

There’s nothing remotely clever about it. The production values are non-existent (despite it being produced by Spike Jonze). There’s no witty dialogue (excepting a few laconic asides by Knoxville as he lies dazed and concussed). There’s no plot, no special effects, no purpose and no meaning. There’s also a good chance you’ll find at least one of these three dozen pranks unwatchable, whether it’s the piss sorbet, the paper cuts, the alligator tightrope, the toy car enema or the various points at which Knoxville comes within a hair’s breadth of genuine death. But this dumb, vulgar, offensive, barrel-scraping film makes you laugh until your face hurts and you want to be sick.

OPENS FEBRUARY 14, CERT 12A, 114 MINS

Three stories about three women in three different times, linked by Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs Dalloway, and by the shameless Oscar-grasping performances of the lead actresses?Nicole Kidman, Julianne Moore and Meryl Streep. Kidman even goes as far as wearing a deeply unflattering prosthetic nose for her turn as the brittle, unstable Woolf. In all fairness, she’s extremely good?as are Moore as a 1950s housewife undergoing a quiet breakdown, and Streep in a contemporary story of a woman obsessed with her dying gay friend. And director Stephen Daldry cuts between these three stories with confidence and a visual fluidity that combines them in an elegant whole.

The problem is that so much of the film deals with unspoken inner turmoil that it’s a rather cold and alienating experience. And there’s an undercurrent of self-importance that occasionally surfaces?perhaps if the film-makers hadn’t been so concerned with making a piece of art, they might have made a better film.

DIRECTED BY Peter Mullan

STARRING Nora-Jane Noone, Dorothy Duffy, Anne-Marie Duff

Opens February 21, Cert 15, 119 mins

The opening scene of Peter Mullan’s award-winning social drama The Magdalene Sisters unfolds in a Dublin pub in 1964, where Guinness-stained granddads in cloth caps slap their thighs to fiddle-dee-diddle-dee music played by a lecherous priest who salivates suggestively over his bodhran while crucifixes are reflected in whisky glasses and a lusty Irish buck rapes his own cousin. Naturally.

However, initial disappointment at semaphoric 10-in-a-bed Angela’s Ashes Oirishisms is swiftly superseded by Mullan’s muscular story of Bernadette (Noone), Margaret (Duff) and Rose (Duffy) and their detention in one of Ireland’s infamous Magdalene Laundries (nun-controlled borstals for ‘fallen women’). Here the girls fight to retain a sense of identity and humanity in the face of state-sanctioned brutality?ritual humiliation, food depravation, and physical and sexual abuse are commonplace.

As with Philip Noyce’s recent historical expos

DIRECTED BY Gaspar No

OPENS FEBRUARY 28, CERT 15, 95 MINS

It’s less bada-bing, more bada-bore in this lazy follow-up to Analyze This, the 1999 comedy that first twinned Robert De Niro’s Noo Yawk mobster with Billy Crystal’s reluctant shrink. That movie’s pitch?gangster enlists psychiatrist to cure his anxiety attacks?is repeated but not developed, resulting in a sluggish retread.

This time around De Niro’s Paul Vitti is released from Sing Sing into Crystal’s custody, embroiling both him and his wife (Lisa Kudrow of Friends fame) in an escalating gang feud. Crystal, meanwhile, is having a mini crisis of his own, brought on by the death of his “withholding” father.

The funniest scenes have Vitti struggling to go legit in a series of ill-fitting jobs, including ma

OPENS FEBRUARY 14, CERT 15, 82 MINS

Written and directed by John Dower, Live Forever revisits that collective moment of euphoria which culminated in the Blur-Oasis wars, Jarvis Cocker’s unlikely rise to fame and the election of Tony Blair. Featuring interviews with journalists, record company insiders and band members, it charts the ’90s British indie-pop scene from Stone Roses-mania onwards.

Live Forever is deeply flawed. It caricatures ’90s Britain as beset by deep-seated anti-Americanism. It neglects to accredit the economic boom in Britain, which fed the leery self-confidence of the Loaded/Evans/Gallagher years. It features S Club Juniors and Menswear but not Radiohead, The Manics or the Spice Girls, or indeed any black people, except, strangely, Ozwald Boateng.

It is, however, very funny. Jarvis is on top form, Damon Albarn is inadvertently amusing, but it’s Noel and Liam who’re at their most priceless and prickly, the latter especially when it’s put to him that he’s “androgynous”. Fortunately, the film-makers, with the adeptness of a Broomfield or Spheeris, solemnly milk these moments for their full comic worth.