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.

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.