Gomorrah, Bigga Than Ben: The Russians' Guide to Ripping Off London, Good Dick, Gunnin' For That #1 Spot and Heavy Load

3:16pm Wednesday 8th October 2008

Matteo Garrone's Gomorrah is a messy, sprawling and often devastating insight into the operation of the underworld organisation Camorra in the rundown tenements of Naples. The speed and complexity of this adaptation of Roberto Saviano's bestseller is mesmerising. But the film's power and compulsion comes from the deft way in which Garrone gets into the corrupted souls of the principal characters — young Salvatore Abruzzese who sells out the woman whose shopping he used to collect after becoming a bag handler for a drugs baron; reckless teenagers Marco Macor and Ciro Petrone, who steal guns belonging to complacent hood Carlo del Sorbo and try to move on to his patch; ageing tailor Salvatore Cantalupo, whose desire to make it in haute couture lures him into a dangerous deal with a Chinese sweatshop; shady businessman Toni Servillo who tutors novice Carmine Paternoster in the sinister art of dumping toxic waste; and 'submarine' Gianfelice Imparato, who tries to help debtor families manage their pay.

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Fear (s) of the Dark and Import/Export

9:08am Thursday 2nd October 2008

Back in the 1960s, famous European directors regularly clubbed together to produce collections of themed shorts that became known as 'portmanteau pictures'. Recent examples, like the 2002 Ten Minutes Older twosome, The Trumpet and The Cello, have come close to recapturing such joyous exercises in idiosyncratic collaboration. However, the majority of shorts selections are little more than cinematic equivalents of the Now That's What I Call Music albums, even though they can be as admirable as the new DVD anthology, Adventures in Short Film, Vol 1, which includes such excellent efforts as Gaelle Denis's City Paradise, John Harden's La Vie d'un Chien, James Thraves's I Want You to Kiss Me and Marc Craste's Jojo in the Stars.

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Angel and Sakuran

3:24pm Wednesday 27th August 2008

Two spirited women attempting to breach the conventions of their times dominate this week's minor releases. But neither François Ozon nor Mika Ninagawa wholly succeeds in making us warm to their unconventional heroines.

Jimmy Carter Man from Plains, The Banishment and Death Defying Acts

5:01pm Wednesday 20th August 2008

he central premise of Jonathan Demme's documentary Jimmy Carter Man From Plains is that the US made a big mistake in not re-electing its 39th President, as not only were so many of his policies ahead of their time, but the world would also have been spared 20 years of Ronald Reagan and the Bush dynasty. Yet in following the 82-year-old on a nationwide tour promoting his book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, Demme is too often guilty of canonising Carter and trivialising complex issues.

Star Wars: The Clone Wars

2:35pm Wednesday 13th August 2008

Just when you thought George Lucas had milked his intergalactic cash cow dry with endless re-issues of the Star Wars saga on DVD, he executive produces a computer-animated adventure that slips neatly into the narrative divide between Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith.

Summer Hours, Puffball and Mad Detective

9:50am Thursday 17th July 2008

Olivier Assayas is a difficult director to pin down. The son of a screenwriter and a former critic on Cahiers du Cinéma, he combines a respect for film art with a passion for mainstream genres. Consequently, his output has alternated between intense, intelligent dramas and quirky curios that have occasionally veered off into erotic eccentricity. But he's on restrained and perceptive form with Summer Hours, a paean to the Musée d'Orsay on its 20th anniversary that typifies Assayas's habit of littering his pictures with homages to favourite film-makers.

Savage Grace, Memories of Underdevelopment and Ikiru

5:09pm Wednesday 9th July 2008

Tom Kalin was part of the 1990s generation of independent American film-makers who promised to bring a touch of intellectual chic to their acerbic studies of bourgeois foible. However, like contemporaries Jon Jost, Hal Hartley and Whit Stillman, Kalin has failed to build on his early promise and it's hard to believe that Savage Grace was made by the same director as Swoon (1992), a stylish biopic of the infamous 1920s Chicago killers, Nathan Leopold, Jr. and Richard Loeb.

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