40 Days and 40 Nights. The humour here is derived from the voluntary (and only temporary) termination of an unrealistically boisterous sex-life by a good-looking young man (Josh Hartnett) who knows — intimately — a large number of equally good-looking young women. After a nasty break-up, Matt reconsiders his randy ways, choosing to consult his brother — a priest — for advice about women and sex. The result is a decision to avoid having sex for Lent in order to develop a more mature attitude towards relationships. Pretty people. No depth. A few laughs. — Bruce Dennill
At Sachem Farm. An English city slicker (Rufus Sewell) tries to get back on his feet after his business has failed. At his family seat in Northern California, he must deal with his offbeat family and friends and come to terms with his life. The wacky crew include Uncle Cullen (Nigel Hawthorne) and gorgeous girlfriend Kendal (Minnie Driver). Cullen is the key to the film, a well-drawn, off-the-shelf English eccentric, part fruitloop, part sage. His plan of action to get the floundering family back in sync with the universe is managed from the top of a three-story column, plonked in the middle of the garden like a remnant of some Roman temple. If it all sounds odd, it is, delightfully so — or rather, it almost is. Unfortunately John Huddles’s film degenerates into Tinseltown gumpf as it heads for its Disney ending. Such a pity, with its dreamy message, great cast, tangy script and lovely setting. — Peter Frost
Big Trouble. A hit man is trying to take out a philandering arms dealer who has a hippie living in his garden, while a couple of FBI agents are tracking the progress of a bomb unwittingly hijacked by a couple of idiots with no plan. Comic potential? Obvious. Laughs? Regular and often tear-inducing. Likely to win any major awards? No. — BD
The Hundred Steps (I Cento Passi) is based on the true story of a Sicilian anti-mafia campaigner, Giuseppe “Peppino” Impastato (Luigi Lo Cascio), who grew up in the embrace of that quasi-feudal system of patronage and power. The story moves from his childhood to his death, showing his conflicts with his father and his relationships with the rest of his family and friends. Not a bad movie, but ever so slightly dull. — Shaun de Waal
Made. Jon Favreau plays Bobby, a driver-bodyguard for his lapdancer girlfriend Jessica (Famke Janssen); Vince Vaughn is his buddy Ricky, and the pair of them make two absurdly incompetent would-be wiseguys in New York. Their routine is much the same as in Swingers, with Favreau playing straight man to the babbling, hyperactive Vaughn — and when Vaughn takes off on a comic riff it can be very funny. Favreau gives his film a curious final touch of earnestness, even sentimentality, but he gets away with it and Made swings funkily along. — Peter Bradshaw
Mama Africa. Three half-hour films are presented together as a feature in this Simon Bright production. In the first a young Cape coloured woman gets out of jail after doing time for drug dealing. Soon she, her mother and her daughter are in a situation again, but we’re only given tiny glimpses into Muslim women’s issues in a story that almost studiously avoids any real conflict. The second story is about another coloured woman who takes her young son to Zimbabwe in the late Eighties to escape apartheid, only to be confronted by sexism and superstition in that country. But those aspects aren’t developed to echo that country’s present mess, and the lyrical, pseudo-Bessie Head vision we’re given of Africa instead rings hollow. The last film is Burkinabe and an altogether more confident, sly and entertaining work about the resourcefulness of an ordinary woman in a work that’s finally worth the wait. — Neil Sonnekus
The Man Who Sued God. This Australian production is pleasantly gritty, with Billy Connolly able to be his ribald, rambunctious self much of the time. Working as a fisherman, he loses his boat to a bolt of lightning, and is then denied compensation by his insurance company because it was an “act of God”. The only way forward, as he sees it, is to sue God (or at least his representatives on Earth), a view that is understandably controversial. His only ally is a high-powered newspaper columnist (Judy Davis) who sees his story as a way back into “real” reporting, but they’re up against an expensively pretentious lawyer (Bille Brown) and the corporations he’s able to manipulate. Despite some DIY directing and distinctly low-budget special effects, this is smart, witty entertainment. — BD
Monster’s Ball. Halle Berry, who deservedly won an Oscar for her performance, plays a woman whose African-American husband is on death row in the Deep South. Billy Bob Thornton plays his warden. When a personal tragedy compels Thornton’s character to resign in this small town the only questions are how are these two extreme opposites going to meet and what is going to happen? The pace is brilliantly, deliberately slow: anything can explode at any time. So, a wonderfully close-to-home kind of film, one that starts off with violence but doesn’t lead to political point-scoring or teary exhaustion. — NS
The Piano Teacher is likely to leave you feeling psychologically pulverised. Shot with calm austerity, the torture is all internal: with grim deliberation, Austrian director Michael Haneke describes a twisted person and a fraught situation, taking the whole idea to its soul-shredding limit. Erika Kohut (Isabelle Huppert) is a single, fortysomething woman who teaches at the Vienna Conservatory, having sacrificed her life to the great Romantic music that is so essentially a part of Austria’s cultural heritage and sense of national identity. In her spare time, she seeks out perverse and self-destructive sexual thrills. Then she meets a young, handsome, talented man (Benoît Magimel) who claims to be in love with her. What happens thereafter is, perhaps predictably, disastrous. The Piano Teacher is the bleakest film I’ve seen in a long time. It is undeniably a great movie, but, hell, it’s depressing. — SdW
Spider-Man. Erstwhile trash-horror director Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man is a bad movie. One did not imagine that it would be a meaningful emotional experience, but one did anticipate breathtaking visuals, given the movie’s huge budget and the recent burgeoning of CGI technology. Yet in that respect Spider-Man disappoints. There are some exciting passages, but for the most part the action sequences are distinctly flat. Tobey Maguire in the lead is the most appealing thing about this movie, for all the rubbish he is asked to spout. — SdW
Star Wars, Episode II: Attack of the Clones. The latest instalment in George Lucas’s space saga disappoints as much as the last one. The unpretentious fun that was the first Star Wars movie has long been lost. The visuals are stunning, one fantasy landscape after another, though much that is good is stolen from elsewhere (Gladiator, Chicken Run), and Lucas seems so dazzled by his own technological prowess that he is unable to pay any meaningful attention to plot or character. Hayden Christensen, Natalie Portman and Ewan McGregor creak their way through various adventures that would barely enliven an old comic book; they are practically erased by the special effects. The arrival of Christopher Lee, doing much the same as what he did in The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, brightens things up momentarily, but also just reminds one of how riveting a long fantasy-epic can be if one is able to care about the characters. — SdW
Waking Life from Richard Linklater of Dazed and Confused fame pioneers new animation techniques. The film was shot with live actors on digital camera, then transferred to computers where the images were drawn and painted over. The effect is extraordinary — each frame seems to breathe, and amusing details are added. It’s just as well there’s something interesting to look at, though, because the film is plotless — a series of odd encounters and meandering conversations about the meaning of life. Still, if you submit to its logic you’ll find it hypnotic. — SdW
We Were Soldiers is a dramatisation of the 1965 Battle of Ia Drang, the American military’s first decisive engagement of the Vietnam war. Mel Gibson plays the leader of a battalion sent in by Washington bigwigs to engage a numerically superior enemy. We Were Soldiers makes much of “getting all our boys out” — an achievement tacitly offered in lieu of victory. Post-September 11, the movie resonates with an appropriately chastened yet belligerent mood. The United States army is given a very topical kind of macho victim status, but there is an absence of genuine human emotion or vulnerability. The soul of any war movie is tested by how it handles civilian scenes back home, and here the film is just grotesque — the army wives are a twittering chorus of lobotomised helpmeets. Even propaganda films don’t have to be as dire as this. — PB