DIRECTED BY Martin Scorsese

STARRING Leonardo DiCaprio, Daniel Day-Lewis, Cameron Diaz, Jim Broadbent, Brendan Gleeson, Liam Neeson

Opens January 10, Cert 15 tbc, 162 mins

After all the hope, hype and rumours of conflict during production, it’s a relief that what could’ve been Scorsese’s Heaven’s Gate works, and works well. After relief, the next thing you feel is awe. There’s just so much in it. Long as it is, you soon want to see it again (without the pressure of oh-god-what-if-it’s a-turkey). You want to check whether those many subtle references to the director’s own canon were really there. To see how he’s managed to tick all the Weinsteins’ boxes (echoes of Titanic and Gladiator? Check!) without nullifying his art and vision. How he’s made bold, dark statements about religion, politics, violence (of course) and the history of his beloved city without capsizing a ‘vengeance-shall-be-mine’ ripping yarn. The money’s on the screen, but so’s Scorsese (literally, in one brief Hitchcockian cameo). It’s great.

This despite the fact that he’s operating away from the milieu we think of when we say his name. The mean streets here are a world (and a century and a half) away from yellow cabs and hissing manholes. The adversaries aren’t motivated by modern malaise. And while Gangs is a more vicious, angry, blood-spattered beast than the slightly prissy The Age Of Innocence, it’s a history lesson rather than a howl of urban protest. Yet we’re forced to use the phrase “history comes to life”. You’re hurled into a mad, sick, tormented world of pain. That there’s plenty of contemporary relevance (racism, riots) is exemplified by corrupt politico Broadbent on the pivotal election day: “The ballots don’t make the results. The counters make the results. Keep counting.” There’s more than enough here to prove Scorsese still counts.

The story, in brief: in 1860s lower Manhattan, the Civil War underway, young Irish-American Amsterdam Vallon (DiCaprio) emerges from a reform house, tosses his Bible into the river and hunts out Bill The Butcher (Day-Lewis), a domineering anti-immigrant gang leader who, 16 years ago, killed Vallon’s father. Vallon’s bent on revenge, but first infiltrates his way into Bill’s inner circle. The law’s a joke, stabbings are rife, feuding fire brigades bicker as houses burn down. Vallon thrives as a bad boy (Bill warms to him), then stuns himself by saving Bill’s life, after which a strange, shaky father-son relationship grows between the two, despite the fact that the pupil’s sleeping with the master’s former mistress, plucky pickpocket-whore Jenny (Diaz).

Wrestling with his Hamlet-heavy demons, Vallon eventually breaks cover, but Bill’s not easily bruised, and now all hell rains down. With the pair symbolising ‘foreign hordes’ and ‘natives’ respectively, the ensuing hatred and rage is painted with operatic violence by Scorsese, who kicks into visual overdrive. The costumes may be different but the climax is as breathless as that of GoodFellas, the bitterness as bilious as Raging Bull. Emotionally, it’s Italian. This is Scorsese, remember, not James Cameron. In the midst of blazing street warfare, an elephant escaped from Barnum’s Museum gallops by. A Fellini moment amid the mayhem.

The screenplay?by Jay Cocks, Steven Zaillian and Kenneth Lonergan?is tremendous: it takes an instinctive sidestep when any blockbuster clich

Opens January 31, Cert 12A, 142 mins

After Spielberg’s giant strides towards darker intelligence in Minority Report, this is a relapse. A misconceived ‘comedy-thriller’, it’s long, dreary and, for a tale about a conman, laughably sanitised. Though the story eschews sugary family values, they’re tediously shoehorned in.

Leonardo DiCaprio appeases any fanbase he might’ve challenged via Scorsese by playing likeable fraudster Frank Abagnale, on whose autobiography this is based. In the late ’60s, Frank poses as a pilot, doctor and lawyer, all before his 21st birthday. Inspired by his father (Christopher Walken), he survives on quick wits (though you wouldn’t know it from DiCaprio’s listless form). FBI agent Carl Hanratty (Tom Hanks, working hard) vows to bring him down.

Chronologically a mess, this sexless plodder tries to surf on breezy anecdotes about the rogue (much like Ted Demme’s Blow). The period detail’s groovy, but Spielberg drenches it in a gushing golden glow. Why Frank falls for a dense, servile girl (Amy Adams) is barely examined. Martin Sheen and Nathalie Baye paper over cracks. It never catches fire.

DIRECTED BY Roman Polanski

STARRING Adrien Brody, Thomas Kretschmann

Opens January 24, Cert 15, 149 mins

This has the ingredients for a near-mythical masterpiece: a revered maverick director whose own Polish childhood was spent in the Krakow and Warsaw ghettos during World War II makes a very long, earnest, unsentimental epic about that place and period. The Pianist is beautifully, sparingly shot; it won the Palme D’Or at Cannes, and nobody, even now, invents interestingly askew camera angles like Polanski. Yet though you admire its class, and the conscious tempering of emotion he’s achieved, The Pianist is a tough watch. It can’t match Schindler’s List for range or heart-tugging, and while you know every point in it is a point well made, you itch for a hint of narrative adrenalin, or some coloured-in characters outside of Brody’s titular martyr.

Brody is magnificent, but with little support he’s asked to carry an awful lot. And his lot sure is awful: as Jewish concert pianist Wladyslaw Szpilman (on whose memoirs the film is based, and who died aged 88 in 2000), he escapes deportation to the camps but sees his family suffer dreadful atrocities. He’s hidden in the heart of the Warsaw ghetto (“the safest place possible”) by a sympathetic resistance, but flawed communication and general chaos mean he nearly starves. Szpilman’s a survivor, however, who lives on his wits, squatting in ruined hospitals, and later saved by the decency of a pensive German officer. Through his long purgatory he witnesses multiple bombings, shootings and acts of heroism and cowardice, usually from high vantage points which allow directorial flourishes. Somehow, Szpilman keeps his dignity, Brody conveying both resilience and helplessness with fierce-eyed force.

There’s much to applaud here?the message, obviously, the sepia quality of the light, and Polanski’s optical feints and swerves. If you’re looking for something as psychologically unsettling as Repulsion or Rosemary’s Baby, or as watertight as Chinatown, you won’t find it. Ronald Harwood’s script roofs some clunky lines, and a cast including Maureen Lipman and Frank Finlay wheezes through slight roles and slippery accents. It’s a stately, elegant film, deeply reliant on the melancholy of Chopin’s music. It’s not Polanski’s forte, though it’s unquestionably from his heart.

DIRECTED BY David Cronenberg

STARRING Ralph Fiennes, Miranda Richardson, Gabriel Byrne, Lynn Redgrave

Opens January 3, Cert 15, 99 mins

Over the years, with films like Rabid, Videodrome, Crash and eXistenZ, we’ve come to expect eerie, special-effects-laden, futuristic horror fare from David Cronenberg. His latest is a sinister but understated study of a schizophrenic (Ralph Fiennes) known only by his childhood nickname of Spider. The film opens in the 1980s with Spider checking into a grim halfway house in a run-down area of east London after 20 years in psychiatric care. Under the rule of Mrs Wilkinson (Lynn Redgrave), it seems as though Spider’s soon to be integrated back into society. But then he starts exploring the local streets where he grew up, and his past comes back to haunt him.

Cronenberg uses flashback to explain how Spider came to be incarcerated. Ten-year-old actor Bradley Hall plays the acutely sensitive young Spider, Gabriel Byrne his boozy father and Miranda Richardson both his mother and his father’s prostitute mistress Yvonne. Through these flashbacks, Spider leads us to believe that an horrific event in his childhood triggered his first breakdown. Or is this the complex, fantastical mind of the schizophrenic at work?

Adapted from Patrick McGrath’s novel, Cronenberg’s film takes us inside Spider’s mind, shows us the world through his eyes. Ralph Fiennes, who spends the film mumbling to himself, writing unintelligible scribblings in a notebook and hallucinating macabre scenes, is nothing short of extraordinary. He puts Russell Crowe’s turn in Beautiful Mind to shame. And his performance is completely naturalistic: a surprise, since we expect special effects galore from a Cronenberg film. But the only special effects in this film are the thoughts that pass through Spider’s mind. Through his eyes, something as banal as a gas tower becomes an object of unimaginable terror. And this is the thread that connects all of Cronenberg’s work: a fascination with the fine line between reality and fantasy.

Bleak, unsettling and very disturbing, this is another reality-bending classic from Canada’s finest.

Opens January 17, Cert 15, 92 mins

In a surreal opening sequence, a gang of boys pursue an anxious Father Christmas across the desert scrub of Nazareth. Later on, a red balloon bearing a cartoon image of Yassar Arafat creates panic among the Israeli soldiers at a checkpoint between Jerusalem and Ramallah. Elia Suleiman’s film repeatedly combines the overtly political with the absurd or comical. It’s a clever device which highlights the dilemma of the secular Palestinian, torn between liberal instincts and a rage at injustice.

Suleiman, who also appears in the film, turns the horrors of daily life into something fantastical?a carelessly tossed apricot stone detonates a tank; a Palestinian woman collects bullets like a halo, then fires them back at the Israeli soldiers. A film with a light touch but a heavy heart, it’s similar in pace and tone to Roy Andersson’s Songs From The Second Floor. Seemingly unrelated vignettes?a feud over rubbish, the lovers who can never get through the checkpoint to meet each other, a bus stop that nothing stops at any more?gradually build into a satisfying, thought-provoking whole.

Opened December 27, Cert 15, 94 mins

Don’t be fooled by an ad campaign that declares “from the maker of Leon and The Fifth Element”. Luc Besson is on board as producer only, presenting this lame adaptation of a script he clearly co-authored after several large bottles of dessert wine.

A pumped-up Statham plays Frank, an ex-Commando with a strangely variable transatlantic accent. Frank’s now a “transporter” based in the south of France?for a large fee, he’ll shift any item in his customised battle-ready Mercedes. His golden rule is “never open the package.” Naturally, the first thing he does in this movie is open the package, which turns out to contain a drop-dead-beautiful mystery woman (Shu Qi). Before you can say “oops,” Frank is six-pack deep in corrupt American businessmen and crazed Chinese assassins. Mercifully, Hong Kong director Corey Yuen can choreograph a mean fight, and Statham proves to be no slouch in the ass-kicking department?the only elements of an otherwise excruciating movie that drag it away from one-star hell. Besson really should be ashamed of himself.

DIRECTED BY Gillian Grisman

STARRING Jerry Garcia, David Grisman

Opened December 13, Cert 12A, 81 mins

Away from the spaced-out acid jams of The Grateful Dead, Jerry Garcia had a profound and abiding love for acoustic bluegrass music. He first met the mandolin player David Grisman in the 1960s, and in the early ’70s the two formed Dead offshoot Old & In The Way to play Bill Monroe tunes and other bluegrass favourites. So close did these kindred spirits become that they even ended up looking like each other (“two beards of the same feather”, as one wag put it). Grateful Dawg chronicles their friendship and musical partnership, which endured until Garcia’s death in 1995.

Much of the film consists of live footage from a December 1990 concert at Sweetwater, Marin County (one of the world’s great music bars) and a second show a year later in San Francisco. Together they play everything from Jimmy Cliff’s “Sittin’ In Limbo” to their own mellow compositions such as “Dawg’s Waltz”, via the Dead’s “Friend Of The Devil”.

There’s an appealing warmth to the performances, with Garcia visibly relaxed. Even better are the intimate scenes of the two beards playing together, shot by Grisman’s daughter Gillian, who set up a camera whenever Jerry visited to play in his buddy’s living room. The musical footage is capped by moving?if not particularly illuminating?scenes in which Grisman and others talk about what Garcia meant to them.

There’s no attempt to present an objective view or assess the music’s significance, and Gillian Grisman is clearly involved with her subject on a highly personal level. Yet this becomes one of the film’s main strengths. The other is simply the intuitive playing of the two soul mates. Grateful Dawg is not one of those music documentaries that ends up leaving you frustrated because you want to hear more music and less talk. Indeed, the music is the real star here. Rough and unsophisticated but totally endearing, it’s more like a home movie than a conventional documentary. But therein lies its unique charm.

DIRECTED BY Michael Caton-Jones

STARRING Robert De Niro, Frances McDormand

Opens January 24, Cert 15, 108 mins

De Niro’s quality control’s been imperfect recently, but this portrait of a tough cop and vulnerable father allows him to use his entire palette with subtlety and strength. There are also career-best performances here from McDormand and rising stars James Franco and Eliza Dushku.

Adapted from a true story, it’s the gently gripping tale of a Manhattan cop forced to pursue the chief suspect in a murder case?his estranged son. Vincent (De Niro) walked out on his wife and son Joey (Franco) 14 years ago. He loses his pain in his work, and enjoys a laid-back relationship with the woman downstairs, Michelle (McDormand). Forced to acknowledge Joey’s existence now, his world is suddenly under assault, and when Joey’s girl Gina (Dushku) arrives bearing a grandson he didn’t know about, he feels like he’s battling time itself.

Joey, meanwhile, is a junkie, on the run from both the cops and dealer William Forsythe. He haunts the delapidated boardwalks of Long Beach. “Used to be beautiful round here,” mutters De Niro, treading on syringes, forlornly trying to find his son before his colleagues do. The faded grandeur of Long Island is a metaphor for De Niro’s state of mind, but it’s not done obviously.

Franco’s a find, and the rapport between De Niro and McDormand resonates effortlessly. There are echoes of Richard Price here, of Heat, even On The Waterfront. You may even notice them after absorbing De Niro’s soft-spoken declaration that he’s still very much a force.

Opens January 24, Cert 12A, 97 mins

A man arrives in town. Almost immediately he’s beaten to death. But this is Finland, and our hero is not one to let a fatal blow to the head stop him from going about his business. Except he no longer remembers what his business is. Without an identity or a memory of the past, the man starts to forge a new life, squatting in a disused freight container alongside a community of winos and down-and-outs, and striking up a relationship with a comely Salvation Army officer. He even starts to forge a career as the new manager of the Salvation Army band. This marginal world is perfect territory for director Aki Kaurismaki, steeped in dark comedy and cheap vodka, and littered with the kind of twilight wisdom that comes only when you’ve been drinking for several days straight. Relying heavily on atmospheric silence and stoic stillness, the film is wholly and completely involving. The soundtrack is superb, composed of melancholy drinking ballads and mournful refrains, and the cinematography is spectacular. If there is a more fully realised cinematic vision on show this year, I’d be astonished.