THE INFORMATION DAILY

New Films

ANOTHER DAY IN PARADISE (18, 101 mins)

Director: Larry Clark

Starring: James Woods, Melanie Griffith

See The Independent Recommends, right.

Limited release

DISTURBING BEHAVIOR (15, 84 mins)

Director: David Nutter

Starring: James Marsden, Katie Holmes

A flat spot of high-school horror, David Nutter's Disturbing Behavior (was he given the job because of his name?) has James Marsden's new-kid- in-town trying to stay true to himself in the face of a macabre spot of social engineering. This is a dead-eyed clone of The Stepford Wives and The Faculty.

Limited release

STRANGERS ON A TRAIN (PG, 101 mins)

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

Starring: Farley Granger, Robert Walker

See The Independent Recommends, right.

Limited release

WILD WILD WEST (12, 106 mins)

Director: Barry Sonnenfeld

Starring: Will Smith, Kevin Kline

Meet James West (Smith). He's a government agent in a troubled 1860s America; a personal favourite of the president who is charged with heading off a renegade bunch of Confederates. So far, so so. Except that James West is a cocksure black man, and the chief baddy (Kenneth Branagh) scoots around in a motorised wheelchair, and don't look now but there's a giant mechanical spider stomping through Monument Valley on its way to take over the world (or something).

And so on lollops the lobotomised Wild Wild West - a film that reduces the true-life West to a kind of sanitised Disneyland theme-park. Turn left at the box-office, and check out the gen-yoo-wine redneck ball, which ends in a comedy lynching, or the rickety steam-train that's jam-full of James Bond-style gadgetry. And how 'bout those sexy saloon-bar singers with their bulging decolletage (no groping, sir), and that larger'n'life Abe Lincoln, which really explodes. Your master of ceremonies is that cinematic snake-oil salesman, Sonnenfeld. Your acting troupe comprises the cheeky Smith, a peeved-looking Kline, the beautiful Miss Salma Hayek and a pantomimey Branagh (all the way from London, England).

It's tat, of course. It's slipshod, and cynical, and boring, too. So take the kids, and buy the merchandise. No refunds, sir. And move along there, madam. Plenty more suckers behind you, queuing to get in.

Countrywide

Xan Brooks

General Release

AUSTIN POWERS: THE SPY WHO SHAGGED ME (12, 99 mins)

See The Independent Recommends, right.

BRIDE OF CHUCKY (18, 89 mins)

The latest graduate from the Scream school of self-referentiality, Bride of Chucky strings together a series of humorous asides and knee-jerk shock tactics.

CELEBRITY (18, 113 mins)

Good satire doesn't pull its punches. Unfortunately, in Celebrity, Woody Allen's line of attack is compromised by his being at least half in love with the very glitterati he sets out to savage.

CRUEL INTENTIONS (15, 97 mins)

Cruel Intentions transplants Les Liaisons Dangereuses to Manhattan for a tale of two half-siblings (Sarah Michelle Gellar and Ryan Phillippe) who embroil their peers in all manner of sexual machinations.

LE DINER DE CONS (THE DINNER GAME) (15, 100 mins)

Lightning-quick French farce whose rat-tat-tat subtitled dialogue requires a spot of speed-reading at times, but is well worth the effort.

DOUG'S FIRST MOVIE (U, 87 mins)

The inaugural feature based on the life of American TV favourite Doug, an amiable cartoon kiddy who discovers an equally amiable monster residing in his polluted local lake. And "First", too, perhaps, by way of an apology for the low-aiming script and the lack of scope and ambition.

ENTRAPMENT (12, 112 mins)

Catherine Zeta Jones is one half of the honey- trap baited to snare Sean Connery's art thief. Flirty intrigue and acts of derring-do dominate this cut-price To Catch a Thief.\

EXISTENZ (15, 97 mins )

David Cronenberg's latest film is like a digitalised Russian doll: lift off the first level of reality, and there's another one beneath. eXistenZ misses the intensity of Cronenberg's best work, but what it lacks in weight, it makes up for in wit, panache and the sense of neat conceit handled to perfection.

HAPPINESS (18, 134 mins) The darkest, richest and most unsettling picture you'll see all year. The everyday monsters who inhabit writer- director Todd Solondz's film are rendered with a queer mix of comedy and compassion.

HUMAN TRAFFIC (18, 90 mins)

One wild weekend with the Human Traffic crew, a likeable quintet of Cardiff clubbers wrestling with problem parents, jealous boyfriends, impotence and the hidden codes of the Star Wars pictures.

AN IDEAL HUSBAND (PG, 100 mins) Oliver Parker's film is a proficient but oddly mechanical overhaul of Oscar Wilde's play. The sharp dialogue is rather blurred by the snappy editing, but bright playing from the starry cast helps to paper over the cracks.

THE KING AND I (U, 87 mins)

Richard Rich's animated take on The King and I tinkers with the plot and shaves off most of the original songs.

LAST NIGHT (15, 94 mins)

The latest hit from the current Canadian film boom is perhaps the most unlikely film ever made about the end of the world. A lushly human, intimate tale that effectively relegates the apocalypse to the role of a support player.

THE MATCH (15, 96 mins)

Once upon a time, in a quaint Scottish village, there lived a good pub and a bad pub. Every year, the bad pub beats the good pub at football, but this year, the good pub simply has to win. Cue salt-of-the-earth whimsy, knee-jerk nostalgia and hammy playing from the celebrity B-team (Neil Morrissey, Sam Fox). Entertainment-wise, it's a no-score draw.

THE MATRIX (15, 139 mins)

If you can accept that Keanu Reeves is the Messiah sent to save our souls from robots, you'll find much to relish in this virtuoso slice of sci-fi nonsense.

MULAN (U, 93 mins)

As Disney re-releases go, there's a lot to like about Mulan, a spry, witty epic about a little slip of a lass who saves first-century China from an invasion by the Hun. A bit like Kurosawa at times. Except funny, and with Eddie Murphy as a jive-talking lizard.

THE MUMMY (12, 115 mins)

The Mummy is this year's Godzilla: a cheesy monster-mash that has Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz uncovering a lost city and battling a bandaged bogeyman.

NOTTING HILL (15, 124 mins)

Loved Four Weddings? Then you'll sort of like the Richard Curtis-scripted Notting Hill, with Hugh Grant reprising his bumbling Brit persona, this time as a middle-class bookseller who becomes the unlikely object of desire of a billionaire Hollywood actress (Julia Roberts).

PLACE VENDOME (15, 117 mins)

See The Independent Recommends, above.

PLAYING BY HEART (15, 121 mins)

Willard Carroll's airbrushed fresco on amour and glamour in 1990s LA is carried by a top-notch cast and propelled by a script that seems to delight in its own ingenuities. All that's missing from this exercise in multiple plot-strands (think Robert Altman lite) is any sense of soul, grit or bare-bones authenticity. Sean Connery, Gena Rowlands, Gillian Anderson, Dennis Quaid, Anthony Edwards and Madeleine Stowe play the angst-ridden eye-candy.

ROGUE TRADER (15, 92 mins)

The magic movie mill moulds weaselish Nick Leeson into princely Ewan McGregor, and his half-arsed rise and fall into an Icarus-like assult on the British class system.

A SIMPLE PLAN (15, 121 mins)

A streamlined crime thriller with tough trimmings, Sam Raimi's Fargo- esque classic has its country-folk trio stumbling across a stash of loot then sliding into a moral vortex as they scheme to hang onto it.

STAR WARS: THE PHANTOM MENACE (U, 132 mins)

Only at the century's end could the world's most eagerly anticipated film turn out to be an exercise in nostalgia. Liam Neeson's grungy Jedi battles the bad guys, while a pony-tailed apprentice (Ewan McGregor) and an incognito queen (Natalie Portman) go along for the ride. George Lucas's prequel is merely a protracted introduction as opposed to a complete, organic whole. It sets the scene for a story that it never quite gets around to telling.

TANGO (12, 115 mins)

An ambitious meta-movie in which Miguel Angel Sola's film director embarks on an affair with Mia Maestro's tangoing tigress. Meanwhile, you gaze on in fretful admiration, marvelling when Tango gets away with it, wincing when it doesn't.

TEA WITH MUSSOLINI (PG, 117 mins)

Franco Zeffirelli's Tea with Mussolini is a typically squiffy and loquacious affair, ambling around the houses during its tale of three dotty Brits adrift in Mussolini-era Tuscany.

TEN THINGS I HATE ABOUT YOU (12, 98 mins)

A canny riff on The Taming of the Shrew, which manages a neat marriage of high and low culture in its tale of two chalk'n'cheese sisters whose dating rituals are overseen by their meddlesome dad.

THE THIRD MAN (PG, 95 mins)

See The Independent Recommends, above.