OPENS FEBRUARY 14, CERT 15, 109 MINS

Who else but Alex Cox would relocate Thomas Middleton’s bloodthirsty 17th-century drama to a half-past, half-future, apocalyptic Liverpool of the imagination? With scally gangs, flashbulb media hooligans and savage celebrity cliques, this urban fusion of Derek Jarman and Baz Luhrmann functions as a compelling character in Cox’s bloody pageant.

As Vendici, a sharp-as-fuck schemer serving cold vengeance against the city’s corrupt Duke (Derek Jacobi) via his snake of a brother (Eddie Izzard), Christopher Eccleston has no problem delivering Middleton’s rapier crudities with venom and verve. But many of his co-stars seem alienated by the historical distance.

The chief drawback here, as ever with Cox, is the glut of grand ideas and bold ambitions hobbling characterisation and dramatic flow. The set-pieces feel disconnected and unevenly paced, the characters too crudely drawn to merit empathy. A Revenger’s Tragedy bleeds, bellows and brawls, but never quite lives and breathes. It’s ultimately another fascinating but flawed misfire from one of British cinema’s last punk visionaries.

DIRECTED BY Paul Thomas Anderson

STARRING Adam Sandler, Emily Watson, Philip Seymour Hoffman

Opens February 7, Cert 15, 91 mins

“I don’t like myself sometimes?can you help me?” No, this isn’t what Sandler said to Anderson to land the role (nice thought, though). It’s one of many self-lacerating lines he delivers in what might be the darkest mainstream romantic comedy ever made. After the rigours of Magnolia, Anderson wanted to try something breezier, and is, he admits, a non-ironic Sandler fan. But?thank Christ?this isn’t typical gurning Sandler fare. It’s a twisted, wilfully weird creation full of tripped-out colours, random surrealism, odd sounds, breathtaking LA photography, and a central ‘romance’ which peaks with the sweet nothing: “I’m looking at your face and I just wanna smash it with a sledgehammer, it’s so pretty.” It’ll frustrate and exhilarate.

Barry (Sandler) is an anal, nerdy toilet-plunger salesman who finds a harmonium and is ridiculed by his seven sisters. (This is the kind of logic you’ll get used to). Just as he meets Lena (Watson), who inexplicably likes him, he gets embroiled in a blackmail situation with a con-woman who’s stalking him through a phone-sex line (which Barry, in a scene of excruciating comic embarrassment echoing Boogie Nights, has called). A grisly hard-knock (Hoffman, against type) is behind the con-woman: Barry, prone to fits of rage, has to confront them while not messing up his putative romance with Lena. He’s collected enough free air miles (by buying thousands of puddings) to pursue his foes, and his beloved, cross-country.

Sandler-phobes be warned: there is some slapstick, and though he’s admirably understated in the early stages, he lets rip with the annoying mannerisms later. Yet, thanks often to Watson’s blissed-out adaptability, it works. Anderson goes berserk with the narrative: between key scenes, characters get lost in hotel corridors, or stuck on the phone. Calling to declare his love, Barry first dials a wrong number, for no good reason other than that it clearly amuses the writer-director. God, he’s perverse.

His warped aesthetics, however, make even his slightest work visually vivid, and this representation (rather than study) of a dysfunctional nutjob is more tough than tender. It’ll leave you reeling.

OPENS FEBRUARY 21, CERT 15, 117 MINS

Troubled young man dujour Jake Gyllenhaal again excels in this finely-wrought tragi-comedy. His largely reactive role’s similar to that played by Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate, and, in a neat touch, Hoffman plays his father figure here.

Set in New England in the ’70s, and taking its title from a Stones song (the soundtrack features Dylan, Van, Bowie et al), Brad Silberling’s film has the feel of a more rock’n’roll Ordinary People or The Ice Storm. Joe (Gyllenhaal)’s fianc

OPENED JANUARY 31, CERT 15, 94 MINS

If Cameron Crowe’s Almost Famous gave us a (rose-tinted) reflection of the ’70s rock groupie scene, Bob Dolman’s debut asks where those groupies are now. For Suzette (Goldie Hawn, showing daughter Kate how it’s really done), the golden years have gone, and she’s sacked from her LA bar job. Her plea that, “Jim Morrison passed out in that toilet! With me underneath him!”, is met by the new manager with, “Morrison’s a ghost. And so are you.”

Suzette drives to Phoenix to visit her former cohort Vinnie (Susan Sarandon)?in their heyday the pair were the Banger Sisters (a thinly-veiled Plaster Casters). But Vinnie’s now a respectable suburban mom, horrified to find the fake-boobed, leopardskin-clad Suzette at her door with a murderous writer (Geoffrey Rush) in tow. Suzette nurses Vinnie’s daughter through an acid trip; barriers come down. Soon the old friends are stoned and cackling over polaroids of rock stars’ penises. At times it does get a bit chick-flick learning-and-bonding, but Hawn and Sarandon go for it with self-deprecating gusto, and you’ll laugh like a roadie.

OPENS FEBRUARY 14, CERT 12A, 130 MINS

Either painfully slow or magnificently elegiac according to taste, Luchino Visconti’s adaptation of Thomas Mann’s novel stars Dirk Bogarde as Gustav von Aschenbach, a composer seeking solace in pre-WWI Venice following a breakdown. At his hotel, he glimpses a 15-year-old boy (played by the perturbingly pretty Bj

OPENS FEBRUARY 21, CERT 15, 137 MINS

A world-weary, middle-aged man (Alejandro Ferretis) leaves the din of Mexico City and heads out into the remote countryside to prepare for his own death. That’s the starting point for young Mexican director Carlos Reygadas’ sombre, elegiac first feature. Ironically, in this arid wilderness, the man’s appetite for life returns. He becomes closer and closer to the elderly, very religious Indian widow (Magdalena Flores) with whom he takes lodgings at the mouth of a huge canyon. He tries to protect her from her unscrupulous nephew, who’s after her property. In one scene, which could easily have seemed prurient or lapsed into Harold And Maude-style comedy, he has sex with her. Reygadas handles the potentially embarrassing encounter with such delicacy and gentleness that it defies anyone to laugh.

Despite occasional lurches into existential pretentiousness, this is a highly impressive debut which underlines the recent resurgence in Mexican cinema. Reygadas has an eye for landscape as well as an ability to coax resonant understated performances from his non-professional actors.

OPENED JANUARY 31, CERT 18, 90 MINS

Written by Philip Seymour Hoffman’s brother Gordy and directed by Todd Louiso (who you may recall as Jack Black’s sidekick in High Fidelity), this is a quiet little film, serving chiefly to give the more celebrated Philip an overdue leading role. It’s a morose piece, focusing on a grieving young widower, and Hoffman plays it impeccably.

As Joel, a daydreaming website designer, he’s driven to distraction at his wife Liza’s unexplained suicide. He goes potty at work, is given time off, takes to sleeping on the floor. His mother-in-law (Kathy Bates) wants him to open the note Liza left him:he refuses. By default, he acquires a new hobby, building remote-control model airplanes. His other new hobby, sniffing petrol fumes, is less therapeutic. He won’t be able to move on till he opens that note. To its credit, the film doesn’t take the obvious sentimental routes offered. On the other hand, this results in a certain flatness, and Jim O’Rourke’s score is subtly oppressive. Hoffman, however, is great, never angling for our sympathy. But getting it.