Opens January 31, Cert 12A, 90 mins

When 18-year-old Ana Garcia (America Ferrera) graduates from high school, her Mexican family ignore the school’s insistence that she apply to study at college, and instead put her to work at her sister’s sweat-shop in downtown Los Angeles.

Ana’s family left Mexico for a better life in the United States only to find hardship, and her mother is adamant that Ana will live the factory life, too. But Ana wants more. So when she gets offered a place at Columbia on a scholarship, she has to choose between her family and her ambitions.

First-time director Patricia Cardoso’s lovely little film (winner of the audience award and the special jury prize at this year’s Sundance Film Festival) portrays Ana’s struggle to break free against the colourful backdrop of Mexican Los Angeles. Boasting a great Mexican soundtrack, a warm script, rich characters and Ferrera’s brooding, intense performance (reminiscent of Michelle Rodriguez in Girlfight), this is a voluptuous film with curves in all the right places.

DIRECTED BY Alexander Payne

STARRING Jack Nicholson, Dermot Mulroney, Hope Davis

Opens January 24, Cert 15, 125 mins

A scathing social satire, a superannuated road movie, a bleak slice of rainy grey Nebraskan realism, and a desperate, heartbreaking redemptive odyssey, About Schmidt is everything, and more, that we’ve come to expect from writer/director and Midwestern visionary Alexander Payne.

Having eviscerated the abortion debate in Citizen Ruth and political guile in Election, this time Payne takes an epic swipe at themes of love, loss, family and the meaning of life.

Here Jack Nicholson, leathery, puffed, with lank comb-over hair and yet somehow ennobled, is the eponymous 66-year-old Omaha actuary lost in a late-life crisis. Newly retired and suddenly bereaved, Schmidt decides to drive to Denver in his 35-foot Winnebago to dissuade his daughter Jeannie (Davis) from marrying incompetent water bed salesman Randall (Mulroney). Along this journey, in what is ostensibly genre-defying and completely anathema to the road movie, he actually learns very little about himself. Or does he?

Coupled with last year’s towering turn in The Pledge, About Schmidt will be read as the startling apogee of late-era Nicholson (and an apposite companion piece to the posturing of Easy Rider). And it’s true that his performance here is a marvel of middle-aged anonymity, a miscellany of facial ticks, twitches and grimaces that deftly efface all but the tiniest hints of the Nicholson persona. Even so, it’s ultimately the cold hand of Payne that takes Nicholson and ‘Schmidt to such great heights. From throwaway scenes, like the grieving Schmidt lathering himself in his dead wife’s face cream, to cold behavioural observations, like the painfully polite interaction of Schmidt and Randall, down to the consistently lugubrious grey-skies static camera shooting style, this is a film of ostensibly modest but utterly effective directorial touches.

And all the while, within this grand design, Payne teases us with the possibility of redemption for Schmidt. Will he find it on the road? No. At his wife’s funeral? Not there. At his daughter’s wedding? No chance. And just when you think that this is the bleakest film since early Kieslowski, it finally crashes into view. And it will floor you.

Opened January 1, Cert 15, 91 mins

One of the few early Bergman features that remains an untarnished jewel half a century later, Wild Strawberries is a 1957 road movie laced with symbolism, philosophical musing and sly humour which gently but consistently undercuts its emotionally remote narrator.

The 78-year-old Victor Sj

Opens January 10, Cert 15, 94 mins

Jennifer Aniston is a fine actress in need of a credibility boost. Unfortunately, The Good Girl isn’t quite the vehicle to do so. It’s a pity, as this domestic drama begins with fine intentions. Aniston is Justine, an intelligent woman stuck in a dead-end job and stuck with oafish stoner husband Paul (John C Reilly). When the enigmatic and handsome Holden (Donnie Darko’s Jake Gyllenhaal) begins working alongside her in a supermarket, he seems to offer a way out. They embark on a joyous and passionate affair but it quickly goes wrong. Holden becomes increasingly unhinged and possessive, while Paul’s redneck pal Bubba (Tim Blake Nelson) blackmails Justine over the affair.

Initially, the characters and script deftly capture the oppressive tedium of backwater America. But Holden’s abrupt character change is hammy and unconvincing, while the narrow focus on Justine’s infidelity means this has all the range of a British soap. Director Miguel Arteta can’t quite decide whether this is indie arthouse or a light mainstream drama and so awkwardly straddles the two. A missed opportunity?especially for Aniston.

DIRECTED BY Curtis Hanson

STARRING Eminem, Kim Basinger, Brittany Murphy, Mekhi Phifer

Opens January 17, Cert 15, 118 mins

In which the woolly hat and zip-up hoodie do for Eminem what the white suit did for Travolta, and the bulging black binliner slung over his shoulder is as iconic a prop as James Dean’s rifle. Anti-glamour is the new glamour for Marshall Mathers fans, whose already vast numbers will be expanded by this superbly crafted, openly self-mythologising vehicle. It’s not easy to make pop stars click as movie stars (ask Madge, for one), but Hanson and writer Scott Silver have pulled it off. Neither too grittily “real” or schmaltzily sell-out, 8 Mile walks and talks the fine line it needs to.

It helps that Em doesn’t try too hard, and happens to have, by accident or design, intense on-screen presence. His eyes brood like a quiet storm, veering inches from viciousness. The producers’ (including Jimmy Iovine’s) boasts that 8 Mile will do for hip-hop what Saturday Night Fever did for disco 25 years ago hold true. It’s often as boorish and nasty as we tend to forget that film was; it’s also as uplifting as Rocky, and lucks into magic with similar animal grace. It’ll thrill fans and fascinate floaters.

Selectively based on Eminem’s early life, it hangs with white trash wannabe rapper Jimmy “Rabbit” Smith Jr (Eminem), who in 1995 lives with his mom (Basinger, enjoying playing against type with the director who won her an Oscar) and her abusive man in a tawdry trailer park. Rabbit struts the mean streets of Detroit, on the wrong side of the tracks. He’s a factory worker by day, punk-ass arsonist by night, dreaming of demos and studio time. But he’s sweet to his kid sister and defends gays, so we know he’s all heart deep down. He freezes at his first “battle” (rap contest), despite the support of buddies like Phifer, an MC who spots his genius. He romances wild-eyed fangirl Murphy with a shag up against a wall (very Quadrophenia). Murphy, never one to underact, plays it like Courtney Love on bad acid, which, in context, is absolutely the correct decision.

When she cheats on him with a rival and Rabbit gets beaten up by that rival’s gang, he’s no longer lacking in determination and motivation. At the next battle he meets (or rather, escapes) his destiny, rapping like a man possessed and wiping the floor with his gutted opponents. That we’re rooting for him in such a potentially corny big-showdown climax is high praise to Hanson’s skill and Eminem’s new-found guile.

Our hero’s discomfort as the only white guy on the block (“Yo, Elvis,” his peers sneer) is shrewdly managed. There’s a tender moment where we see Rabbit scribbling down rhymes as his sister colours in drawings of trees, which is almost saying something about the nature of art. But 8 Mile doesn’t risk pretension: it moves in straight lines, sharp as an arrow. “Lose yourself,” urges the truculent theme song: enthusiast or sceptic, you will. The best rebel-music movie in years.

Opens 31 January, Cert 12A, 102 mins

Set in a local barbershop in south Chicago, this finds Ice Cube cast as Calvin, a second-generation hairdresser eager to be shot of his late father’s business. It takes a run-in with loan shark Lester (Keith David) for Calvin to realise how important the shop is to its customers, its staff and the community at large.

Barbershop won’t win any prizes for originality, but its feelgood mix of familiar elements makes it much bigger than the sum of its parts. Okay, so a dopey subplot involving a pilfered cash machine tests our patience, and the pressure to sew up the various plot threads results in a rushed and unconvincing conclusion.

Cube is hugely loveable here, but the ace in the hole is comedian Cedric the Entertainer, ideally cast as the shop’s resident sage, Eddie. His comments on OJ Simpson, Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks have whipped up a storm of controversy in the States, and they’re evidence that Barbershop wants its audience to think as well as laugh.

Opens January 10, Cert 15, 90 mins

Although set in the same urban sprawl that emblazoned Amores Perros and Y Tu Mam

Opens January 10, Cert 15, 88 mins

Former special effects man Steven Beck hasn’t mastered original filmmaking just yet. Ghost Ship is a clich

Opens January 10, Cert 12A, 98 mins

James Bond has had a lot of competition recently: Matt Damon in The Bourne Identity, Vin Diesel in xXx and the pint-sized heroes of Spy Kids 2. Now it’s Jackie Chan’s turn to take on 007 in this entertaining if disposable caper about a boy, a girl and a hi-tech dinner jacket.

Jackie Chan plays a humble chauffeur who turns into… well, Jackie Chan the moment he dons his employer’s prized tuxedo. Equipped with more gadgets than the whole of Q Branch, Jackie finds he can walk up walls, turn invisible and move like James Brown?talents that come in handy when he’s called upon to battle a madman out to contaminate the world’s water.

As Chan vehicles go this is fairly average, and sidekick Jennifer Love Hewitt is a poor substitute for Rush Hour’s Chris Tucker. Still, Kevin Donovan’s feature debut boasts enough fight scenes, slapstick comedy routines and outlandish stunts to satisfy the most ardent fan, and although this tux might have looked better on someone else, Jackie nonetheless wears it with aplomb