<preform>Dodgeball (12A)</br> Donnie Darko: The Director's Cut (15)</br> Phone (15)</br>The Chronicles of Riddick (15)</preform>

<preform> Dodgeball (12A)<img src="/img/furniture/stars/4star.gif" border="0"> </b></p>Film of the month by a long shot. Rawson Marshall Thurber's debut brilliantly sends up the pomposity of sports movies and trains the spotlight on one of America's unsung ballgames - you'll see why no one bothers to sing it. Vince Vaughn plays the proprietor of a rundown gym threatened with closure, so he enters his stumblebum clientele into the Vegas dodgeball tournament to face moustachioed narcissist White Goodman (Ben Stiller) and owner of corporate monster Globo Gym (motto: "We're better than you!"). The script fizzes with fantastic one-liners, there's a cameo by all-American hero Lance Armstrong and Stiller gives his funniest performance since Meet The Parents</i>.</p> Donnie Darko: The Director's Cut (15)<img src="/img/furniture/stars/3star.gif" border="0"> </b></p>Given that its UK release was less than two years ago, and that the imprimatur of Director's Cut has been granted only to heavyweights such as Coppola, Ridley Scott and James Cameron, Richard Kelly's debut movie has achieved cult status with astonishing speed. Whether it deserves this re-release is a moot point - even Kelly admits it's "a luxury I do not deserve". Remastered sound and new visual effects are all very well, but the 20 minutes of previously unseen footage (mostly extra information on "Tangent Universes" and the like) do scarcely anything to elucidate the convoluted plot. As Donnie, the disturbed hero with one foot in suburban Lynchland and the other in a roiling fantasia of six-foot rabbits and imminent apocalypse, Jake Gyllenhaal is the best reason to see the film, an endearingly bemused boy who feels too much in a world that understands too little. Donnie Darko is a precocious debut, though it has gained little in intelligibility and nothing in impact.</p> Phone (15)<img src="/img/furniture/stars/2star.gif" border="0"> </b></p>Like cult horror hit Ring</i>, this Korean psychothriller draws its frights from marrying technology to the paranormal. A crusading journalist (Ha Ji-won) is being stalked, so she changes her cellphone number, only to learn that the previous two owners of the number died in "mysterious circumstances". The plot thickens when the young daughter of her best friend (Kim Yu-mi) hears an otherworldly something or other down the hexed phone and starts behaving like a cuter version of Chucky. Writer-director Ahn Byoung Ki mingles tropes familiar from Ring</i> - sudden deaths, a revenant with a grudge - with a dark subplot about paedophilia, and while it will cause a shiver or two there is something predictable about it. And I suppose it's a sign of the times that at no point does the heroine consider getting rid of the accursed cellphone altogether.</p> The Chronicles of Riddick (15)<img src="/img/furniture/stars/2star.gif" border="0"> </b></p>I rather enjoyed Pitch Black</i>, the B-movie sci-fi thriller in which Vin Diesel's musclebound outlaw Riddick first appeared. David Twohy's sequel boasts a larger budget and ambitious sets, but it's thinner on excitement. Vin must now face out the dastardly Necromongers who plan to colonise the galaxy. A white-haired Judi Dench (a female answer to Gandalf) and Linus Roache lend gravitas to the proceedings, while Thandie Newton's space-age Lady Macbeth suggest this epic could give Star Wars</i> a decent fight. If Riddick were a more prepossessing hero that might be a fight I'd pay to see. </p></preform>