Bait. Jamie Foxx plays a very funny, motor-mouthed petty thief who becomes the titular bait for a major thief and computer genius. Monitoring our turbo-tongue is a cop (David Morse) who has had a mic-thingy implanted in Foxx’s jaw. Thus the latter’s every line can be heard by a team of state experts, and what they hear is as embarrassing for them as it is funny for us. Bait is pacy and well shot, and is in its own way a truer reflection of power relations in the United States than many an attempt at “gritty realism”. Neil Sonnekus
? Billy Elliot is the story of an 11-year-old boy (Jamie Bell) living with his widowed father (Gary Lewis), his brother (Jamie Draven) and his slightly dilly grandma in Durham in the industrial north of England in the mid-Eighties. Dad and brother are coalminers engaged in the famously bitter strike action that was one of the great class battles of Margaret Thatcher’s reign. Worst of all, Billy wants to be a ballet dancer. Lee Hall’s script and Stephen Daldry’s direction are marvellous; Bell’s performance is remarkable in every way. The dancing is energetic and expressive; and, despite some implausibilities and the plot’s rather obvious trajectory, the film’s emotional pull is inexorable. Shaun de Waal
Bootmen. Adam Garcia gamely stars in a film that combines (fairly) high art and a working class ethos: retrenched steel workers tap noisily to the strains of heavy metal rock in a very Strictly Ballroom vein and more or less conquer the world. There is the anti-art father as usual, the Sheila interest with the blend eccent, and the solid commercial story we seem incapable of producing. NS
Bounce. Ben Affleck will act like a real prick, he will punish himself and then he will start performing good deeds towards the late, injured party’s wife, a convincing Gwyneth Paltrow. Then there’s a script that gets undermined by its own cleverness, which isn’t helped by the fact that Affleck subscribes to the method school of mumbling. NS
Cast Away. Is it a meditation on man’s essential need of others? Or the fickleness of love? Or on just how cultish we can get when the dictates of survival, utter loneliness and the passage of time a major theme wear us down? Tom Hanks’s loud-mouthed FedEx manager is obsessed with punctuality and gets his just desserts for it, but this epic-length film fails on the above three questions because it touches on all of them without ever getting down to any of them. So only one thing remains certain: if their transport doesn’t fail, FedEx will get your parcels to you, chop-chop. NS
The Cup (Cape Town only). Starting with the affecting image of a group of giggling monks playing soccer with a Coca-Cola can, we learn that we’re in a Tibetan exiles’ monastery in India. The year is 1998, which is also the year the last World Cup was played. The elderly abbot is disturbed to hear that his monks want to watch the final of this strange and violent game. The story lacks pace, the actors are monks, not actors, and the photography and sports continuity frankly stink. But if you want a little kindly wisdom from a culture that seems doomed to extinction thanks to mighty China this could be it. NS
The Ladies Man is a cognac- swilling, very camp-looking and -sounding DJ (Saturday Night Live star Tim Meadows), who has a dated “Afro” hairstyle and basically tells everyone that what they need is straight, anal sex. The bizarre thing is that the film’s very valid premise is: listen to your wives, listen to what they need and want. But queer is not the word for this load of trash. NS
? O Brother, Where Art Thou? The Coen brothers’ new movie is based on Homer’s Odyssey or it pretends to be. George Clooney plays the fast-talking “tactician”: Everett Ulysses McGill, how, along with the rather jumpy Pete (John Turturro) and the none-too-bright Delmar (Tim Blake Nelson), has just escaped from a Mississippi chain gang and is heading home to Ithaca. In the course of this journey, the trio encounters Baptists, sirens, politicians, a bank-robber, and a cyclopean Bible-salesman, among others. The setting is the Deep South of the Thirties, or a stylised version thereof, and the music is a key part of the movie it’s almost a musical. It’s also a quirky joy. No other film-makers could have created quite so delightfully oddball an Odyssey. SdW
? Quills. Directed by Philip Kaufman of The Unbearable Lightness of Being fame, Quills is interesting and often enthralling. Set during the last incarceration of the Marquis de Sade, it investigates the relation between fantasy and reality, madness and sanity, as well as taking a stab at repression and hypocrisy. Geoffrey Rush plays a flamboyantly defiant De Sade: a larger-than-life performance which suits a movie that is essentially a fantasia of ideas rather than a realistic treatise. A rather naff, lispy Joaquin Phoenix is the progressive head of the asylum; Michael Caine is the truly sadistic Dr Royer-Collard, sent in to deal with the marquis. Kate Winslet is lovely and touching as the chambermaid who is De Sade’s most committed fan. SdW
A Time for Drunken Horses (Cape Town only). This Iranian film is a family drama set in Kurdistan on the Iran-Iraq border, depicting the hardships of life there when a 12-year-old has to take charge of the household after his father’s death. Tasks in hand include saving a handicapped brother and keeping the horses going by feeding them alcohol. Written and directed by Bahman Ghobadi, using non- professional actors, the film has been described as heartbreaking.
? Unbreakable. One cannot help comparing every detail of this film with M Night Shyamalan’s other brilliant work The Sixth Sense and other hollow offerings from both Hollywood and darkest Europe. Starring Bruce Willis, Samuel L Jackson and Robin Penn Wright at their very best, it is both cleverer and wittier than its predecessor, even though a lot of people think it’s a poor follow-up. NS
The Way of the Gun. Christopher McQuarrie may have won the Oscar for writing The Usual Suspects, but here he directs as well and it shows. His two anti-heroes, Ryan Phillippe and new heartthrob Benicio del Toro, abduct a heavily pregnant surrogate mom (Juliette Lewis) and from there on things get much too complicated. One of the problems lies with our two scumbags who “didn’t come for absolution. [They] didn’t ask to be redeemed.” They came to look cool with their “heat” and fearless in this bad, thinly disguised western. NS
What Women Want. Mel Gibson plays a boorish, sexist Casanova of an ad exec threatened by the ascendancy of his new female boss (Helen Hunt). When a freak accident magically endows him with the ability to hear women’s thoughts, he sees possibilities for manipulation. The film is funny in places, but an over-acting Gibson can’t do character development, so the premise (jerk undergoes change of heart) is meaningless. And the chemistry between him and Hunt hovers round zero. SdW