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.